Papal visit, Papal blessing?

It certainly made a change to preach after a week when religion and specifically Christianity has been very much in the news with the visit of the Pope to Britain.  Not that the news has all been positive.  We are all aware of the critics, and it is good to remember that we are never anything but a flawed church and that the good news is not any institution or human leader, but always and only Jesus Christ himself.  

Nonetheless I did welcome the Pope’s visit for a number of reasons.  The Pope had some important things to say and it’s good to engage with his message.

The Pope’s message to western Europe, and that includes our own country, is that as a church we need to address the issue of secularism.  Now secularism is a very complex matter.  Of course it includes the aggressive atheism that Cardinal Kaspar spoke about – what we see from people like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and Philip Pullman and others.  And we do need to respond to what they argue, but the Pope’s understanding of secularism goes much deeper and much broader, and to concentrate on the more aggressive forms of atheism can in fact distract us from the real issues.  

In fact I rarely meet out-and-out atheists, but I meet plenty of people for whom religion is largely irrelevant.  By and large they are perfectly content for those of us who like doing religious things to carry on doing so and in fact they might be quite pleased that there are those who keep churches going and might even like to dip into church life at times of crisis or maybe for the odd Christmas service.  This is secularism – what might be described otherwise as the privatisation of religion.  Christian faith is seen as a private affair.  

Christian values are a private matter, a person’s own business.  Faith is seen as a matter of opinion and not a matter of truth.  Religious truth is what is true for you, which may be completely different from what is true for me.  In other words truth is relative.  

Now it is a very short step to thinking that Christian values are completely irrelevant to political life and public policy.  When it comes to matters like abortion or euthanasia, Christians should keep any Biblical perspective to themselves.  Likewise faith schools are something of an anomaly, because like our Church Schools down the road, the ethos is explicitly Christian.  

Now if we buy into this way of thinking, we have to recognise that it means a shrinkage of the Christian faith.  It becomes something of a lifestyle option.  Good words are those like multi-culturalism, inclusivism, tolerance and pluralism.  These have become the dominant values in a secularised society where religion is privatised and truth seen as relative – your truth and my truth.  

Tudor Griffiths