ARTICLES
December 2002 ARTICLES
Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Theology from Down Under
Archdiocese Hosts Condemned Aussie Priest
By F. Michael Forrester
You have shaken with our laughter
You have trembled with our tears
We are woman, we are man
All around us we have known You
All creation lives to hold You
In our living and our dying
We are bringing You to earth.
So ended the hymn that began the talk, "Tomorrow's Catholic: Re-Shaping Our Church," presented by Michael Morwood at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Los Angeles, on September 17. Sponsored by not only the parish, but Loyola Marymount University and the Los Angeles archdiocesan office of religious education, the event promised to "help us to discover what to let go of that is inadequate and what to hold onto that is essential if we are to become a Church of responsible, adult Catholic Christians." Present for the event were Sister Edith Prendergast, director of the archdiocesan office of religious education, and Michael Horan, pastoral theologian at Loyola Marymount.
Michael Morwood, according to the handout that evening, has been, "helping Christians to examine and articulate faith in ways that resonate with a contemporary understanding of our place in the universe." The handout did not mention that, in 1998, Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, Australia (Michael Morwood's place of residence), had declared that Morwood's recent book, Tomorrow's Catholic: Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millennium, contained serious doctrinal errors. Pell's declaration was accompanied by a ten-page document listing the heresies contained in the book. The archbishop also banned the book in his archdiocese. Moreover, because Morwood refused to retract anything written in his book or sign a profession of faith, Archbishop Pell banned him from speaking publicly on the incarnation, the redemption and the Trinity. That same year, Morwood resigned from the priesthood. Despite Morwood's irregular status, the Los Angeles archdiocesan-sponsored event promised attendees a "certificate of attendance," to go towards their earning a "catechist certificate."
"Thank you for the welcome. I speak funny," began Morwood. "I hope it doesn't take too long for you to get the accent."
What soon became evident to several of us was that the Australian accent would be the smallest of our obstacles when it came to understanding Morwood. "I want to speak tonight mainly about the imagination," said Morwood, "not just in the sense of 'make believe,' but in the understanding that our images are vital in our formulation and articulation of our faith. What are our images? What do we imagine? What do we imagine about God?"
Morwood's ensuing talk was, for the most part, a summary of his condemned book, Tomorrow's Catholic. As in his book, Morwood began his talk by looking at our current "images of God," based principally on "the story that the Catholic Catechism is very strongly immersed in" -- that is to say, Genesis.
"It is significant," asserted Morwood, "that the idea of one almighty and powerful deity is less than five thousand years old. Only about 800 or 900 years before Jesus of Nazareth, in the Hebrew tradition, did [man] articulate the idea of one, almighty, powerful being. It is actually very recent in human development history.
"Can these lights go off?"
Using an overhead projector for visual stimulus, Morwood continued: "this was a God who chose the Israelites, in their estimation, to be God's people. This was a God who would use the army of Nebuchadnezzar to punish the Israelites for not being faithful. This was a God who oversaw and who would manipulate human history. A God who could intervene. It's also the God I grew up with. The God who would punish, the God I grew up with, asking, 'Why did God do this to me?'" Morwood explained that, like us, the Hebrews were forced (on account of an almighty, all good, God), to "wrestle" with the question, "how can there be evil in the world?" To solve this apparent contradiction, they came up with the "story" of original sin. "They came to the realization," claimed Morwood, "that if God is almighty and powerful, something must have happened in human history and it wasn't God's fault; it had to be our fault. And so they told the story [of Genesis]."
Before continuing, Morwood gave a personal story to illustrate this issue of evil and sin and how it affects our understanding of God. "One of my brothers-in-law died last year," recounted Morwood, "his name was Kevin. Kevin went to Mass every Sunday of his life. He was with the Knights of the Southern Cross and St Vincent de Paul. About two years before he died, he was in the hospital and they cut off one foot, then the leg -- and you know what's coming don't you? -- they cut off the next foot, then both legs. He spent his last six months with an extraordinary headache. And I would visit him, as I often did. The day before he died, he said to me, 'I must have done something terrible in my youth.' It's amazing how it stays -- 'I must have done something terrible in my youth for God to do this to me.' And that's not uncommon for Christians and Catholics to have this concept of God."
Returning to the Israelites, Morwood proceeded to give a somewhat mocking account of Genesis -- according to him, a "wonderful story" the Israelites told to solve the problem of evil in a world. Using their own conception of the cosmos -- with a dome over a flat world, below which was an "underworld" where the forces of evil lived -- the Hebrew people, said Morwood, told the story of creation and of the fall of Adam and Eve. This story, according to Morwood, was never taken literally by the Israelites; they were just "trying to make a theological point." "Somewhere back in the nether regions of human history," said Morwood, "somewhere back there, we made the world [with evil], and God is a God who is going to help us."
With no further elucidation or argument, Morwood then jumped to the New Testament, claiming the "literalizing" of Genesis only began with St. Paul, who was "interpreting" the person of Jesus. Paul, said Morwood, was also "interpreting" Jesus "within this understanding of the cosmos." "Paul imagined that, because of the fall of Adam, no one could get to heaven," said Morwood. "'Hang on [thought St. Paul], is Jesus just human like the rest of us? Because no human person can bridge this gap between us and God.' So Jesus had to be more someone on God's side." Consequently, "we get Jesus is equally human and he is equally God, because he has to be God in a way that we are not, otherwise we don't get into that place. And so Jesus was interpreted in traditional Christian theology as the one who fixed up and repaired the fault of Adam. It's a great story, and it makes great sense."
Noting that "it's a concept many of us grew up with," Morwood added an anecdotal story. "I was asked by a bishop. who thought I was suspect, [if I would] assure him that [because of] what Jesus has done by his life and death, humankind wins access to life with God in heaven? I responded to the bishop, 'that's the imagination I grew up with. I was ordained into that imagination, but the imagination in me is now telling me something else.'"
Central, it seemed, to Morwood's problem with this doctrine, is the physical positioning of things. "In our imagination, when we look to see where [God] is, we look up! That creates all sorts of problems. If you have one person in Australia and the other in L.A., and they look up, they aren't seeing the same thing -- believe me. The Catechism is full of images of what's called 'dualism' -- or in other words, Christianity has required this sense of a gap between heaven and earth. Everyone has this imagination. I once imagined that, when I die, my soul was going to go somewhere else. Was going to go 'up.' It was going to go to the place where 'God really is.' And there would be a judgment about whether I could get in or not. Many, many Christians still believe that there will be a judgment about whether you'll get in or not. Why? Because we've taken this imagination [Genesis] on board. It is what we have acquired in our Christian tradition. in John's Gospel he talks about Jesus actually having to go back to the Father. What happens in the resurrection? Who knows what happens when we're dead?! But the writers of the Gospels knew; at least, they had their images. Jesus stood there and he went 'back up.' It was possible in [their] cosmos for this to work. To go 'up' to get back into heaven."
St Paul, according to Morwood, used the story of Genesis "quite rightly" because "theology always has to theologize at the time, and how the world is seen at that time -- we can't do it any other way." But, Morwood added, "the question today is whether in the 21st century we will still theologize about God and the human condition and the human story using that understanding of the cosmos.
"Catholic leaders," continued Morwood, "still speak in this imagination." We cannot, according to Morwood, afford to keep basing our imagination of our God and "our story of Jesus" on "a story like this, in a cosmos like this." "Were human beings moved from paradise?" asked Morwood. "Scientists will tell us that's nonsense. It is scientific nonsense. So the question is, if we shift from this imagination. what happens to Christianity? What happens to our understanding of Jesus? Do we call heaven a place? Or does it become more exciting? More wholesome? Or does it become more WOW! I think it does."
Having, apparently, sufficiently argued that our current understanding of God "suffers from the limitations of an outmoded cosmology," Morwood proceeded, with the aid of projected images, to dazzle us with a myriad Discovery Channel-style facts about the universe "as we know it," and offer very little in way of replacement for our "outdated images." He spoke of the earth "traveling through space at 210 kilometers per second," of parallel universes. "Every second," he marveled, "the sun converts six hundred million tons of hydrogen to helium. I mean use your imagination! I mean, how can you keep up with that?"
"One of the first things I learnt about God as a little Catholic boy," said Morwood, "is that God is everywhere.... Where there is anything at all, it exists in God." Juxtaposing this against "traditional Catholic theology of a God that breaks into our world," Morwood insisted that it is not enough to give "lip service" to the idea that "God is everywhere," we must "take seriously the idea that God is everywhere, not just on earth -- but in the universe. This [God] is not some overseer, this is not some 'Big Daddy figure in the sky,' this is the awesome reality of everything in existence. God isn't out there directing it; he's not somewhere else watching it. This is happening in God. And so it goes on and on."
The emergence of the human species, said Morwood, gave God's presence a way of being on this planet. "We," said Morwood, "are a life form that gives this awesome reality a means to God. You and I give God a way of coming to this universe. God's spirit is everywhere on this planet.And who is Jesus? Certainly he is human like us. Did he come from God? Of course he came from God. But that Jesus is the incarnation? Of something that came from someone else? Came down to earth? And went back up again? So we can go back up again?"
In some sort of conclusion, Morwood said that we, as Christians, believe that. "Jesus himself articulated that when a human person gives himself totally to love, to allow the spirit of love -- when you are totally and utterly the best human person you can possibly be, when you are utterly generous, when love overflows, and when people see that in someone, then they can say, 'hey. Wow. There's another dimension of human existence here.' And people saw that in Jesus. I want to suggest that salvation is not about Jesus unlocking the gates of heaven, despite the Catholic catechism telling us that's exactly what it is." Instead, Morwood suggested, it is about "Jesus setting us free" from our "ideas and images concerning God and our relationship with God, and religious attitudes and practices that result from them."
Morwood made more of an attempt in his book to deal with the consequences of his "imaginings" than he did in the presentation at St. Paul the Apostle -- particularly with regard to the Trinity, Church authority, the real presence in the Eucharist, and, indeed, the need for the Church itself. These are all but completely done away with. On his website, Morwood helpfully posts excerpts from Archbishop Pell's report on the doctrinal content of Tomorrow's Catholic. Morwood even includes Archbishop Pell's closing comment: "[Morwood's] limited understanding both of classical theologies and contemporary science is evident to the informed reader."
Before we received our certificates of attendance, Sister Edith Prendergast took the podium to offer her comments on the evening's presentation.
After commenting that Morwood has "raised our sights and shaken us up," Sister Edith spoke of an experience she had recently had in one of her classes: "we were talking about God, and this woman could not rid herself of the image of a God who is judge -- no matter how I went around it. She said, '[but what about when Christ says] "I've come to judge the living and the dead,"' and named all these kinds of things. So I was thinking tonight, when you were speaking, Michael, that the time for us involved in religious education is to rethink our story and traditions. So often I think that we are counting on images and metaphors. We have to ask the question: are they relevant to our time? Do they speak to anyone?"
Offering us examples of these "metaphors" that might not "speak to anyone," Sister Edith mentioned "the metaphors of the incarnation, of the Trinity, redemption -- some of the things that Michael assessed for us tonight. And each of those metaphors, in a way, you might say, is a poetic device, giving an insight into who God is, but also, who God is not. When you say God is Mother, or God is Father, God is not mother or father, either. We have to look at the need to change our metaphors and also the need to re-address them throughout the ages. I ask people, how do we teach, today, the Trinity? How do we teach incarnation? Is it what we were taught twenty or thirty years ago? I don't know. And I think that is one of the areas that Michael is willing to push us to take a look at today and that's in the context of the fact that our cosmos has changed, our social and scientific development of our age.
"Another cool area," continued Sister Edith, "which Michael talked about as well is 'the myth' or 'the stories.' The stories of creation or of the parables or whatever. Can we pass these on? Do we have all the context? I think the context of the time, the social and the cultural and the gender and the context of today? Those of us who are listening to the story think about it in a post-modernist time and society and roles. How do we pass on the stories to the young adults? To those in their twenties and thirties? And all of that. So being able to think into our myths, while we stand firm within them, to move up and beyond them; to be able to say, what in this myth empowers me? What deeper questions are raised as I stand in the story and in the midst of our traditions. What can I let go of? What should I let go of? And if I fail to let go of this, will religion lose its relevance?"
Becoming increasingly excited, and hardly stopping for a breath, Sister Edith continued, "and I think Michael also cautions us against the risk of literalization. When we just go for literalization, we deny the depths of the symbol and we take it only within its vertical limits. It doesn't stretch us. It doesn't move us. It doesn't make connectives."
After praising Morwood's book, Sister Edith concluded, "finally I would say that your work also has asked us to say, certainly, who is this God? But also, who are we? And, how are we related to this God in authenticity? You bring to us the interconnectiveness of all of life and the ecological implications of that are something we have not even begun to explore -- that whole interconnectiveness that we have and responsibility with all of life, rather than 'power over,' or 'dominion over.'"
The archdiocese of Melbourne declined to comment on Michael Morwood's reception here in the archdiocese of Los Angeles.