Bishop blames economic woes on an “inhuman Thatcherite creed"

Advent this year has come “at an uncomfortable time for Church and State” and the country’s economic pressures “make it hard to be hopeful about the future,” the auxiliary bishop of Down and Connor, Bishop Donal McKeown, has acknowledged.

In a special reflection for the season, Bishop McKeown underlines that, though Advent has never been an easy time for anybody, notably busy parents and those who dread a lonely, joyless Christmas, “this year it is particularly difficult” for those who are still involved in Church as well as for many who have severed contact.  

He adds, “It is hard to miss the symbolism that we may be just at the beginning of a long, hard winter!  Spring is not just around the corner.”  However, he reminds people “times of pain and stress are not new experiences.”

For members of the Church, Bishop McKeown reminds them that Advent says that God is coming - “we are going forward not back.”  He says that their task is to “wait in joyful hope for the coming of Christ.”

“We prepare to welcome the God of surprises, rather than - Pharisee and Sadducee-like – plan to manage his arrival in a way that will upset others but not us.”

He reminds the faithful that, “We are not just as hawkers of God’s ideas.  As a wise friend said recently, it does not even mean helping the poor like Jesus did but seeking God where he is to be found, among the poor and the marginalised!  It is in the needy that the Christ of Bethlehem and of the Cross is revealed to the comfortable.” 

Bishop McKeown then underlines that Church renewal will result from God’s work of prayer, penance and discernment, and not “our work as a result of a change in management style.”

“New structures and new styles of being Church may have value – but only if they are suffused with a new way of looking at the world and God’s new way of looking at people.  That means a new heart and not just new systems.  It means repentance and not just restructuring.  It involves spiritual renewal and not just doing battle with theological shibboleths.”

Referring to the “huge crisis of confidence in the State,” Bishop McKeown draws on the Church’s recent experiences.  

“In Church we have discovered that the problems of the past were not just a failure of safeguards but had something fundamental to do with how we were Church.  Similarly our economic woes were not just a result of poor oversight but the result of a system which was based on the inhuman Thatcherite creed that you cannot buck the market.”

While the markets produced great growth in wealth, this was accompanied by increasing levels of personal and communal dysfunctionality, the Bishop said, citing the booming prison population, the growing levels of community relationship breakdown and loneliness, and the unsustainable degradation of environment as consequences.

Those who wish to bring us beyond the present “Titanic-style economic woes” have to recognise that it is not a question of returning to the past; which was based on a confidence built on communal delusion.  “We in Church have rightly been criticised for allegedly just tinkering with the system.  Our political and business leaders will have to learn that the human person was not made for the economy, but the economy made for the human person,” Bishop McKeown warns.

He adds, “Self-delusion and corporate blindness are not a peculiarly church-specific failing.  It would be a tragedy if citizens were to allow the powerful merely to tinker with the system rather than to question its apparent omnipotence.”  

If Church and society see this period as merely a chance to correct a past model and to try again, we will be disappointed, Bishop McKeown warns.

He concludes, “If we see this as a communal Advent, then we can allow ourselves to be surprised by joy rather than shattered by disappointment.  Jesus tells us that the best is yet to come – and that it will not look like the past!”

SIC: CIN/IE