Hope for the future

Hope for the future

In an exclusive interview recorded for The Tablet – his first for a UK publication – Pope Francis tells Austen Ivereigh that this extraordinary Lent and Eastertide could be a moment of creativity and conversion for the Church, for the world and for the whole of creation. He describes daily life under lockdown inside the Vatican, praises “the miracle of the next-door saints” – the doctors, nurses, volunteers, religious sisters, priests, shop workers who are keeping society functioning – and laments how the pandemic has exposed the “throwaway culture” and the hypocrisy of politicians who speak of facing up to the crisis while in the meantime selling weapons.  We should be preparing now for an aftermath that will be tragic and painful. 
 
Elsewhere in an extended 40-page Easter issue produced under unfamiliar as well as familiar pressures, Timothy Radcliffe suggests how we might we use these days of waiting and hoping to change the way we structure and shape our lives so that we can let go of the past with its burdens, be open to the future with its promises, and live each moment as it comes; Laurentia Johns welcomes the moment of spiritual release Easter brings even in these days of confinement; and Melanie McDonagh finds a surprising satisfaction in the original ending to Mark’s gospel, which closed with the women fleeing from the empty tomb, too frightened to speak. 
 
Earlier this year, the Tablet’s digital editor Ruth Gledhill was received into the Catholic Church; she describes a long, meandering and sometimes painful journey towards reconciliation with an institution whose flaws she is more aware of than most. As we celebrate the bodily Resurrection of Jesus, performance artist and theologian Claire Henderson Davis makes a very personal appeal to Pope Francis to recognise a renewed understanding of priesthood that embraces every aspect of human wholeness. Frank Cottrell-Boyce reflects on an unforgettable image of mercy at the centre of the Easter story: the two criminals on either side of Jesus, dying on a cross. The one who turned to the Lord and asked for forgiveness was saved, in spite of his sins; the one who mocked him with his last breath was damned. In George Herbert’s great poem “Easter”, the risen Lord reaches out his hand in friendship. As Mark Oakley explains, he is inviting each of us to share in his Resurrection, to overcome our fears and to find the best in us. There’s a short but haunting Easter poem by Ann Wroe in Word from the Cloisters. And Ian Thomson celebrates a recording made over 50 years ago by the Arab Christian soprano Fairuz, an indelibly beautiful hosanna to the great gift of Easter: hope. 
 
As Mark Bowling reports, Cardinal George Pell has been acquitted of child sexual abuse and released from jail. Frank Brennan excoriates a legal process that has caused needless pain to the complainant, to Pell and to the community and exposed serious failures in the criminal justice system in the state of Victoria. 
 
In four pages of Books, Piers Plowright enjoys The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Catholic Church by our own Christopher Lamb; Rachel Kelly is soothed by Can We Be Happier? by Richard Layard; Michael Glover enjoys three new poetry collections, Joanna Moorhead admires an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance and Michèle Roberts and Mark Hudson are gripped by new fiction from Maggie Hamand and Eimear McBride. In Arts, Vincent Nichols, Judith Wolfe, Christine Allen, Sarah Teather and Stephen Wang each select a painting or sculpture that they turn to at times of crisis, and doyenne of the ethical kitchen Rose Prince suggests some creative ways to make good food go further. 
 
As we say in our Easter leader,  echoing the Pope’s message in his interview in this week’s Tablet,  there is a yearning for the rebirth and renewal of old institutions and ideas, a resurrection of the human spirit in the name of solidarity. All the efforts made to defeat the coronavirus, all the heartache and suffering endured, deserve a new beginning. Once the epidemic is over, merely reverting to the way things were would be a betrayal of the gift that fate –  or Providence – has provided. “Let’s not let this moment slip from us,” Pope Francis urges us in Britain in Ireland and around the world, “and let’s move ahead.”
 
Every good wish for Holy Week and Easter

Brendan Walsh
Editor of The Tablet