WelCom February/March 2025
Taking our Cue from Faith and Reason Together
December 2024
If human life is the wonderful gift and privilege we believe it is, then so too, is the work of making it more fully and authentically human, and countering everything that dehumanises. That work starts over and over again with the formation we provide for every person. It involves education, but in the broader sense of formation, involving an intimate partnership of faith and reason. Reason without faith cannot know the transcendent dignity of the person, and so a person’s worth is ultimately their usefulness to themselves and to others. Faith without reason easily leads to the fundamentalisms that find expression in wars of religion. And formation doesn’t finish when school finishes; it is even more for adults. We grow into it, not out of it.
Disconnections
An unhelpful separation of faith and reason came out of an over-interpretation of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. Reason had a rightful place in correcting the excesses and abuses of authority, culture and tradition, but not as a complete replacement for faith. Within a short while there was a revolt against the excessive claims made on behalf of reason itself. This gave rise to Romanticism – ‘the cult of the heart’ and individualism. It became a person’s sincerity that mattered, more than the meaning of their actions. The Catholic Church still has a hard time convincing people that morality is based not only on one’s intentions, but also on the meaning of one’s actions. Their meaning is not always limited to what the individual intends.
Faith and reason together can make a better job than secularism can, of interpreting and safeguarding the very yearnings that modern society treasures, such as the yearnings for tolerance, self-expression, human rights, participation, democracy, etc. Distorted interpretations of freedom, authenticity, honesty, love, tolerance, equality and human rights result from the claim that they mean whatever the individual believes they mean or wants them to mean.
Ultimately the Church has something more radical to offer humanity than does secularism because its gospel is about a love for life and for the world that does not stop at what can be merited or deserved or found useful. Nothing more fully embraces the world as it really is than love poured out where it is not merited or is even undeserved – like God’s love for us; (see 1 John 4:17). Faith’s contribution is unique.
“In much of western society, those who work at providing faith formation are doing so within a culture that regards ‘religion’ and faith formation as a kind of optional extra to life. It’s fine for those who want it, or need it, but one can do without it, and not miss it. It is like a coat that one can put on or take off. It is not part of one’s being.”
In much of western society, those who work at providing faith formation are doing so within a culture that regards ‘religion’ and faith formation as a kind of optional extra to life. It’s fine for those who want it, or need it, but one can do without it, and not miss it. It is like a coat that one can put on or take off. It is not part of one’s being.
Their task has not been made easier by a kind of evangelical short-cut that considers ‘religion’ to be a ‘man-made’ system that isn’t necessary for, and only gets in the way of, simple direct faith in Christ based on the scriptures. This over-simplified disconnect between ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ implies the privatisation of the individual’s faith, and has led to an even wider gap – now even the scriptures themselves, and Christ, and the very idea of historic revelation, are lumped in with ‘religion’ and dispensed with in favour of ‘spirituality’. There are others who less ambitiously but faithfully get on with being ‘just good Christians’.
Nor has the task of faith formation been made easier when institutional religion fails to connect with people’s spiritual journeys. Fr David Ranson reminds us that most often, young people are not yet ready to accept an entire systematic interpretation of their spiritual experience. They are not yet ready to express their spiritual quest in ritual form, particularly as it is celebrated in many parishes. And often, very little else is offered them. Consequently, they experience a significant gap between their spiritual questions and the doctrinal answers that religion provides them. (cf Across the Great Divide, St Paul’s, 2002, 36).
There are ways of loving the world that disregard its Maker. But a true love for the world – respecting the purposes built into it – are part of our love for God. It was a false ‘spirituality’ that put them in conflict. ‘Love for the world and love for God are in direct, not inverse proportion’ (K Raher). Asceticism does not despise nature in any of its forms; it just treats its present forms as transitory.
The Second Vatican Council had said:
…the split between the faith that many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age (Church in the Modern World, n.43).
This obviously refers to the scandal caused when our lives are inconsistent with our faith. But it also implies that if people don’t experience the connection between their religious faith and their daily lives, they soon begin to see religious practice as an ‘extra’ – not really needed.
It was for this reason that the Council dramatically shifted from a previous emphasis on revealed truths to God’s revealing activity. In the earliest days of the Church, all preaching was around the person of Jesus. In his person God is revealed, and how much we mean to God is revealed. His resurrection made possible their real encounters with him and real union with him. The result was a message they received with power, conviction and joy (cf 1Thes. 1:4-6).
During the Patristic era, the focus was on the ‘wonderful things’ God had done in history and was now doing above all in the liturgy. (Pope Francis has called the liturgy ‘the today of salvation history.’) When later it became necessary for the Church to defend itself against various errors leading up to the Council of Trent and the first Vatican Council, revelation came to be identified with the truths taught by the Church. Accordingly, faith was perceived as assent to those truths. This is how matters stood into the first half of the twentieth century.
By now it was becoming clear that knowing the truths of faith does not always make the difference that faith makes. This led to the kerygmatic movement, which once again focused on proclaiming the wonderful things God had done, in the hope of inspiring gratitude and conversion. But revelation was being viewed predominantly as a past event. The bible was the text. Students became tired of hearing about Abraham and Moses and crossing the Red Sea was not their problem. Kerygmatic catechesis was not connecting with their own experience.
Making Connections
Pope John Paul II put his finger on the connection between faith and real life in his memorable one-liner: ‘The human person is the primary route the Church must travel in fulfilling its mission: the primary and fundamental way of the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself’ (The Redeemer of the Human Race, n.14).
In the second century CE, St Iraneus had said, ‘it is the human person fully alive that is God’s glory; and what makes us fully alive is seeing God.’ That is why: [indent]
…the people of God labours to decipher authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose in the happenings, needs and desires in which this people has a part along with other people of our times. For faith throws a new light on everything, manifests God’s design for our total vocation, and thus directs the mind to solutions which are fully human (Second Vatican Council, Church in the Modern World, n.11).
Even allowing for life’s raw deals and injustices, the intimation of being made for better things does not let go. A sense of being made for more is what ‘speaks’ to us in our deepest longings, in nature around us, and wherever human lives manifest love, belonging, goodness and beauty. We should not underestimate the importance of beauty in a world that has become culturally tired of hearing about right and wrong, true and false.
Even the hardened and brazen can succumb before the miracles of life and love. At times it can be harder to believe there is no God than to believe there is. Handing on the faith means helping people to ‘see.’ It takes us beyond religion perceived as a duty into the need and desire to give thanks for what was never owed to us.
Just as ‘seeing’ God’s presence in creation involves the experience of it, so too does ‘seeing’ God’s presence in human lives and history. In the wake of Jesus’ resurrection, His disciples’ education-in-faith started with their experience of life-changing events. The experience came before understanding. That has not changed. Learning the meaning of Christian faith comes from the experience of participating in it. Participation gives us glimpses of ‘something more.’ Experiences that touch hearts expand the awareness we have from rational analysis. It’s a bit like the way hearing live music reveals something more about the notes than does reading them on the score. Ritual and other experiences of Christian expand our awareness.
A Catholic Culture
These experiences of the faith are normally more sharply focussed within the community that still commemorates Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. That community embodies a culture that is formed by the combined experience of its scriptures, liturgies, devotions, hymns, literature, art, vowed lives, work for justice and peace, contribution to health care and to education, personal sacrifice, faithful lives. Something within that culture connects with what we have been made for.
However great the community’s own shortfalls, it is where the desire to belong can still be mysteriously stronger than what offends. It is where faith is caught as much as taught. And it is the context in which reason draws out the meaning of this faith, and its application in life’s ever-changing situations. Homes, parishes and schools support each other in deriving their identity from that culture.
God’s presence among us reaches its summit in the person of Christ. It is above all in the liturgy that we touch ‘the mystery which is Christ among you’ (Colossians 1:20). Being absorbed by this mystery involves body, mind and spirit – attentive listening, adoration, reconciliation, songs of thanksgiving and joy, times of stillness and silence. The physical setting, the symbols, and ‘atmosphere’ help to deepen our awareness of being in God’s presence. The capacity of young people to be absorbed by ‘the mystery’ of Christ among us should not be underestimated. It is one of the things they can feel strongly attracted to, as the history of Taize demonstrates dramatically. We need to enhance this dimension of our liturgies. It attracts. It is remarkable how ANZAC services can attract young people.
When young people find the liturgy ‘boring’ it is sometimes because we are not relating it to their own experience. The Mass has been designed by adults for adults. Making adaptations to better engage children or young people is justified by the paramount law of proclaiming the mystery of God’s presence to all, and therefore doing so in accordance with their circumstances of age, culture, and education. Failure to adjust to the needs of a particular congregation is failure to make the liturgy accessible to people according to their capacity to receive.
“Failure to adjust to the needs of a particular congregation is failure to make the liturgy accessible to people according to their capacity to receive.”
Adaptations must always respect the main structure of the liturgy and the purpose of its particular parts. That is because it is the Church’s liturgy we celebrate, not something of our own making. There is a process of authorisation for those adaptations that are intended to be ongoing, but smaller accommodations are made for the occasions they are needed. That need takes priority over routine.
The role of those who facilitate the discovery of God in our lives is not so much the role of teacher, or master or even guide. It is more akin to the role of prophets and mystics – those who ‘see’ and ‘listen’ attentively to what is actually there (cf Matthew 13:14-16), and can find themselves in awe of it. So, they are able to help others interpret their own experience and the hints of God’s wonderful purpose.
This is also what makes a homily different from a sermon and from moralising: against the backdrop of the scriptures which depict God’s presence in human history, a homily helps people to recognise the signs of God’s presence in their own lives, to which they can respond gratefully.
Education
Education understood as formation is a many-layered thing, which can be sketched like this: Our earliest ancestors learned to use reason and make choices. They already had some life-skills, such as using a stone to crack nuts open. Whether or not we call these early learnings ‘education,’ they were enough to get us down and out from the trees. Education became part of life. Later levels of education incorporated and exceeded earlier levels.
Learning life skills progressed from cracking nuts to planting potatoes and catching fish to computer technology and now AI. Many thousands of years have passed and we are gradually learning to use freedom responsibly. Hurricanes come along to remind us that misusing our freedom has consequences, like heating up the atmosphere to bring about bigger floods, fires and droughts, and less food. Or, chainsaws, drills and excavators ravage habitats and livelihoods, which they do only because the rest of us provide a market for what they plunder. So, we need criteria for determining what kind of developments are good. Lifeskills education showed up the need for moral education. Education that looks no further than the development of skills, even high tech skills, is severely truncated.
A deeper and wider appreciation of human life is shown in those cultures which remember our dependence on nature, that we are part of it, and need to look after it – kaitiakitanga; and being there for one another – manaakitanga; in relationships that are life-giving – whanaungatanga.
Those whose socialising is limited to mainly virtual presence (online) leaving less time for real presence to one another are becoming non-participants in community events, service assocations etc. A diminished form of real presence to others can be a diminished form of living. That makes it a moral issue, as well as a health issue.
“Those whose socialising is limited to mainly virtual presence (online) leaving less time for real presence to one another are becoming non-participants in community events, service assocations etc. A diminished form of real presence to others can be a diminished form of living. That makes it a moral issue, as well as a health issue.”
Becoming one’s true self by being ‘for others’ extends to working for the personal, social and economic development of all. But the requirements of justice and the common good cannot be achieved without the transformaton of culture, and personal ‘conversion.’ That’s because social and economic practices are the progeny of how we think and what we value. ‘There can be no new humanity without new persons…’ (Pope St Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, n 18).
Cultural deterioration is evident in a report on Pope Francis’ recent visit to Louvain University. A spokesperson condescendingly explained that Francis ‘may not have fully grasped how deeply our culture believes that each person defines their own origin, purpose and standards. Contrary to what he preaches and hopes for, the individual has overtaken the concept of the person.’ (La Croix). But Pope Francis is not alone in believing that the autonomy of individuals is not absolute, even if that is what ‘our culture’ wants us to believe.
Human beings are not free-floating agents capable of re-shaping themselves in any way they choose; this happens only in on-line virtual worlds…. Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by screens that allow us to easily imagine ourselves in alternative realities or as alternative beings…. The real world, however, continues to be different: wills are embodied in physical bodies that structure, and also limit, the extent of individual agency.’ (Prof Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and its Discontents, 2022.)
Notwithstanding occasional throwbacks and cultural deformities, contemporary culture and moral education do have some important points of contact and are able to support each other. This was recognised by the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council: [Indent]
The dignity of the human person is a concern of which people of our time are becoming increasingly more aware. In growing numbers people demand that they should enjoy the use of their own responsible judgment and freedom and decide on their actions on grounds of duty and conscience, without external pressure or coercion. (On Religious Liberty, 1; also Church in Modern World, 17)
Honouring this reality leads to formation aimed at helping others to understand issues and to choose well. It moves away from the social patterns and leadership styles that were more typical of feudal societies and that prolonged over-dependence and personal immaturity. ‘A major function of schools is to produce critical thinkers, discerning consumers, and perceptive citizens.’ (Cardinal TS Williams).
Teaching is a more subtle process than indoctrination. It involves respect for learners’ right to reason and to freedom. At the same time, it does not leave young people to drift aimlessly, based on false understandings of freedom. Moral education needs to be common ground for all educators. It does not succumb to the illusion that education should be morally ‘neutral,’ because that deprives them of the attitudes and skills needed for questioning current values within society, and allows the impression that all views are equally valid and immune from criticism. That is not neutrality; it is just a different set of values. (See Ivan Snook and Colin McGeorge, ‘More than Talk’ – Moral Education in New Zealand, Dept of Education, Wellington 1978). Full rolls and waiting lists at faith-based schools show that people realise this.
The need for values – moral education – is enhanced by religious education. We do not really know ourselves until we know we have been personally and gratuitously chosen and called into existence by God. This is the greatest thing we could ever know about ourselves. When moral education takes this leap, life takes on meaning and has a whole new feel to it. It becomes thanksgiving. Being called into existence by God is the basis of each person’s fundamental dignity, equality, and right to be loved regardless of their condition, their circumstances and even what they have done.
“Being called into existence by God is the basis of each person’s fundamental dignity, equality, and right to be loved regardless of their condition, their circumstances and even what they have done.”
In turn, religious education becomes Christian education when we discover in the Person, life, death and resurrection of Jesus how much we really do mean to God. This is the point of Catholic schools.
Alongside others who provide Christian education, we are partners in a great enterprise – en-abling young people to grow as persons. But we also have reason for maintaining the distinctiveness of Catholic education. Our immediate ancestors were concerned to preserve our Catholic identity in an environment that was mainly Protestant. That has largely changed. The need now is to preserve our Catholic identity in an environment that is mainly secular – not for the sake of separating ourselves, but for the sake of taking our place in that kind of society without losing our bearings. If Catholics are to be able to take their place and make a positive contribution to society, they first need to experience their own identity, savour it and nurture it. They need to discover why they are Catholics and why they can be proud of it. Out of that strength they can be a leaven in the dough of a society that is crying out for meaning.
“If Catholics are to be able to take their place and make a positive contribution to society, they first need to experience their own identity, savour it and nurture it. They need to discover why they are Catholics and why they can be proud of it.”