CONT'D



But before we turn to Rahner, I should fill out the Cardinal's remarks, since it brings us back to that anxiety about losing the faith. I don't care what you do, my mother used to say when we were growing up, as long as you don't give up the faith. This was a bad strategic move, like the warning about the fruit of the one tree that you mustn't eat, the one door not to be opened ... except that giving up the faith is not something that one straightforwardly does. Losing the faith can sound like carelessness, and perhaps in some cases it is, though is its loss always a cause for blame? Perhaps one can be blamed for failures one was hardly aware of ... so, the precious gift that can be lost and if lost then lost on account of some failure of will or action or inner disposition that slips below the surface of one's attention. Perhaps even thinking too much? There were those who thought that a blameworthy activity that put one's faith in jeopardy. Anyway, "For Jesus the inability to believe in God and to live by faith is the greatest of evils. You see the things that result from this are an affront to human dignity, destruction of trusts between peoples, the rule of egoism and the loss of peace. One can never have true justice, true peace, if God becomes meaningless to people". No, I don't agree with this either, gentle reader, but precisely where does the disagreement lie? And is there some truth that Murphy-O'Connor seeks to convey that one might acknowledge, and recognise that one had not taken into account? Disagreeing is not the same as dismissing it as nonsense, the latter a reactive movement that depends upon misinterpretation of what it is to be a believer.



In any event, commentators in the media were astonished that the Cardinal claimed this at the time of the Ryan Report on child abuse in Ireland. How can the 'inability to believe in God' be the greatest of evils? I suppose they might have gone on to say that surely these cynical priests and nuns and Christian Brothers did evil things and were believers. But actually it is not so clear that they were .... believers, I mean. I know that this will irritate my secularist friends--and I do, honestly, speak as one of them--but the Cardinal is not saying that the greatest evil is to be of the opinion that there is no God. To think so is to misunderstand the nature of belief. To believe in God is to have confidence in the saving power of his Word and thus to commit oneself faithfully to following his commandments --- something like that. I shall have to return to this.

But 'the rule of egoism and the loss of peace' are phrases that echo the thinking of the present Pope. The thought seems to be that the loss of faith amounts to the loss of a vision of the world, including the loss of moral vision. It is the expression of a fear, one we are entirely familiar with from that remark from Dostoevsky, 'If God is dead, then everything is permitted'.. It is the assumed loss of moral vision, and the sense that moral life loses its foundation, that sees the loss of faith as the greatest evil. This is a thought that we have to resist, but should take account of its being the expression of a fear on the part of those who believe and are afraid of the loss of that belief.

When I first read accounts of the mid-Victorian crisis of faith I wondered how late I was to undergo it myself more than a centry later.