As you will have seen, the cover of the December issue of Position Papers shows a festive looking O’Connell Street in Dublin decked out in Christmas lights. Looking at it only now, it occurs to me that many looking at that photo will automatically think of November 23 last when that same street was unfortunately decked out with a burning tram, bus, and cars as well as smashed windows and looted shops. That terrible image of a ransacked and burning O’Connell Street appears to me to point to an underlying malaise which not be ignored or brushed aside. This is the malaise of a West which is frankly collapsing. Unfortunately the level of analysis here in Ireland didn’t go much deeper than blaming “the looney far-right” for the riot, and presenting tasers, body-cams and draconian hate speech laws as the solution to the problem.
The catalyst to that riot was a brutal knife-attack on young children, apparently Islamist in nature. Perhaps if there were open and candid debates regarding Ireland’s immigration policy, discussion of these difficult questions would not “go underground” only to suddenly explode to the surface violently as we saw in November. But more importantly there needs to be a debate regarding the kind of society which devours itself. Where a significant number of young men of a country have gone feral, what does that say about their families, their schools and communities?
Even the then British Prime Minister David Cameron was able to see that the British riots of Summer 2011 had something to do with the breakdown of the family, when he said: “I don’t doubt that many of the rioters out last week have no father at home. Perhaps they come from one of the neighbourhoods where it is normal for young men to grow up without a male role model, looking to the street for their father figures. So if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start.”
And it would be quite myopic to examine what is happening in Ireland, separately from what is going on in the rest of the world. Even a little awareness of current affairs is enough to convince the observer that the world appears to be going through a unique crisis.
Next month, if all goes according to plan, we will carry a review of a book recently published by Rialp in Spain (though as of yet only available in Spanish). Its title in Spanish is La sociedad del delirio which could be translated as The Delirious Society. The book asks whether the world is going through a deeper crisis than ever before in its history. So far the author, Antonio-Carlos Pereira Menaut, makes a good case for an answer in the affirmative. As we shall see next month, he argues that a generalised culture of anti-humanity (deshumanidad) is now dominant throughout the world.
Now I can hear you begin to grumble that this Editorial is a bit thin on Christmas cheer, for which I apologise! I would, however, like to counter that genuine Christmas cheer can cope quite well with riots, social collapse, and social delirium, precisely because of the words of our Saviour: “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Our good cheer is based on the rock solid conviction that a silent victory over all that evil which we and the world at large generate, began with the Incarnation, and continues through Christ’s presence in the world in the Eucharist and in Christians.
The Book of Wisdom has a passage which contains a beautiful prophecy of a coming triumph of the light over darkness:
For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,
thy all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne,
into the midst of the land that was doomed,
a stern warrior carrying the sharp sword of thy authentic command,
and stood and filled all things with death,
and touched heaven while standing on the earth
(Wisdom 18:14-16).
Already from ancient times, the fact that Christ’s birth took place in the depth of winter, when “night in its swift course was now half gone”, has been seen as especially significant. One of the essays in the collection Christmas and the Irish reviewed here, points out that the contrast between the light of Christ and the darkness of mid-winter was a dominant motif in early Irish manuscripts and later Medieval writings.
In the first Christmas Christ came unnoticed into a world “that was doomed”. While the Book of Wisdom portrays Christ as a giant of warrior who stretches from earth right up to heaven, we know that Christ when he came didn’t even stretch the length of a cattle trough! And yet for all his smallness, and apparent significance, he has begun to fill the world with the light of his love. Even today of course, Christ continues to be small to the point of invisibility – in all the tabernacles of the world. And yet, as Fr Pat Gorevan points out in his review of Bishop Robert Barron’s book on the Eucharist This is My Body, there is “a creative power of the divine word at work in the Blessed Eucharist”.
But this tiny, apparently ineffectual Christ is also present in another “Body” of his, the Mystical Body of Christ, his Church. Looking at the world crises, and the current world crisis which may well be the greatest crisis the world has ever undergone, the influence of Christians may appear to be laughably insignificant. But this is, as St Josemaría Escrivá warns us, a temptation:
Then, like a subtle temptation, the thought may come that there are very few of us who have really taken to heart this divine invitation. Moreover, we see that those of us who have, are instruments of very little worth. It is true; we are few, in comparison with the rest of mankind, and of ourselves we are worth nothing. But our Master’s affirmation resounds with full authority: Christians are the light, the salt, the leaven of the world and “a little leaven leavens the whole batch” (Homily “The Richness of Ordinary Life” in Friends of God).
I think that we see a very nice example of this quiet, leavening quality of Catholics in the life and thought of the great statesman Edmund Burke. Michael Kirke in his In Passing column this month, describes how (the non-Catholic) Burke was deeply influenced by the Catholics he knew through the course of his life: his Catholic mother of course, his wife Jane Nugent, and an in-law Richard Hennessey among others.
This task of quiet leavening and transforming the world is equally our task at the dark outset of the twenty-first century, and the quiet power of that leavening influence is vast. In the words of one Father of the Church:
Christ has appointed us to be like lamps, so as to be teachers to others; to act as leaven; to live like angels among men, like adults among children, like spiritual beings among the merely rational; to be seed and to yield fruit. There would be no need of speaking if our lives shone in this way. Words would be superfluous if we had deeds to show for them. There would not be a single pagan left if we were truly Christian.