For the Church and the world

The fierce South Atlantic storm that blew in with the election of Pope Francis in February 2013 continues to rattle doors and windows in the Vatican and shows no sign of abating. In a pre-Christmas address to the chief personnel of the Curia, Francis listed the various ailments with which he said they could be afflicted, including “spiritual Alzheimer’s” and “existential schizophrenia”. They risk being consumed, he said, with narcissism, and “the pathology of power”. These spiritual illnesses “are naturally a danger to every Christian and every curia, community, congregation, parish, and ... movement”, he added, but they were widely seen as a rebuke specifically directed at the Roman Curia.

Nevertheless the Pope is clearly committed to a change in culture throughout the Church and not just in Rome. He will not succeed on his own. The call to an examination of conscience and conversion is universal. This is a critical time to be one of the foremost Catholic periodicals in the English-speaking world, and it coincides with the 175th anniversary of The Tablet’s foundation. That is a good Ignatian moment to take stock. What are the duties and responsibilities of The Tablet in this time of Hurricane Francis, to its readers and to the wider Church?

 The first responsibility, now increasingly shared between The Tablet’s weekly paper edition and its website which is updated daily, is to keep readers informed of developments by reporting relevant news promptly, fairly, and accurately, without fear or favour. Many stories about the Church, whether from the Vatican or elsewhere, are not self-explanatory. They require a wider context, a longer historical perspective and a grasp of the theology underlying them. Otherwise there is a danger of sensationalising novelty, or basing news values on the same unexamined criteria as the secular media with its vague but implicitly liberal unwritten agenda.

The Catholic Church is good at one-way communication, from the top down, but not so good at communication upwards nor in communicating horizontally, from one Catholic to another. Ordinary Catholics are often unaware of what their fellow Catholics think. They fail to admit difficulties, to lend each other support, or to find a sense of belonging in shared devotional practices. And when the Catholic Church seems to be in a state of upheaval, many need reassurance that the certainties of their faith remain reliable. One function of The Tablet is to encourage all those conversations and provide space for them.

Sometimes the news will be painful, and the comment sharp and wounding. There is no joy in being the bearer of bad tidings. Alongside many parts of the secular media, The Tablet played a significant role in exposing the appalling evil of the abuse of children by priests and other church authority figures; and the even more damaging way authority figures in the Church ignored what they knew, or disbelieved what they were told, so that the abuse continued. Truth is sometimes hard to bear, but truth is also liberating. It is liberating for children who would otherwise be at risk of harm and for survivors who were disbelieved and ignored for decades.

Blessed John Henry Newman, in his brief spell as editor of The Rambler, defended the right of the laity to express opinions on matters of concern to them, even when these were deemed less than helpful by the bishops. “Surely we are not disrespectful in thinking,” he wrote, “... that the bishops would like to know the sentiments of an influential portion of the laity before they took any step which perhaps they could not recall.” More than 100 years later, The Tablet’s then editor Tom Burns accused the encyclical Humanae Vitae of offering neither joy nor hope to married couples seeking to live faithful lives, and ended his leading article by saying “We who are of the household and can think of no other, have the right to question, complain and protest, when conscience impels.”

It was in the same spirit that under his immediate successor John Wilkins, The Tablet reported the gradually increasing pressure to conform under the pontificate of St John Paul II – the closing of the windows that Pope St John XXIII had thrown open when he convened the Second Vatican Council in 1959. These are the very windows that Pope Francis has now set rattling in their frames. There is a new mood abroad, a trajectory rediscovered. The poor have been reinstated at the heart of the gospel message. Pope Francis exudes an infectious confidence that the joy of the Gospel, which “fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus” (Evangelii Gaudium), can surmount even deep-seated difficulties and draw the alienated back under the cloak of God’s mercy. 

The Tablet does not make a virtue of criticism per se, and seeks to occupy the mainstream middle-ground rather than one extreme or another. The criteria on which it bases its judgement are not those of secular liberal opinion, from which it frequently has to distance itself, but always the good of the Church and indeed of the whole human race. Just as The Tablet turns to the documents of the Second Vatican Council to frame its judgements on internal church affairs, so The Tablet also turns to Catholic moral and social teaching to frame its judgements on issues in the secular sphere. Brutality, inequality and injustice are no less rife in the modern world than they were in 1840, when The Tablet’s first editor, Frederick Lucas, took up his prophetic pen in defence of the poor. And he was a trenchant critic of the hierarchy when he felt it was necessary to be so. He held that no government, papal or secular, was beyond questioning, provided it was done courteously and respectfully. That can also be a service to the Church. In his address in Westminster Hall in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI referred to the “purifying and structuring role of reason in relation to religion”. “This is why I would suggest,” Pope Benedict said, “that the world of reason and the world of faith ... should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation.” The Tablet’s pages are filled with that dialogue. As John Wallis, The Tablet’s second editor, wrote in 1859: “Catholicism is an atmosphere, and not a mere creed … a medium which colours almost everything which comes before us, except pure mathematics.” More than 150 years later, those words still apply. They define our character.