Our People

Catechesis for World Youth Day (WYD 2005)

St Katharina, Buschhoven, Swisttal

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
17 August 2005

“Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East” (Mt 2:2): Searching for Truth—the Deepest Meaning of Human Existence

Truth? What is that?
As was explained to you when I was introduced and as my habit tells you I am a Dominican friar. My habit is white and so you’ll find is the pope’s when you see him this week, because a Dominican Pope nearly 500 years ago decided to keep wearing his Dominican habit even after he became pope and the colour caught on. Were it winter I’d have a black cloak over this white habit and that cloak is the origin of the black academic gowns worn in many universities. So we Dominicans wear a black and white habit. Why is that?

Well, all most people know about the idea of the friars is goodies like Friar Tuck from Robin Hood and baddies like the Inquisition. And certainly, like Tuck, many of us are rather fat and jolly. But I hope there’s more to us than that! St Albert the Great, who is one of the patrons of this World Youth Day, is also the Patron Saint of Science and Scientists. He was a great scholar and bishop and he taught another Dominican named St Thomas Aquinas. Albert is buried in St Andreas Church in Cologne and you can visit his simple but very moving tomb there in the crypt. Al lived for most of the thirteenth century. So the Dominicans have been around a long time. Their motto, as all that scholarship might hint, was and is today Veritas, truth. And that is at least part of the explanation, for the fashion detectives amongst you, of the black and white. Veritas, truth, is black and white.

Well you might say, who believes in black-and-white truth anymore? Isn’t it a lot more sophisticated to say that truth comes in various shades of grey? And even if there are some things that are black and white, it hardly matters enough to get up a sweat, let alone give your whole self to as a truth friar, spending your life trying to find and contemplate and communicate the truth to others.

The life-story of Jesus begins and ends with questions of kings: three kings arrive in Bethlehem to ask King Herod “Where is the infant king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to reverence him.” At the end of Jesus’ story, two more kings ask their questions: he is brought before King Herod’s son, Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee; and before Pilate who as Governor of Judæa stands in place of the Emperor Tiberius. Pilate asks more or less the same question: “Are you the king of the Jews?”

The first time around Jesus is too young to answer for himself. But by the time he is on trial he has come of age. “Yes, as you say, I am a king—though by kingdom is not of this world. I was born for this one purpose: to bear witness to the Truth. Whoever belongs to the truth listens to me.”

“Truth?” said Pilate. “Truth—what is that?”

Pilate’s jest to Christ says a lot about the human condition and our deepest desires. In his great encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), our late Pope John Paul II suggested that we can define the human being as the one who seeks the truth. We cannot be genuinely indifferent to whether what we think we know is true or not. If we discover what we thought was the case was false, we naturally reject it; if we discover something is true we are pleased. What we cannot successfully do is build a life upon doubt or deceit. That would leave us permanently anxious and confused.

Yet while we are all drawn to the Truth, the idea that some world views or opinions might be true and others false, and that truth can be comprehended by one idea or set of ideas can be repugnant to us in today’s world. There have been too many fanatics, crusaders, revolutionaries, terrorists, jihadists, whether for their religion or some ideology. Here in Europe millions have fought and killed each other over which faith is the right one or whether ideas such as Marxism or Nazism should become the basis of society. So our generation is naturally suspicious of any passionate attachment to one set of ideas.

That suspicion is further enhanced by recent philosophies that have told us that we can’t really know anything about ultimate realities such as God, beauty and goodness. Such things are really just statements of feeling or sentiment. “This interpretation of reality seems right to me. This my truth. But yours might be different and that’s fine by me. Better that we live and let live rather than start bombing each other over beliefs that can’t be proven anyway.” On this view there might be truths of science, but religion, morality and art are realms of mere opinion.

More recently even the few truths of hard science have come into question. Despite our undeniable technological success, the New Science is not able to tell us much about the real position of anything. That electron might be there—or it might not be. That photon might be a particle – or it might be a wave. Even the immutable laws of physics look shaky. “It’s all relative”, could be the motto–or perhaps the epitaph—of the Twentieth Century. In this brave new 21st Century we invent our own reality. We even have deconstructionism and punk to tell us there is no reality even to construct: just various stories we tell ourselves to stop us getting too anxious and to help get control. In the end, though, its all meaningless.

For many years before I was ordained a bishop I worked in universities, whether as a student or a teacher. There I met some people who were amongst the most knowledgeable and sophisticated in the world in their own particular art or science or profession. Yet when it came to thinking about the really fundamental things, about the meaning of life and of their own life in particular, about whether there is a God and if so what it means for them, I found they were often five-year-olds. They never studied their own Catholic faith and values, or read a book about it, or joined a group about it, or did a course on it, or thought about the religious implications of and for their professional studies. They left their faith stunted at about the level of belief in Santa Claus and their morals at the level of ethics of the Tooth Fairy. They couldn’t be bothered growing up faithwise. And so when they found they could not reconcile their new adult knowledge with their baby worldview, they felt very sophisticated, very grown up, when they left behind their five-year-versions of God and called themselves agnostic or atheist about God, morals, any ultimate reality.

Of course nature abhors a vacuum and when people stop believing in God other things rush in to fill the void. There are plenty of counterfeits for truth available on the market in our consumer culture: lies attractively packaged, all promising the good life with minimum intellectual, moral or physical effort. Yet, despite all the apparent freedom that arises from the possibility of choosing our personal reality we remain fundamentally “homeless”, as G. K. Chesterton put it. Nowhere is the homelessness caused by relativism clearer than in the realm of human action. All we are left with today is “what’s right for me” or what is currently fashionable, morally speaking. Even the greatest things in the world—life and love—are up for grabs in a world where unborn babies are killed by the millions each year; where people use their own and each other’s bodies for recreational sex;, where all sorts of relationships are being called marriages and real marriages, far from being supported, are pressured to breaking point; where divorces and broken families are thus commonplace; where elderly people are put out not of their misery but of ours, so that no-one dare be a burden on us or even on themselves. If there are any rights or wrongs in these things today, the only one seems to be going against the flow, daring to stand up for some value contrary to the current fashions in our own country.

And yet there is within every human being, an inner motor driving us to embrace and live a good and true and beautiful life. The American sociologist of religion, Dr Peter Berger, spoke of a “rumour of angels” in a book by the same name. Despite what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “tyranny of relativism”, we still recognize some realities as worthy of our reverence in and of themselves, such as God, life and love, and other things as worthy of our repugnance. We still recognize some actions as praiseworthy in and of themselves, and others as being truly blameworthy, “crying to heaven for vengeance”. There are signals of transcendence, both moral and religious, all around us. The universal condemnation of crimes against humanity—the  destruction of the innocent and helpless, torture, politically managed famine, slavery, genocide—suggests a common moral heart in man. Likewise the upward striving in every culture and every person towards that beyond and above suggests that even if the answer is not always shared then at least we know there is a question.

In the last scene of Judgment at Nuremberg, a film about the war crimes trials after the Second World War, the American judge played by Spencer Tracy visits in prison a German jurist found guilty of war crimes. The latter tries to excuse himself, perhaps seeking some sort of absolution. “I never thought it would come to this”, he says. The small town American judge replies, “The moment you knowingly condemned an innocent man it came to this.”

However much we might like to construct our own universe, there are realities that operate independently of our perceptions of them. The condemnation of the innocent is a cancer that can eat away at a society and consume it. One evil brings forth another as the first evil is justified and lied about until the whole architecture of moral Truth totters and collapses. Brute power, whether of ballot or bullet, then becomes the sole determinant of conduct. Sin, if not repented, compounds itself. We can think like this about our own societies and the condemnation of the innocent by abortion. The first tentative steps towards mass euthanasia of the inconvenient old or comatose may already have been taken. The terrible story of Europe’s wars beckons a world that will not enunciate clear moral principles and adhere to them to ask again: is there not any truth that might be some limit to our own selfish wills?

Reading Martial’s poem on the death of his infant child and then the Australian poet James McAuley’s Pietà on the same theme you leap a distance in time of about 2000 years. Despite the difference of culture, religion and epoch there is not so much a common thread between them as a common core. “O Earth lay not heavy on her, for she was not heavy on you!” is Martial’s heart wrenching conclusion to his lament. McAuley ends in a Christian vein “One touch, and that was all of you she had to keep. Clean wounds, but terrible are those made with the Cross.” Even without the Gospel, the pagan Martial was able to celebrate the brief life of his child and commend her with real piety and evident pain to the shades of his parents.

As far back as history records, human beings, especially when prompted by tragedy, have asked: Why do we exist at all? Why does anything exist? Did someone make all this? What is the meaning of my life? Where am I going? What am I called to be and do? Those wise men of the East came searching because they believed that there was a Truth and it could be found. So too did the great philosophers and scientists, priests and poets, each in search for Truth, before the birth of Christ.

The Truth will set you free
And undoubtedly these wise men found part of the answer to Pilate’s question: truth, what is that? But what Pilate did not realize was that truth comes with a capital-T. Truth is not just a thing, an abstraction, an ideology. Truth is a person. Ironically that person was standing right in front of him as he asked his post-modern question. Truth, the whole Truth, nothing but the Truth, is Jesus Christ. What Martial and the ancients groped towards now speaks for Himself. Lying in front of the Magi and standing before Pilate is the Guide, the Map, the Road to the Home that they all sought unawares.

It would be easy to conclude that Pilate and Herod were just evil men. Yet their situation was not unlike ours. We have all, at one time or another, washed our hands of that improbable God-man, Jesus, or pretended not to know what Truth requires of us. Each of us stands before the Truth surrounded by a chorus of competing voices: “Not this Man, but Barrabas!” they say. “Be Caesar’s friend, not his”. “Go with the flow, stick to the crowd.” “Do what’s most comfortable, least demanding.” “Avoid commitment, avoid sacrifice.” “Sex and drugs and money and power are so much more fun.” We have all heard the voices, at one time or another. We have all wandered about homeless rather than coming home to the God-man who said “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life… I am the Light for your world.”

Jesus stands in the court of Pilate, before the bar of the world, on trial before us, a silent affront to the sovereignty of our own selfish wills. Despite all of Pilate’s goading Our Lord did not give him all the answers. In fact he threw back at him more questions. “Who do you say I am? Where did you get your power from? Who writes your script for you?” Jesus stood before Pilate the Interrogator as the Very Question Himself, the Last Word and the First. “Where are you, infant king of the Jews?” the Magi ask. “Who are you, so-called King of the Jews?” Pilate asks. To which he responds, not first with an answer, but with a question: Who do you say I am? What does your life say about you and about me? Call yourself a Christian do you? What Gospel then do people read when they read your life?

In this City of the Magi, we are drawn back to Jesus’ origins, in the crib in Bethlehem. He didn’t have much to say for himself then. Babies don’t. The Word of God, spoken by the Father from all eternity, is mute. Or perhaps not quite mute. Perhaps he screams, like babies do. In time he grows. But as a little child he still doesn’t answer questions. Children don’t. They ask the questions. “Why mummy?” “What’s this?” “When will we get there?” A child loves to search and find, to play hide and seek. “Are you a king?” Pilate asks. “Why do you want to know?” Jesus responds. “Where is your kingdom?” Pilate asks. “Out of this world,” answers Jesus. He was still playing hide and seek, right to the end. For he viewed things from the perspective of One who sat in the lap of God the Father. The Son of God Incarnate told us what its like to play at the feet of the Creator of the World. Pilate was the boring grown up. Jesus was the Divine Child.

Mystery is the reaction of the Divine Prankster to our predictability. As Christians we are completely shrouded in Unutterable Mystery: the mystery of life and love, of a birth and a death and a rebirth, of opportunities and limitations, of where we are going and what our life is all about. If we strain to see with the eyes of our hearts we can catch a glimpse of Him in the distance. If we listen with the ears of our soul, we can just hear Him singing, just around the corner. What we see and hear we may find a little unsettling, since it is part of our broken human condition not just to seek Truth but also, ironically, to avoid it.

Truth tells us that we are gifted, often generous people. But Truth can also have some hard things to say about how we use our gifts and privilege. Truth demands a rethink, an intellectual, moral and personal conversion. That means we can find Truth subversive, seditious, profoundly disturbing. And when that happens we might want to reject the perplexing reality of God and perhaps of all reality. Like Pilate, we are not happy if we have not personally authorised any divinity that crosses our paths, if we have not personally constructed our own reality, especially when that divinity and that reality makes demands of how we should live our lives. Doesn’t God know His place? How dare He interfere in our lives? The short answer is: whether we like it or not, God loves to interfere. And He does so without any authorisation except that of the loving heart.

Wouldn’t we all like to keep this naughty little divinity under strict control, to send Him to a home for delinquent deities or put Him in a bottle for taming genies? Once we let Him out into our lives there is no telling what He might get up to! He might teach us to love the young and the old, the sick and the poor, the disabled and the powerless. He might even convince us to love Him and to forsake the world on His account. He might let us in on the secret that evil and suffering and death are not the last word. He might seduce us into His own eternal life and joy. Ever since the days of the Three Kings God has been well and truly out of the bag and He won’t go back in. No matter how much we try to ignore Him, He will continue to tug at us, like a child trying to get his parent’s attention. And He will not be satisfied until we let Him ask his questions of us and tell us what it is that has caught His attention.

Today that same Divine Child walks among us in the Holy Liturgy. Through the action of the Holy Spirit, He continues to change the subject on us. We want to talk about death, and He will only talk about life. We want to dwell on hurts and evils, while He will only talk about forgiveness and healing. We want to go on about freedom and autonomy, while He talks about commitment and fidelity. We want to talk about self-fulfilment: He goes on about self-giving. We want to be popular and He wants us to be virtuous.
 
Today that naughty Divine Child whispers the secrets of His love into our ears. Blessed are the Poor for they shall inherit the land! Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called sons of God! Blessed are the pure of heart, they shall see God! It is not easy for adults to understand these lessons of the celestial kindergarten, we would dearly love to substitute our own adults’ only version of the Beatitudes: Blessed are the comfortable for they have avoided inconvenience! Blessed the assertive for they will break through the glass ceiling! Blessed the emotionally fulfilled for they shall avoid dysfunctional relationships!

Today then let us find the Truth, not by asking our questions, but by answering His. “But you,” He asks: “who do you say that I am?” Let us reply to Him with the words of the Byzantine liturgy:

I believe, O Lord, and I profess that you are truly the Christ, the Son of the Living God, who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. Accept me this day, O Son of God, as a partaker of your Mystical Supper. I will not betray you with a kiss, like Judas did, but rather, like the Good Thief, I beg you: Remember me, Lord, when you come into your Kingdom! Remember me, O Master, when you come into your Kingdom! Remember me, O Holy One, when you come into your kingdom!