Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30: (Vigil) Martin and Kate Cleary, (Anniv).
11.00: Nellie Carter, (Anniv).
6.30: William Morris, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

I have a confession to make! Like millions of others, I dipped into the reality TV programme Celebrity Big Brother during the week. Prompted by the charges of racism, I dumbly followed the promptings of 'market forces'! Even though I found it shallow, tacky, and banal, this series has certainly been extraordinarily dramatic, particularly when four of the house-mates ganged up against the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty. Her chief tormentor was the unlovely Jade. There have been claims that the bullying of Shilpa is racist, and the row has reached such proportions that it has led to questions in the House of Commons, overshadowed Chancellor Gordon Brown's visit to India, and led to thousands of people protesting on the streets of Delhi. (How banal today's politicians have become!)

No doubt the artificial environment of the Big Brother house where people, live for several weeks together, cut off from the outside world, has added to the tension.

But this is not just a contemporary row. This is also a timeless drama. It struck me that Shilpa is a scapegoat, the subject of the loathing and disproportionate blame of others. The Catholic thinker and anthropologist Rene Girard has developed a theory that scapegoating is essential to the human condition, and that the violent aggression it encourages is key to society's malaise.

According to Girard, the origin of all scapegoating is desire. We imitate others, we want what they have, they get in the way of our desires. The emotion snowballs with others joining in. The group becomes entirely focused on wanting to destroy the common enemy. Girard talks of the theatre of envy, an apposite phrase for the Big Brother house and the jealousy inspired by smart, sophisticated, beautiful Shilpa. Rene Girard argues that such behaviour also lies at the heart of religion.

Indeed the scapegoat was the goat sent into the desert as a sacrifice to atone for a tribe's misdemeanours, while in some primitive religions a human sacrifice would be the scapegoat. In the Old Testament Abel and Joseph were sacrificial victims, but with Christ, it is God who becomes the scapegoat, unmasking the complicity of religion and violence.

It is certainly all too easy for us to be complacent. While we watch the Big Brother bullies and the other housemates stay silent, failing to stop the attacks, we can fool ourselves that such primitive behaviour is not the kind of thing we would indulge in. Voyeuristic Big Brother may be, but by watching what has happened to Shilpa, we might come to reflect on how our various families, parishes and communities can exclude people from their lives. Scapegoating is a perennial problem.

-Dick Lyng

Items of Some Interest

A Christian Europe?

Europe enjoys unprecedented peace and prosperity. Of course no one single factor can claim credit. NATO played its part. Ironically, the Cold War kept certain traditional antagonisms at bay temporarily. The European ideal of its founders contributed in no small way.

But has a climate of materialism led to the rejection of Christian values? Some will say 'yes'. But for me, taking huge sectors of the European population out of poverty is an achievement about which the Christian must only rejoice. If such prosperity has led to a religious decline, it may reflect an inability on the part of the Church to respond creatively to changed circumstances.

But the European Values Study urges a certain caution in presuming that we have gone "all secularist". The Values Atlas sums it up: "One thing is certain, the old continent is not as secularised as it seems", just as the same Values Study points out that European do not find marriage and faithfulness as outdated institutions or values. Recently published studies of the Iona Institute here in Ireland indicate similar convictions about the family.

Religion plays a large role in the personal life of most Europeans. Perhaps the growth of religious pluralism in Europe indicates a persistence rather than a decline in religious values. To mark the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, we, the European Bishops noted in the 'Berlin Declaration' how "for many of its founders the Christian imprint on the European factor has been an indisputable fact", quoting an interesting comment of Paul-Henri Spaak, by his own admission an atheist!

Obviously, I would prefer to see an explicit reference to our Christian heritage in the European Constitution, I feel that the best way to counteract this omission is to witness more energetically still to those perennial values which have always been at the root of that Christian contribution. The lack of an explicit mention of the Christian heritage of Europe was not some sort of a pan-European plot against religion, but de facto the result of the rigid and immoveable objection principally of one or two European nations.

Ten years ago Pope John Paul II wrote his third Social Encyclical. As the protest which was to bring down the Berlin Wall grew stronger, Pope John Paul grew more apprehensive. Would it be possible for those countries to move from centralised economies to market economies without paying a disproportionate price? He called together leading economists to discuss this matter. This discussion led into more general reflections on the nature of a modern economy truly at the service of all. There are human needs which cannot be met by the market; indeed there are values and needs which should not be bartered just like commodities. It is at this point that the Churches will find their truly prophetic role.

-Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

Something to do with Love....?

What has been happening in society is a gradual shift from emphasizing the contract of marriage to emphasizing the relationship within it, as being at the human heart of the marriage. This shift is not a radical rejection of a Christian understanding of marriage, though it may be a radical rejection of post-Tridentine Church legalism. Indeed it may even be a step in the other direction, towards a more humanistic and fluid appreciation of what a marriage is. It would be ironic if those wishing to safeguard a Christian understanding of marriage dug their last ditch in defence of a contractual view of marriage which was all about inherited property, and rejected an emerging view of marriage that was trying tentatively to say that it had something to do with love.

-Clifford Longley, The Tablet, 10 June 2006, p. 5

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