Jesus’ last words to his apostles were: “You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1:18) The apostles took this to heart, and when electing Matthias and later spreading the word, the key point was “of these things we are witnesses” (Acts 1:22; 2:32; 3:15, etc).
A witness is a person who sees something happen and is able to describe it to other people, but it is a bit more specific to Christianity: everyone who is able to give an account of their faith, even those who were not eyewitnesses of the Resurrection or officially constituted priests, etc. are regarded as witnesses to Christ. The word martyr means “witness” but it was not only the martyrs who performed this task.
Christianity began to spread on the basis of witness, testimony and the evidence of people’s lives. “Going therefore teach all nations” was never spoken to Abraham or Moses; Christianity seems to be the only monotheistic religion, the only major world religion in fact, to go and make disciples by giving witness to the faith. Rodney Stark’s sociological analysis of the implanting of Christianity in The Rise of Christianity (1996), stressed how their care of the sick, their horror of infanticide, the message of redemption, their social cohesion and mutual care attracted disciples at all levels of society. Stark regarded this as a more plausible explanation of the spread of the faith than the stock political one (Constantine making it the official religion of the Empire). Pope Benedict dedicated his first encyclical to charity – God is Love – and pointed out that even the apostate Fourth Century emperor Julian attempted to copy the hierarchical structure of Christianity, the “Galileans” as he dismissively called them, for it was an efficient way of caring for all, even the weakest.
The Second Vatican Council took this up as well, describing the Christian vocation as, of its nature, a vocation to apostolate and witness, by word and life (Decree, Apostolate of Lay People). Every member of the Body of Christ is active, and it isn’t a matter of preaching or having an official role. One’s whole life, even when one isn’t trying to say anything, can bear testimony. Michael Novak offers a telling quotation from Romano Guardini, who influenced four Popes so far, to the effect that anybody should be able to tell that you are a Catholic even by the way you climb a tree!
VATICAN II AND OUR FRAGMENTED LIVES
But we find it hard to go public with our Christianity in the midst of today’s world and even Guardini claimed that “the conscious unity of existence has been to a large extent lost even by believing Christians. The believer no longer stands with his faith amid the concrete, actual world, and he no longer rediscovers that world in his faith.” This gap is one of the problems identified by the Second Vatican Council: “One of the gravest errors of our times is the dichotomy between the faith which many profess and the practice of their daily lives.” Or in the words of St Josemaría Escrivá in his famous homily entitled Passionately Loving the World:
And so, for many Catholics, churches become the setting par excellence of the Christian life. And being a Christian means going to church, taking part in sacred ceremonies, being taken up with ecclesiastical matters, in a kind of segregated world, which is considered to be the antechamber of heaven, while the ordinary world follows its own separate path. The doctrine of Christianity and the life of grace would, in this case brush past the turbulent march of human history, without ever really meeting it.
But faith is not meant to be carefully hoarded away and kept for Sundays, or relegated to private life. It is geared to operate within and engage with the secular world for “a faith”, St John Paul II said, “that does not affect a person’s way of life and culture is a faith not fully embraced, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived.”
CONNECTING THE DOTS: UNITY OF LIFE
This fragmenting is a very contemporary phenomenon, affecting not just Catholics. Max Weber said that each of us experiences in his own flesh “personal experiences of discontinuity” which cause one to change one’s costume several times a day. It is often the case that various persons co-exist in a single subject, without it being easy to identify oneself with any single one of them. Are we members of a family, professionals, citizens, believers, or simply clowns? All and none of these. As Catholics, how can we draw all these facets of our lives into one coherent witness?
An answer has been taking shape in Catholic life, a development of the Council’s doctrine, echoing Guardini’s phrase: “the unity of Christian existence”. This new feature is expressed as “unity of life”, originally associated with the preaching of St Josemaría, at the beginning of Opus Dei, in the 1930s, and used also by St John Paul II: “The unity of life of the lay faithful is of the greatest importance: indeed they must be sanctified in everyday working and social life. Therefore, to respond to their vocation, the lay faithful must see their daily activities as an occasion to join themselves to God, fulfill his will, serve other people and lead them to communion with God in Christ.”
In recent years, since the 1987 Synod on lay people, calls for “unity of life” have become common in magisterial and more unofficial spiritual exhortation. Cardinal Martini spoke of “unity of life in a fragmented world”, and many recently formed associations, blogs and initiatives also refer to the ideal of unity of life. Again in the words of St Josemaría: “Christians must not resign ourselves to leading a double life: our lives must be a strong and simple unity into which all our actions converge.… We are ‘citizens of heaven’, and at the same time fully fledged citizens of this earth.”
A STILL POINT IN A TURNING WORLD
So how do you stand firm in the world as a Christian, loving the world, your neighbour as yourself and God above all? This is made possible for a Christian at the Incarnation, for Christ assumes and redeems everything that is human, he is like us in “all things” except sin. This means that no human reality lies outside the scope of the redemption, no human person either. This is the still point in the turning world, the point at which all our varied activities can come together in one. From here, we can forge our varied activities into a unity, and reflect the new creation in Christ.
About the Author: Rev. Patrick Gorevan
Rev. Patrick Gorevan is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature. He lectures in philosophy in St Patrick’s College Maynooth and is academic tutor at Maryvale Institute. He has written on the early phenomenological movement, virtue ethics and the role of emotion in moral action.