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 11^th 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.