Timothy radcliffe why go to church

Why Go to Church? Add to basket. Add to wishlist. You must sign in to add this item to your wishlist. Please sign in or create an account. Description The Eucharist, writes Timothy Radcliffe, is a three part drama, forming us in faith, hope and love.

Read an extract Read an extract of Why Go to Church? Close Preview. About the contributors. Title mention in Christian Marketplace. A Tablet Book of the Year Review in Daily Telegraph. Related Titles. Thy Will Be Done. Stephen Cherry. The Joy of God.

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Patrick Woodhouse. Thomas Keating. The Merciful Humility of God. Jane Williams. Touched by God. Luigi Gioia. The Shattering of Loneliness. Erik Varden. Say it to God. One of the other things that Taylor shows is that beginning with the 16th and 17th centuries, morality is increasingly seen as being about what you're allowed to do.

He calls it the birth of the culture of control. But in the New Testament, in the whole of the Bible, right through Augustine and Aquinas—mainstream Christian tradition—morality is not about what you're allowed to do, it's about who you're called to be.

It's about becoming alive. So you have the seven "deadly" sins, and the virtues are about becoming someone in particular. But with the birth of the secular culture of control, morality becomes more and more about the regulation of behavior. And if God doesn't do it, the state will. I think the present economic and banking crisis has a lot to do with the fact that morality has been reduced to rules, with God as the policeman in the sky.

What we need to do is find a recovery of virtue—that's one form it can take anyway—so that we're invited to become free, joyful, loving, courageous, temperate, prudent people. In England, the big debate is how far we should regulate the banking system, for example. You can regulate until you're dead, but people will always find a way around it. So the English bishops have produced a wonderful document about the recovery of virtue, and there's a real thirst for that.

I recently have had lectures in London with bankers on this topic, and they respond. They see that this makes sense. So it's an exciting moment in that way. Let's take the first example, homosexuality. It's a very odd word, a very 19th-century word. It didn't exist before the 19th century. It's very odd that you describe somebody primarily in terms of their sexual inclinations. Imagine that when you meet someone, you said, "Hello, how are you?

Tell me about yourself," and they said, "I'm primarily sexually attracted toward people of the other sex. I think the important thing about homosexuality is that you have human beings who are capable of love. Cardinal Basil Hume, the great archbishop of Westminster who died in , said the first thing you recognize is the presence of God in that love. The second thing you recognize is that the challenge that somebody who is gay faces is exactly the same challenge everybody else faces: How do you love well?

So you treasure the love that's there and then, with prayer and gospel, seek to know how to love well. But to reduce the situation to a desire to engage in particular sexual acts is very odd really.

The question of what gay people are or aren't allowed to do sexually should be rather a long way down on the list of questions to consider. The previous cardinal of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who retired a couple of years ago, established a Mass for gay people in central London, and he very carefully went through it all with then-Cardinal Ratzinger. There's a roster of about 15 priests who preside there; I go there a couple of times a year, and the church is full of gay people and their families.

We're having a lot of conversions to Catholicism in the gay community, believe it or not, because what they see is that we value them and recognize the gifts they bring. I think that's connected to a wider question, that of the baptized.

I think part of the trouble is that so many tensions have grown up around ordination, we've actually forgotten that by far the most important dignity that any Christian has is that they're baptized. When somebody asked Pope John Paul II what was the greatest day of his life, he said that he couldn't remember it, but it was the day he was baptized. I think the women's ordination question has become more acute now because the church has become more clerical than in my childhood.

But I grew up as a Catholic in the s and the '60s with a profound sense that the real dignity of every Christian was that they were baptized. I think in recent years people have become more conscious of power and decision-making and less of the beauty of baptism.

There are still some big questions, about women's ordination, for example. I think the primary difficulty isn't ordination as such; it's that ordination is linked to decision-making in the church. If it was just sacramental, presiding at Eucharist, I don't think there would be so much pain, whereas people are acutely aware that in justice, women should have a voice in making decisions.

They had more in the past, in the early church, and indeed in the medieval church, when the great abbesses had considerable authority. Can we see a way back to the recovery of that earlier authority? Pope Benedict has spoken about this often, and he believes that this has to be a priority. We have taken some steps, but they're small ones.

The biggest change is that already in theology the voice of women is becoming stronger. When I joined the Catholic Theological Association in Britain 20 or 30 years ago, all the members were men and they were all religious—in fact they were all Jesuits or Dominicans, barring one or two. When I went back a couple of years ago, 70 percent of the people in the room were lay, and half were women, so there's a massive transformation already happening.

I was in Indonesia this time last year, where I gave a retreat for about priests and bishops. It was all organized by a young lay woman who told those gathered that she wasn't awfully impressed by their degree of holiness and so had organized a retreat for them! She said she wanted to check up in six months' time to see whether they were any holier.

There was a sort of relaxed relationship between laity and clergy, which you often find in Asia, for example, which means the question of ordination doesn't weigh so heavily because there is this profound sense that we're all brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. Another, more difficult example has to do with the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy. The church's response to this tragedy must be through laypeople. The crisis in England wasn't as serious as in other countries because the moment it began to blow up, Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor appointed a senior lay Catholic judge to oversee what procedures must be in place.

There is a layperson responsible for verifying compliance so that the clergy and the bishops are answerable to the laity explicitly. That's helped a great deal, because the temptation is to take refuge in a sort of clerical fog where we protect ourselves.

I think what happened in England is a very good model of how to get beyond it. Examines what it means to celebrate the Eucharist, and in turn reminds us of our capability for love, hope and faith.

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