Timothy Radcliffe is perhaps the best-known British priest on the international stage and a renowned conciliator.An ageless, smooth-faced man with an infectious laugh, he spent much of the 1990s on the hoof as worldwide Master of the Dominican Order, and now travels widely as a freelance speaker and retreat-giver.
We meet in the musty splendour of Archbishop’s House, Westminster, shortly after Radcliffe’s return from a trip to Jakarta. The journey has taken its toll: he is nursing a heavy cold.
“I only accept 5 per cent of my invitations, but I’m still fully booked till the end of 2010,” he says a little ruefully. “After that I’m determined to take a six-month sabbatical.”
Radcliffe belongs to a notable recusant dynasty. His career has included stints as a university chaplain in London, a teacher in the Oxford theology faculty, and a minister to Aids patients.
As Master of the Dominicans he regularly found himself having to defend his brethren against the probings of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger when the future Pope was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal watchdog.
While some conservatives hazard that he has displayed a characteristic Dominican flair for subverting Left-Right theological distinctions, if faith really discloses the truth, he explains, then the Church should encourage greater freedom of thought as a way of elucidating that truth.
“I believe in the adventure of orthodoxy,” he adds, alluding to G. K. Chesterton.
A good number of Radcliffe’s ideas have gone down well in the storm-tossed US Church, where disagreement between liberals and conservatives reflects the cultural wars in wider society.
During a well-received address to a big Roman Catholic conference in Los Angeles three years ago, he appealed for charity as well as greater theological literacy among the Church’s squabbling factions, pointing out that both sides feel got at: “We will only heal the divisions if we stretch our imaginations open to understand why the others think and feel as they do. Before we can talk, we must sympathise, and feel how it is that their way of understanding the Church offers them a home, a place in which to be at peace.”
The Radcliffe style is so admired that it prompted an invitation to write the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 2009 Lent book. The result is Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist (Continuum).
The author is aware that churchgoing can feel unpalatable or meaningless, even for committed believers: “Often when we gather round the Lord’s Table nothing much seems to happen: a few people, mainly elderly, gather in a cold building, listen to sermons which are often tedious, and wonder how long it is before they can go home.”
The book begins with a joke about someone who could hardly bear to get out of bed for church on a Sunday morning. His mother shook him, but he would not budge, asking why he should bother. “For two reasons,” his mother replied. “You know you must go to church on a Sunday, and secondly because you are the bishop of the diocese.”
Why Go to Church? also quotes the teenager who likened attendance at the Eucharist to sitting through an endlessly repeated film, the outcome of which is always known. The mistake here, says Radcliffe, lies in overlooking not just what Cardinal Newman called “God’s noiseless work”, but human nature itself.
In his foreword to the book, Rowan Williams encapsulates the point of Christianity as follows: “The drama at the core of our humanity is about our reluctance to be human; and the gift that the Church offers is the resource and courage to step into Jesus’s world and begin the business of being human afresh — again and again, because our reluctance keeps coming back.”
Radcliffe builds on this insight with his suggestion that “the liturgy works in the depths of our minds and hearts a very gradual, barely perceptible transformation of who we are, so quietly that we might easily think that nothing is happening at all. The Eucharist is an emotional experience, but usually a discreet one.”
Elsewhere, the assumptions of many non-Christians are efficiently rebutted. Radcliffe quotes the great Dominican Father Herbert McCabe, one of his former teachers, who gave short shrift to the idea that Catholics confess their sins in order to stir up feelings of guilt. “If we go to confession,” McCabe wrote, “it is not to plead for forgiveness from God. It is to thank him for it . . . When God forgives our sins, He is not changing his mind about us. He is changing our minds about him.”
Why Go to Church? unfolds in a similar register. It takes the form of a set of reflections about the Eucharist structured on the model of a drama in three acts, with the three parts of the Mass discussed under the rubrics of faith, hope and love, and subdivided into “scenes”.
It offers a rich but digestible helping of Christian thought. It also prompts an obvious inference. Why not make Radcliffe the next Archbishop of Westminster now that a vacancy exists?
His talent for commending Christianity to the cultural despisers of religion is obvious; he is very well liked; he looks young for someone in his early sixties.
In any case, the Catholic Church venerates age more than most other institutions: the outgoing Cardinal, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, was not translated to Westminster until the eve of his 70th birthday.
Radcliffe has good political antennae. For instance, he could easily have foreseen that the Vatican’s recent decision to lift the excommunication of Richard Williamson, a British-born ultra-conservative bishop, would backfire disastrously when Williamson’s status as a Holocaust denier was revealed.
Radcliffe was also tipped as a successor to Basil Hume in 1999 by some liberals who probably thereby revealed more about their own wishful attitudes than about the realities of church politics. Sadly perhaps Rome had tended to favour managers over prophets.
Not that Radcliffe is complaining. He knows that he has a comfortable berth at Blackfriars Hall in Oxford, and admits to being ignorant of the nuts and bolts of diocesan administration. And he is well suited to the role of roving evangelist. When the promised sabbatical ends in mid-2011, he will almost certainly still have many years of globe-trotting ahead of him.
Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist by Timothy Radcliffe, with a foreword by Rowan Williams (Continuum, £9.99)
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(Source: TOUK)