Brendan Hoban: Catholic Church needs to offer ‘salt and light’                 

Western People 18.2.2025

A friend suggested to me recently that what the Catholic Church needed now was a return to the days of religious persecution. There was no sturdy Catholic presence in Ireland, he argued, until everything Catholic, even our very existence as a church, was opposed, reviled and persecuted. It was only then, he said, that Catholicism found its voice.

Without a lively history of persecution, the Catholic Church in Ireland, he suggested, would never have become the force it was in the early twentieth century – and he listed everything from the Penal Laws and the Famine as ‘grist to the mill’ of Catholic progress. Without an extended history of persecution Catholicism, he concluded, would be little more than a peripheral sect.

Another voice commented that he thought that a new persecution had already arrived – wasn’t the very word ‘Catholic’ now a synonym for anything and everything that was despised in modern Ireland? We had entered, he countered, an age when apology seemed to be the defining characteristic of Catholicism. Everything ‘Catholic’ now was, he suggested, an apologetic hymn for our existence in Ireland, an example of how it’s possible to get everything wrong.

I suspect that such discussions are the result of the present trauma that the Catholic Church is now experiencing. Everything ‘Catholic’ seems to be on a downward trajectory, every policy seems to be driven by consolidation not mission, every response to every crisis seems to have caution written into its seams. The prevailing question defining every Catholic response is, like that of the Lotto winner who lost it all – how did we possibly get to where we are now?

At the beginning of the last century, when it was clear that political freedom of some shape or form was inevitable, Catholicism embraced the nationalist spirit and reaped the whirlwind that followed. Other Christian denominations, associated directly or by association or by history with the centuries long conquest by our near neighbour found it difficult to find a new role in a new state.

For Catholicism it was just a matter of taking the tide. For other denominations it was searching for a new path in a strange terrain. For Catholicism, it was about cheer-leading in a new Ireland; for Protestants, it was about keeping heads down as a policy of ‘wait and see’ seemed the more astute response.

Recently I was sent a short reflection by the spiritual writer and mystic, Fr Richard Rohr, an American Franciscan priest and the founder of the influential Centre for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Rohr, a mystic and a theologian,  has a legion of international followers and is a gifted writer with multiple books on theology and prayer, and notably on the need for contemplative prayer (or what we call contemplation). Every day as part of his worldwide ministry Rohr sends a few hundred words, usually scripture based, on some topic.

A few days ago, as I was mulling over the topic introduced above, Rohr’s words jumped out at me:

The great temptation of Christianity has always been to think that if we were in control, if we had power, we would “win,” but that’s exactly what Jesus warns us against. If we look at the history of Christianity, whenever we were “in charge,” that’s when we became the most corrupt. Christianity operates best in a resistance position, in a position where we can discern and choose how to be salt, how to be light.  

Rohr reminds us about two bits of advice Jesus gives us. One is that we should be the salt  of the earth and, two, the light of the world. We’re not the meat or the vegetables or the potatoes, we’re just the salt – that added bit that gives the taste to food – what, in Rohr’s words are what gives ‘purpose and meaning to life’.

In the same way, the metaphor of light that Jesus uses is not controlling or forceful.

Just set the light on a lampstand and (the message is) that as a Church we need to do the same if it’s good, and if it’s real, and if it’s beautiful, people will come.

This is the very opposite of what we expect. In Rohr’s words, ‘We basically think we can only move the world by being in control. Yet both of the images that Jesus offers here warn us against wanting to be in control’.  

Many Catholics today tend to look back fondly on the past as a golden age. Yet, as we know, the more we lifted the veil on the past the more problematic it seemed. For the Catholic Church, control and particularly absolute control have been toxic. Popes, bishops, parish priests, ‘superiors’ of religious orders, head teachers, medical consultants were all invested with absolute control, enforcing their opinions and decisions on those ‘under’ them.

Unless we offer ‘salt’ and ‘light’, in other words unless we find our authority in love of God and of neighbour and in lived concepts of mercy and justice, then in Rohr’s words, ‘we’re not offering anything that the world doesn’t already have or can’t find in other places’.

That’s why Pope Francis introduced himself as ‘the bishop of Rome’ to the crowds gathered in St Peter’s Square the night he was elected pope. That’s why he has made his life’s project listening to the voice of every baptised person. That’s why he wants to introduce the reforms embedded in the Second Vatican Council into every diocese, every parish, every community.

The overwhelming message from the history of the Catholic Church is that when it had too much control, it lost its way.

Food for thought and for purpose.