Tag Archives: apologetics

Authority and Credibility

11 Monday Mar 2013

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Yesterday’s BBC Radio 4 Sunday programme explored the idea of the moral authority of the Church in the light of what we can all recognise to be scandals. At this time when we are praying for the election of a new Pope, such a topic will indeed be in the mind of the Cardinal-Electors, as much as those who look to the Church – from within and without – for moral guidance. Do these scandals undermine the moral authority of the Church? Can the Church proclaim truth despite, and even through, her failed members and leaders?

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, whose parish I was covering this weekend, spoke on the programme. He ably described moral authority as ‘the ability to speak on moral issues, it’s the ability to pronounce on right and wrong, it’s the ability to mediate to people what is not just the opinion of the Church, but what is the authoritative teaching of the Church – that which must be obeyed, as Canon Law says, with religious obedience of the will’. He went on, ‘In other words it’s not just another of the things offered in the great marketplace of humanity, it’s something which can be taken as true and believed as true. That’s what moral authority is: it’s the ability to speak truth’. That is important. Moral authority is the revelation of truth which, as the Catechism says, is always from God: ‘The authority required by the moral order derives from God’. (CCC §1899).

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Something different to offer

07 Thursday Mar 2013

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The past few weeks have seen a number of pretty vocal criticisms of a handful of public figures in Church life. Many of these criticisms are entirely justified, and only a fool would try to defend the actions of those few individuals who have fallen short of the call to holiness. Often these public reprimands are bound up with a call for Church reform. The Church is, in fact, permanently in the business of reform, though we might more usefully speak about ‘conversion’. Of course, this might not be the ‘conversion’ that society wants, but reform and renewal and conversion, are not alien to the life of the Church – in fact, they are central to it. Christians undergo a constant and continual conversion deeper into a relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ, and so with the Church and each other, because that is the life to which we are called by our baptism.

Part of that continuing conversion is the growing towards Christ which takes place through the recognition, admission, contrition, and absolution of sin. In this, the Christian is restored to the grace of baptism through God’s forgiveness in the sacramental action of Confession. When we Christians do something wrong, we don’t only have vocabulary to describe it – e.g. sin – but we also have a clear moral code by which we are able to judge the act. ‘Wrong’ and ‘Sin’ are not only fluid terms in the Western secular mindset, but they are always applied subjectively because no moral code exists independently of the Judeo-Christian moral law which undergirds the very fibre of society. Thus we have the analogous situation of a senior Churchman being decried for doing something which secular society encourages and promotes, and the cries of hypocrisy from certain quarters begin to ring hollow.

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Fr Barron in London

03 Thursday May 2012

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Last evening I went over to St Patrick’s, Soho Square, where just under two weeks I was ordained to the Sacred Priesthood. It was good to be back – catching up with members of SPES and Fr Alexander. In fact, as an added bonus, I got there slightly early and caught the end of their daily Vespers and Benediction. Perhaps it’s an Anglican thing, but I really find praying the Liturgy of the Hours with other people a beautiful expression of the nature of the Church – militant, expectant, triumphant.

After Benediction, we went down into the newly-refurbished crypt of the church for a quick meeting before around 100 young people turned up for the third session of Fr Robert Barron’s Catholicism, with the added bonus of Fr Barron coming to speak!

I’ve stopped being shocked by the age and passion of the people at events like this, but I will never stop being thrilled. As a lapsed friend said after my ordination – “I never realised the Catholic Church was so young”. It really is so encouraging.

Fr Barron was only there for half an hour – a long day of travelling from Birmingham, via  the Bird and Baby in Oxford, to London and a pretty demanding schedule quite understandably leaving him tired. But that didn’t stop us having a good Q&A session in which Fr Barron’s simple, effective, apologetic method – which is ably employed in the series – was on show. At the end, Fr Sherbrooke kindly left the last question to me – with, I hasten to add, about 3.4 seconds to formulate it!

Anyone who has seen the Word on Fire videos will have been surprised by the number of English, and in fact Anglican, theologians which Fr Barron quotes. He seems to have C.S. Lewis, Tolkein, Chesterton, and Newman, all at his fingertips – deploying them to great effect, using the stories and analogies so rife in their writings to explore and explain the fundamental truths of the Christian gospel.

So I asked – How can the Ordinariate help bring these great figures into a wider readership in the Catholic Church? The answer? Find out in the next post.

The New Areopagus

27 Friday Apr 2012

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From January 2012 until last month we ran Fr Robert Barron‘s Catholicism as a series-based course of process evangelisation and catechesis at the Centre for Catholic Formation in Tooting Bec. Headed up by our parish Catechetical Co-ordinator, Hannah Vaughan-Spruce, almost 100 people attended the course, which was hosted on Thursday evenings.

At the end of the course we were thrilled that a number of people asked to be received into the full communion of the Catholic Church, to be baptised, and/or to receive the Sacrament of Confirmation. Those people will now undergo some further formation in preparation for that wonderful act of Christian Initiation, or sign of their call to continuing conversion.

Next week Fr Robert Barron will be visiting London. He’s already in the UK, having spoken in Durham this week and he will be speaking at the LACE Conference Centre in Liverpool on Tuesday evening (1 May). On Thursday he will be giving a lecture at Heythrop College, University of London, and on Friday there will be a screening of Catholicism followed by a reception and dinner at St Patrick’s, Soho Square, where my ordination was hosted last Saturday.

I will certainly be heading to Soho Square, and I hope very much to be able to make the lecture at Heythrop. If you are in or around London in the next week, then do make the effort to try and attend. You can get more details here.

Fr Barron has a particular style, and a particular approach to explaining the faith. Someone described him to me as having a “geeky enthusiasm” – and you can tell that he fervently believes in the ‘product’ he is ‘selling’. The series is beautifully produced, with broad camera angles, well-produced music with plainchant themes woven through, and snappy, memorable messages which reveal and point towards the fundamental, profound truths of Christianity.

I want to write more about the course in the future – I think there’s a great deal to say. If you have the opportunity to attend it, do, and if you want to find out more about running the course, why not come along to the Discovery Session that we are running on 26 May in Tooting Bec? In the meantime I want to offer a general thought on contemporary apologetics.

In the Acts of the Apostles, St Paul visits Athens and, specifically, the Areopagus – by that time a place used to honour an unknown pagan god. Here he engages in Christian apologetics, engaging with the world-view and presenting Christian message in a public, potentially hostile forum. That apostolic example of apologetic evangelisation has got to find roots in us if we are to similarly engage in the contemporary world, where the unseen god of consumerism is slavishly followed by so many. Fr Barron does that well through his online ministry of teaching – coming to the new Areopagus, the internet: the very place where consumerism can often reach it’s zenith.

St Paul didn’t convert the crowd when he addressed them, but we are told that “some men joined him and believed” (Acts 17:34). That’s a pretty good place to start.