Letters Extra

In addition to the letters published in this week’s issue of the The Tablet you can find more correspondence here, available free.

Darwin doesn't explain away the need for atonement

Jack Mahoney's "puzzle" ("Humanity's destiny", The Tablet, 14 January) concerns what he sees as the implications of Darwinism for "traditional Christian teaching". He tries to answer the wrong question, since Darwin wisely never attempted to fit spirituality into his theory of evolution. On the contrary, evolution is an admirable description of vital, time-bound processes beginning with the (as yet unexplained) appearance of life, some half-billion years after the earth settled down from the incredibly violent chaos of inanimate matter which accompanied its appearance on the cosmic scene.

Evolution, like all branches of science, begins in man's spirituality - our universal desire to know, so admirably illustrated in Genesis 1. We are made in God's image, and our initial act of faith is what makes science possible: the (unprovable) belief that the universe is in principle capable of being explained and understood. Our recent emergence as "talking primates" who, unlike our cousins, can choose to nurture or wreck the environment in which we all live, naturally leads us to speculate why we have been put here. The best answer I can think of is "to make sense of God's universe", which involves science and its dangerous offspring, technology, and "to know, love and serve its Creator" which involves spirituality in all its myriad creative aspects - language, culture, literature, art, music, philosophy, ethics, morality, religion.

Spirituality is that aspect of ourselves which craves transcendence. It longs to be freed from the bondage of time. It is humanity's defining characteristic. Every culture develops its own way of expressing it through its sacred books, its rituals, its art. For Hindus it might involve "the loosening of the inner bonds"; for Buddhists "the guest for the means to release"; for Christians "the denial of the self, the shouldering of the Cross, and the following of the risen Lord". None of this is time-bound, unlike "evolution", "quantum uncertainty" or "the multiverse".

To reduce spirituality to some sort of evolutionary process and thereby to eliminate the problem of evil (or that acknowledgement of our collective inadequacy and tendency towards self-delusion which the Bible, calls, in its striking but obviously metaphorical way, "Original Sin") is to delude ourselves yet again.

At the heart of the Christian Gospel lies the doctrine that God is love, and that Jesus, as the incarnate Word, is the expression of that love in human form. Christ's whole ministry is marked by his championing of the poor and oppressed, his defence of the weak and vulnerable, and his condemnation of the rich and powerful. How, then, can such a vision of Christ be squared with Darwinian natural selection, which proposes that the suffering and death of the weak is a necessary part of life, and which favours those with sufficient fitness to survive in a ruthlessly competitive environment?

If we are to eschew the doctrine of Original Sin, and embrace Darwinian evolution, we have no alternative but to hold that the suffering and pain which Jesus protested against is due, not to a contingent flaw in God's creation brought about by human sin, but to a necessary state of affairs brought about by God himself.

This would not only raise serious problems for our belief in a loving God, but would also produce a somewhat confused Christology. We would be compelled to believe that Jesus dedicated his life and ministry to protesting against the injustice of a system which He (as the Creator God) had originally put in motion as part of his design of the universe. Such a model of God and creation would not only be incoherent, but fundamentally incompatible with orthodox Christian belief.

Something from nothing

There is no necessary contradiction between the Christian faith and the idea of Lawrence Krauss in Edwin Cartlidge's article ("New stirrings out across the universe", The Tablet, 21 January) that all that exists could have emerged from nothing. Indeed, to argue that the universe does not come from nothing runs counter both to Catholic teaching on creation ex nihilo, and to contemporary quantum physics. The crucial point with regard to faith is not that the universe can appear from nothing but that it has.

If, on the one hand, matter's appearance from nothing is due to the prior existence of various laws of physics, then where, as it were, do such laws exist? Where did they come from? If they are independent of the material things upon which they act, then their origin must necessarily lie in some kind of non-material realm; Christians might call this the mind of God.

If, on the other hand, both matter and the laws that govern it are inseparable and appear together spontaneously from nothing, then what makes this happen? If it is not necessary that they should come into existence due to factors external to them, then why do they do so? The Christian of course will say that God freely wills them to exist for God's own good purpose.

Gagging order on conscience

In the 14 January issue of The Tablet I noticed a citation of my own Archdiocese, "Archbishop John Nienstedt of St Paul, Minnesota, has issued a "gag order" on priests who disagree with his vocal opposition to same-sex-marriage proposals. "There ought not to be open dissension on this," Archbishop Nienstedt reportedly told priests at a meeting last year. "If any have personal reservations, I do not wish that they be shared publicly."

Indeed, this statement should get wide circulation for it is quite amazing. In effect, the moral credibility of every priest in the archdiocese is undermined by this command. Parishioners have no reason to know if on a matter of major moral consequence their priests actually agree in conscience with a teaching they are ordered to promote. This is also most unusual as the constitutional amendment is not a matter of church doctrine but rather concerns public policy and personal civil rights. Other bishops, including the English bishops, have shown no such need to impose our Catholic teaching about marriage on other citizens of different faiths or no faith. There are many positive ways that our Church can uphold sacramental marriage.

Little cause to celebrate

The new English translations have had time to bed in by now; I have not heard a single parishioner express satisfaction with the finished product. Every comment has in fact been negative: impenetrable language, long rambling sentences, ignoring the context of the English language, failure to grasp the nettle of inclusive language, Eucharistic Prayers for use with children discarded, the needs of people whose first language is not English are ignored - what a parish with 25 language groups near Melbourne make of it, I dread to think.

Bishops whose encouragement to embrace the translation are not very convincing - they thought they had an approved translation from Bishop Maurice Taylor and his ICEL, but stood silently by while ecclesiastical civil servants binned the fruits of ten years' work. They should have had the courage to resist. A diocesan bishop is not a branch manager, as the Archbishop Emeritus of San Francisco had the temerity to claim in his book. It cost him his post.

The number of groups who have exemptions is infuriating: disenchanted Anglicans; SSPX; Syro-Malabar; Ambrosian Rite and so on. The zeal and energy being devoted to reconciling the rift between Rome and SSPX is not edifying. The present administration seems intent on going down in the annals of church history as the force that brought about reconciliation and unity. Their efforts impress nobody apart from the revisionists who have until now been keeping a low profile in the hope that the documents of Vatican II will be binned and we will return to the clericalism for which they seem to yearn. Roll on retirement, when I can celebrate the Eucharist privately using my carefully preserved Sacramentary.

O, almighty and most merciful Father...

Perhaps Desmond Wilson of Belfast (Letters Extra, 28 January) would be wise to recall that the Our Father that needs, he feels, to be "adequately and respectfully translated" actually shares the faults of the 1975 translation. That equally unadorned English version interpreted Our Lord's command "When you pray, pray like this" quite seriously, addressing God simply and directly as his children address a loving Father, rather than as awed servants address an emperor.

If the forces responsible for the new Missal had leave to tamper with the Lord's Prayer, would it not begin, "O my almighty and most merciful Father ..."? Would "Give us this day our daily bread" not be corrected to "Therefore be pleased, we humbly pray, graciously to bestow on us the quotidian bread which through your goodness we receive'? And "Forgive us our trespasses" - "Be pleased, moreover, in your mercy, O Lord, to release us from our debts in a similar manner to us, as we also release our debitors"? True, the new Lord's Prayer might not run to full Latinism; ambiguities like "hosts", "confess" and "communion"; unrecognised contexts like Malachi 1.11 and Luke 7.6; or elastic theology like "peace to people of goodwill". But can we afford the slightest further loss?

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