I have recently read an inspiring story on the sacrificial work of the Irish priests during their mission to China in the mid 20th Century. You can see and hear me give this Homily on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svt7XkberQg
Their work of humble service to the Chinese people chimes in with our Gospel today (Matt 23:1-12) where Jesus calls all of us, not just priests, to work for God by humbling ourselves in the service of others, rather than relying on some kind of imagined status. There were two things about these priests that impressed me. The first was the many hardships they endured to bring the Gospel and the Teaching of the Church to that part of China. They clearly thought of themselves as being like St Paul, who in our 2nd Reading today (1 Thess 2:7-9.13) says that he saw himself “Like a mother feeding and looking after her own children” and continues “We were eager to hand over to you not only the Good News but our whole lives as well.” The second was their effort to understand the Chinese people and their language, and so be more capable of explaining the faith to them in ways they would understand.
What interested me was that to produce priests who would be able to do these things, Father (later Bishop) Edward Galvin and his colleagues realised early on that the standard training for priests in Ireland would not produce the kind of priests they needed. So they got permission to found their own seminary. In my mind, the tragedy is that even today the training men get for the priesthood in our ordinary seminaries is not really adequate for the challenges they need to face, mainly of course not in China, but in the modern mission field of England and Wales. I am sure attempts are being made to remedy this, but I suspect that we need a radically different model from the one provided at the moment.
We priests will often encourage our people (note the language!) to go out and tell others about the faith, but we are so absorbed in running the parish, of dealing with the administration and producing decent liturgy, that we seem to have little time left to get out and meet and talk to non-Catholics or lapsed Catholics ourselves. Thus, as Jesus warns, without realising it we do not “Practise what we preach.” This is compounded by the fact that seminary education does not seem to teach priests how to translate our theological language into words that ordinary people can understand. The Irish priests working in China had to learn to do this, because the Chinese spoke a different language and used different idioms. They had to work out how to express standard Catholic words like “Incarnation”, “Salvation”, “Holy Spirit”, “Heaven and the Kingdom of God” even “Prayer” in words that Chinese people could understand. What we fail to realise is that modern English people are equally bamboozled by such words, often totally misunderstanding them. I know someone who taught lay Catholics in a Catholic College being equally dismayed at the inability of intelligent Catholics there to translate their faith into words that modern English people would understand, simply reverting instead to those standard words and phrases.
I am reminded of the way Sports journalists report on the game of Golf. They use all sorts of technical terms like birdies and eagles that those who play Golf, or are fans, can easily understand; but I’ve no idea what they are on about. Financial journalists do the same don’t they with their own terms, as well as lots of abbreviations. So what is the FCA ? This then is a challenge for us priests, for unless we attempt to try and translate into modern English the faith we profess, how can we expect lay people to do so when we ask them to talk of their faith to others. Maybe underlying our reluctance is our fear of ending up getting it wrong. I remember once summing up the Trinity for someone by talking of the way we experience God as the power beyond us, God the Father, as the same God with us in human form, God the Son, and the same power working within us, God the Holy Spirit and being told that this simplistic summary was actually heresy. I suspect that those priests in China might well have been accused in the same way, if there had been some theologian around who understood Chinese. They had to do the best they could, and they did. We priests however are so indoctrinated by our training not to stray from standard Catholic teaching that we fail to take such risks.
It's worth remembering that St Paul took such risks all the time. He often used images from the pagan world in his preaching. Think of his image of running the race as if the faith were a competition, which strictly speaking it isn’t. Or of his use of the word “freedom”. We know some people thought that meant they could do whatever they liked, and that he had to tell them they had misunderstood him (Gal 5:13) Next week, we will hear him talking of “Meeting God in the air” and of being “In the clouds” which they understood, because that was the language used to describe the arrival of the Emperor, but it didn’t mean that we would literally meet God up in the air or on a cloud!
St Paul also sets us priests an example in being prepared to get his hands dirty doing ordinary paid work, in his case tent-making. We heard him say today. “Let me remind you, brothers, how hard we used to work, slaving night and day so as not to be a burden on any one of you.” I remember once being in a parish where they didn’t keep the Gents toilet clean and so I was found by a shocked parishioner scrubbing it. Yes, there is more than one modern way of imitating how Jesus washed dirty feet. Surprisingly, after that, someone started keeping it clean! One of the priests from Malawi that I follow on Twitter sometimes shows us the pigs he looks after. I fear that few of us priests in England would be prepared to do that kind of work.
So there’s the challenge for this Sunday. All of us, not just us priests, need to be humble servants of one another and of the world in which we live, and to find ways of translating our faith into language ordinary people can understand.
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