Surprising, unwanted divisions....

Today is the feast day of Edith Stein: St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. Today I am meant to be finishing up an article about her. Today is the day the heat is undoing me. So I napped and woke up to this nagging that I need to finish writing this here post about something that has been bothering me over this past summer. Partly it was reading this here post about Edith Stein, which is a biography about her. In her pursuit of Truth (of God himself who

is Truth itself) she was led by the hand through different writings: Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Avila. She was not prejudiced rather she let herself be led by the saints on her own path to sainthood.  We would do well to emulate her.

__________________post on what has been nagging me: a bit of a churchy rant_____________

Over the past year life has brought me back in touch with people I had not spoken to in many years, many of them from or living in Spain. While I have visited Spain in these years I had mainly met up with my family and one or two friends. In those years I lived mainly in Germany with some periods in England and a brief stint in the US. So had become detached from the localist, separatist concerns of the Spanish autonomies, something that I in any case had not engaged with much unless pushed into it by specific circumstances. I had also happily forgotten divisions within Catholicism that are seen as natural and inevitable in predominantly Catholic countries but which I have been observing with some unease in the US and the UK in recent years. In many ways, I have outgrown the Catholicism I was educated in, in terms of its interactions with other groups within the church, and not in the theological-doctrinal side of things, that remains unchanged, matured, more thought through, more studied, but the basis comes from that initial education. 

And so I interacted with these old friends as I do with anyone with whom I feel safe, in honesty and saying exactly what I think if any subject comes up that requires it. There have been two instances in which I have been seriously bothered: these things should not happen in the church. First, I was accused of being critical of the Opus Dei. This happened in a particular setting that I cannot mention here in detail but suffice to say I found myself in the position of giving advice. This person had spent most of their life in Opus Dei institutions only to discover they didn't actually like the spirituality/charism of it. My natural conclusion was they needed to explore other charisms of the church and recognise the mistakes committed that had led them to the place they were at, at that time. One cannot feel better until one recognises that things are not all right and that a malaise does actually exist. Their reaction was one I have seen before but did not expect: an accusation and a persistent burying of the head in the sand. Often people fear that to recognise the church, a community, or a friend has made a mistake is to condemn them or criticise them. To err is human and we all make mistakes and none of us will stop stumbling over the same rock until we have recognised that the rock is there. To grow in virtue, to respond to the call of God, we must first recognise that we need to grow in virtue. Maybe this person wasn't ready to hear what I was saying, maybe they never will be. I had sent over links to retreats amongst one run by Jesuits. I had never been to them but a good friend of mine, whose criteria I trust, recommended them. This was inevitably another thorn in the side: the Jesuits. And that leads to something else I have encountered. 

At another point this past year I was unexpectedly stuck on the French/Spanish border near San Sebastian and ended up having dinner with friends I had not expected to see so soon again. They in turn had another friend staying with them I was meeting for the first time that evening. Her spirituality aligns with Communion and Liberation and she knows some friends of mine from Communion and Liberation that live in Germany. To her surprise, when I described our lives in Germany, was that her CL friends and I were intimate friends with members of charismatic groups. In the city where I lived in Germany, we weren't that many Catholics,  and you learn quickly in a place like Germany that what matters is that we share the same faith and not that one person prefers gregorian chant and the other a charismatic hymn. You realise that there are more important things in the life of faith: like agreeing on the liturgy: the meaty stuff, and on such things as pre-Canaa classes.  While I have always enjoyed talking with people of all walks of life it was not until living at the Chaplaincy in Oxford and especially in Germany that I came to know the freeing and deep joy that comes from building community with a large variety of people. It is in fact, at least for me, much easier to practice the faith and learn about God amongst a diversity of people (think from Tridentine lovers to Eastern Catholics passing through CL, Opus Dei, and the Emmanuel Community) than in a much more homogenous faith group but I have found in recent years in the US and UK, and encountered again this past year in northern Spain this animosity between different Church groups, between Tridentine and novus ordo mass goers, or between CL/ Opus Dei and Emmanuel Community and disciples of the Jesuits. Do I always agree with what some of the more prominent Jesuit priests are saying ? Most definitely not. But do I also know that they are doing it out of love of Christ and their neighbour? Yes. And that we both believe in God and Jesus Christ? Yes. In thinking we can't be friends or build and live community with someone whose liturgical preference is radically different from mine is to lose sight of what is truly important in this life: that we believe in God, one and three, and that this has led us all to live one type of life over another. We should be helping each other reach heaven rather than pushing our supposed liturgical opponents down for not agreeing with the position of the priest during mass.