Seán Ó Conaill: Patsy McGarry and Catholic Atonement Theology
In the second chapter of his memoir ‘Well, Holy God: My Life as an Irish, Catholic, Agnostic Correspondent’ Patsy McGarry tells us of his loss of an early interest in the Catholic priesthood. Local clericalism was one reason but also there was this, in his second chapter:
“…even (Jesus’) Divinity soon proved a problem. I began to have great difficulty with the entirety of redemption theology, the teaching that Jesus came to this earth to placate a God, his father, over a disobedient humanity by taking on his own head the burden of human sinfulness and purging it through his own death to win back the favour of his father. Seriously?”
Seriously indeed! This ACP site records the ongoing difficulty in persuading Irish clergy to engage in a discussion of that same subject of atonement theology – especially in a 2014 exchange that ended with Joe O’Leary adverting to ‘the phobia of so many clergy about studying theology’.
Given that synodality began in 2021 with an appeal for ‘parrhesia’ (frankness) from Pope Francis, and that reportedly Ireland will soon resume its own ‘synodal pathway’ what hope is there that the obstacle described by Patsy McGarry will be surfaced?
Recently Brendan Hoban described my own protests on this matter as ‘apodictic’ – but if I am indeed endlessly stating the obvious why even yet can no cleric here – apart from Joe O’Leary – state a clear opinion on the matter? The history of atonement theology did not begin with St Anselm’s insistence on God’s need for ‘satisfaction’ for sin, but with an emphasis on the Father as liberator (the clear implication of the very word ‘redemption’) – and as source of ‘new life’ – so why should St Anselm be given the last word on the matter, when St Patrick (to take just one of many examples) knew nothing of his 11th century theology?
To be clear, I accept entirely that in dying as he did, with forgiveness even of his accusers, Jesus forever takes away our sins when we confess them – but I reject utterly the inference that God the Father needed Jesus to be crucified to forgive us. Instead I point to Jesus’s insistence that the ‘father and I are one’ as clear evidence that it is a mistaken emphasis to speak of God the Father’s need for ‘satisfaction’ for sin rather than of his intent to liberate all humans, through Jesus, from the burdens of our past mistakes, as well as from all fear of the future.
That Jesus was misjudged and cruelly mistreated by ‘the world’ – and that his Resurrection was proof to the first Christians that the punitive judgements of that world had forever been relativised – is obvious from the spirit and matter of the New Testament texts. That world was therefore ‘passing away’ – and so it did.
The medieval world – in which the political power of the church was at its zenith in St Anselm’s time – was a different matter. Christians then were expected to take the judgements of Christendom rulers as divinely sanctioned. This explains how the ‘ransom’ to which Jesus adverted (Matt 20:28) came to be understood as payable to God the Father, when the early church believed something entirely different – that Jesus and the Father had together freed humankind – through Jesus’ sacrifice – from the reign of evil.
René Girard’s insight into the connection between violence and mimetic desire (‘covetousness’ – the desire for what others possess, as described also by James the apostle) has surely challenged the blindness of Christendom on this simplest of explanations for Europe’s civil wars (up to and including the Great War of 1914-18). To see Jesus’ holiness as centred on his freedom from covetousness rather than his celibacy would forever overcome the fixation with sexual sin that so unbalanced Irish Catholicism, and mobilise the church decisively to tackle the challenges of social injustice and climate recovery.
Fear of what others think (i.e. of the judgement of the world) lies at the root of all futile wanting, and that fear was clearly what Jesus overcame in accepting crucifixion – to free us from that same affliction. He said so himself in claiming to have ‘overcome the world’ (John 16:33). And fear of what others think lies still at the root of Catholic ecclesiastical secrecy. We need a respectable theology of atonement that stops blaming God the Father for the crucifixion and turns the sharpest focus of the church’s moral concern to the futile pursuit of social status – the root of all self-harm, meaningless accumulation, injustice and conflict.
Some random thoughts:
Can we see ourselves as being freed from the slavery of sin by seeing our own selves as the enslavers? If we think of addictions to drugs or alcohol, are we slaves to those substances, or are we slaves to our own wants, needs and desires? Can we let go of the “Devil made me do it” attitude which blames someone else for our own failures.
The greatest gift we have from God is the gift of free will. We make choices knowing the consequences of those choices. Everyone knows the dangers of drugs, and yet we “medicate” ourselves to face life. We use Alcohol to “steady our nerves” when facing something we don’t like. We live in fear of death and the loss of our lives and the resurrection is the proof that we need not fear.
How often do we see God as an adversary? Or as a punishing parent who looks for us to do something wrong so that we can be punished? What happens when we change our outlook from “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” to God gives us the grace, love and support to handle what happens to us in life?
Some things are the result of our choices that we know are wrong and have serious consequences. We know that smoking causes lung cancer, but still choose to smoke, then wonder why God has given us cancer.
We think God’s will is an exact plan for our lives, every moment marked out, but can we see God’s plan for us as wanting us to be happy in what we do and what we choose, like any good parent’s will for their children?
“We live in fear of death and the loss of our lives and the resurrection is the proof that we need not fear.”
Exactly Bill – although belief in the resurrection of Jesus does not come easily, and seems to require a life crisis that sets us praying ‘for dear life’. (That was certainly my own experience anyway.)
That human knowledge of the inevitability of bodily death could be the most important original source of our tendency towards self-doubt and self-harm (sin) seems likely – but the Catechism creates an unnecessary difficulty here by insisting that on the contrary God made us immortal originally – that our bodies die only because of original sin.
CCC 1008 – “Death is a consequence of sin. The Church’s Magisterium, as authentic interpreter of the affirmations of Scripture and Tradition, teaches that death entered the world on account of man’s sin. Even though man’s nature is mortal God had destined him not to die. Death was therefore contrary to the plans of God the Creator and entered the world as a consequence of sin. ‘Bodily death, from which man would have been immune had he not sinned’ is thus ‘the last enemy’ of man left to be conquered.”
How can this be remotely plausible? Even if we grant that sinless humans might never have deliberately killed one another, what about the vulnerability and mortality that is inexorably attached to organic corporality and is now evident in the geological record of all life on Earth since the beginning – many millions of years before there were any humans whatever?
And since Jesus was sinless from the beginning why then was he ever mortal, if bodily death is a consequence of sin?
Why is so little theological attention paid to Jesus’s own warning in Matt 10:28 – “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell”? To me this greatly supports the inference that from the beginning the Trinity foresaw Jesus’s death and resurrection as a means of overcoming our fear of death, as you argue.
St Paul insists in 2 Tim 1:10,11: “He [Jesus] has abolished death, and he has brought to light immortality and life through the gospel, in whose service I have been made herald, apostle and teacher.” So why not argue that from the beginning this was the intention of the Trinity – the overcoming of our fear of bodily death via the life, death and resurrection of Jesus – an intention that makes even more sense if we accept the overwhelming evidence of science that death has always been a condition of physical corporality?
The perception of African American theologians such as James Cone that in the crucifixion God was also demonstrating solidarity with all victims of unjust legal process – including the 2,000 – 3,000 victims of white supremacist lynching in the southern US states after 1865 – also gels with Girard’s argument that the Crucifixion starkly reveals a primordial practice of scapegoating to maintain social cohesion in a crisis. So it was also in Europe in the era of St Anselm, in e.g. witch hunting, but for obvious reasons it could never occur to St Anselm to see solidarity with the victims of Christendom as a divine intention.
So, over nine centuries later, why are Catholics today still tied to St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theory of atonement, by a Catechism that also insists, impossibly, that all humans ever born would still be alive if Adam and Eve had not sinned?
Sean, there were theologians who faulted the Catechism for fundamentalism because of this and other Genesis-related passages. When Cardinal Martini said that the Church was living 200 years in the past, he was not speaking lightly.
I immediately think of Gabriel Daly in this regard. His contribution to Michael Walsh’s Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church highlighted the disconnect between the Catechism’s endorsement of what amounts to the historical-critical method in paragraphs 109-110 and the same Catechism’s failure to take its own hermeneutical advice in its historicized exposition of the Adamic myth – with implications for a theology of Original Sin and Atonement. Paul Ricoeur often struck a similar note to Fr. Daly in this regard, noting the damage done by literalistic interpretations of Genesis 2-3. I am indebted to Msgr. Dermot Lane who introduced us to Gabriel Daly’s book Creation and Redemption in Mater Dei in the early 90s and I feel a strong obligation to try to keep Fr. Daly’s insights on the theological and catechetical radar. The Catechism’s literalism, historicism, and its version of atonement theology seem to invite either fundamentalism or cynicism.
“This ACP site records the ongoing difficulty in persuading Irish clergy to engage in a discussion of that same subject of atonement theology.”
I don’t recall seeing Seán’s discussion of this in 2014, so I’m ten year late! But I do remember in school in the 1950s hearing the version that because sin against God is an offence against a divine person, reconciliation with God could only come about via sacrifice made by a divine person. I could understand the kind of reasoning on a human society level – if I committed an offence against a VIP, on human reckoning it would require a greater level of action than if I offended another pupil. But it seemed to me even then that this was not appropriate in the case of God: it reduced God to the level of some kind of human chief accountant calculating the offence level. Over many years in homilies and talks, it seemed important to me to emphasise that we do not have to persuade God to love us, or to love us more: God already loves each of us totally. We pray, not to change God’s mind about us, but to change our minds about God, and to let the mind of Christ be in us.
A short 2015 article by Richard Rohr, “Love, Not Atonement” (https://cac.org/daily-meditations/love-not-atonement-2015-03-20/) refers to the harm done by Anselm’s “substitutionary atonement theory”. He wrote: “God in Jesus moved people beyond the counting, weighing, and punishing model, that the ego prefers, to the utterly new world that Jesus offered, where God’s abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary. Jesus undid “once and for all” (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10) all notions of human and animal sacrifice and replaced them with his new economy of grace, which is the very heart of the gospel revolution.” The human inclination towards a retributive justice system has been overcome in Jesus with a restorative justice system.
An article in Sojourner’s magazine by Benjamin Corey in 2014 linked the defective model with serious failures in the US justice system: “How A Poor Theology Of The Cross Created America’s Broken Justice System.” https://sojo.net/articles/how-poor-theology-cross-created-americas-broken-justice-system.
One might also see this kind of poor theology resulting in how institutions like industrial schools and Magdalen homes were deliberately set up along a punitive model to try to discipline inmates into a more respectable life which would strengthen the state. Barry Coldrey, an Australian Christian brother, wrote about this in his study of such children’s institutions.
Such defective theology may also underly how the Vatican has dealt in an inhuman and unChristian manner with priests perceived to stray from strict orthodoxy.
Thanks, Seán, for insisting on the importance of recognising a defective theology and pointing out the true Good News.
Many thanks, Pádraig, for flagging up Fr Richard Rohr’s presentation of the Franciscan alternative to St Anselm’s ‘satisfaction’ theory of atonement, from which the notion of penal substitutionary atonement naturally followed – the fundamentalist notion that Jesus takes our place to receive the divine punishment that our sins deserve. That too relies on an understanding of the Father that is simply the opposite of the one that Jesus himself presents, especially in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
In that parable the father of the prodigal son is not waiting stiffly for his son’s afflictions to satisfy his injured ‘honour’ but running towards the suffering son he has seen ‘far off’. So does our father in heaven come running, through Jesus, to assure us all that we have never been unloved.
In Feb 2019 Richard summarised this Franciscan alternative of e.g., St Bonaventure and Duns Scotus in a series of daily reflections which we in ACI reproduced on the ACI site, linking to Richard’s ‘Centre for Action and Contemplation’. This page still receives consistently high rates of daily visits from all parts, under the title ‘Richard Rohr – Jesus and the Cross’.
https://acireland.ie/richard-rohr-jesus-and-the-cross/
Cardinal Bergoglio’s choice of ‘Francis’ for his papal name in 2013, and his turn to ‘synodality’ in 2021, surely signal an opportunity for this Franciscan theology to overcome the retributive understanding implicit in St Anselm’s understanding of atonement. Your own references to the likely influence of that inadequate theology upon the scandalous abusive regimes in many Catholic institutions of the last century, in Ireland and elsewhere, point us towards a deeper understanding of that phenomenon, and of the healed and restored future that now beckons.
Christus Vivit!
Many thanks, Alan, for that reference to Michael Walsh’s Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and to Gabriel Daly’s contribution to that. A copy is on its way to me.
I agree completely with your final sentence. CCC 1008 in particular makes it virtually impossible for anyone with a rudimentary grasp of earth history to take the whole catechism seriously. Does no Catholic bishop anywhere see this?
Tied as it is to the Catechism and other such documents, the AI ‘expert’ that answers questions on Catholic teaching – ‘Magisterium AI’ – also affirms both the historicity of Adam and Eve and the origin of of our physical death in their historical sin.
https://www.magisterium.com/
This of course makes the construction ‘the Catholic church teaches’ risible rhetoric rather than a reliable account of what any sensible person can learn from such obvious nonsense.