On
a recent edition of Prime Time, the new Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin,
Denis Nulty, said something to the effect that we must balance
inclusiveness with communion.
He hit on a very important point that on
its own should be the subject of a television programme.
The topic under debate on the night in question was the future of the
Catholic Church.
Inevitably, the talk turned to matters like
homosexuality and women priests.
In fact, the future of the Church
depends on how well we Christians do at telling people about Jesus, but
this hardly figured at all in the debate because that kind of talk is
practically barred from current affairs shows.
Pressure
Bishop Nulty and Breda O’Brien
(columnist with this paper and a patron of The Iona Institute) both
performed very capably but the main source of any pressure they were
under was to explain how the Church could become more ‘inclusive’.
‘Inclusion’ is one of those ideas we’re all supposed to favour. Who
could be against it, and isn’t the Church supposed to be a welcoming
place and therefore the very model of ‘inclusion’?
The problem, say the critics, is that a lot of the time it is the
very opposite.
Thus actively gay people are made to feel excluded.
Divorced and remarried Catholics feel excluded.
Those living together
outside marriage feel excluded.
Those who have had abortions feel
excluded.
Many women feel excluded because they can’t become priests.
The list goes on.
The point is that a community, namely the Church which is supposed to
welcome everyone, in practice makes a whole lot of people feel
unwelcome, and how can that be Christian?
This brings us to Bishop Nulty’s point.
A communion, or community,
that is all inclusive won’t be a communion at all.
Or to put it another
way, it will be so all inclusive that it will be very hard to say what
it stands for and what it believes in anymore.
Girl Guides
A case in point.
The Girl Guides in
Britain used to require their members to make a pledge to God and Queen
(or King). That is gone, especially the first part because it was deemed
to be ‘exclusive’, that is, it excluded those who didn’t believe in
God.
Therefore the Girl Guides is now an organisation that does not have belief in God as one of its defining characteristics.
The pledge would-be Girl Guides now take is to develop themselves and be true to their beliefs.
Notice how completely individualistic this is.
In order to be
‘inclusive’ the Girl Guides no longer require their members to be true
to anything outside of themselves.
There is nothing external, like God
or country that they are required to believe in as a condition of
membership.
Now, this does not mean the Girl Guides is destroyed as a community.
They still come together, share time, go camping and so on.
But they
stand for less than they used to.
Nothing was ever stopping anyone from setting up their own version of
the Girl Guides, one that uses the new pledge of the original Girl
Guides.
But the old Girl Guides decided to become ‘inclusive’ and
therefore to water down their beliefs and their identity.
Community
A similar pressure is on the Catholic
Church, and on Christianity generally.
Obviously the Church as a
community, as a communion, cannot be for and against divorce, for and
against homosexual conduct, for and against women priests, for and
against abortion.
As a communion it has to take a stand on these things.
It has to
permit divorce or not permit divorce, favour abortion or not favour
abortion and so on.
It literally cannot be all things to all people.
And this is the point.
No community of belief can avoid making a
stand.
If the Church suddenly decided it has no moral objection to
divorce, then it will exclude those people who do have a moral objection
to divorce and think it is important to make a stand against it.
Abortion
The same goes for abortion and a whole
raft of other moral issues.
If, by some horrible and impossible to
contemplate turn of events, the Church was one day to become
‘pro-choice’, it would immediately exclude everyone who does not believe
in a ‘right’ to abortion.
More importantly, the Church would be abandoning things it believes
to be true in themselves, for example that abortion is wrong in itself.
The Church has no more power to alter what is right and wrong than you
or I have.
Its duty is the same as yours and mine, that is, to discover
the truth and then live by it.
Therefore an all inclusive community is both an impossibility in the
sense that it is impossible to stand for everything.
In addition, a
Church that tried to stand for everything would be forced to abandon
certain important truths which would be an injustice.
Truth
So, does this mean the Church cannot be
welcoming?
Not at all.
The Church welcomes everyone who wants to live in
the truth.
It doesn’t welcome everyone on their own terms, but on the
Gospel’s terms.
Anyone who is willing to try and live by the truth of
the Gospel is welcome by definition.
‘Inclusion’ when it is used in a certain way in fact means
relativism.
Those who use the word in this way want the Church to
relativise its beliefs and become like the modern Girl Guides and simply
be a place where we develop ourselves and our beliefs whatever they may
be.
On the other hand, the Church is inclusive on the Gospel’s terms.
There are certain truths it cannot abandon.
If it ever did abandon those
truths, it would no longer be a Christian communion at all and that, I
think, was Bishop Nulty’s point.