By Catherine Pepinster
The Church – and the world – needs to get beyond conventional divisions between left and right, progressives and liberals, and fixed ideas, and find new ways of mutual flourishing, according to England and Wales’s newest cardinal, Timothy Radcliffe.
And key to a new era is reciprocity, he said.
Cardinal Radcliffe was speaking at an Oxford conference earlier this week – his first public address since he was installed as a cardinal at a ceremony in Rome last month by Pope Francis.
The one-day conference was jointly organised by the Jesuit’s Georgetown University in Washington and the Dominicans’ Blackfriars Hall, in Oxford, where it was held, to discuss the outcome of the recent Rome Synod.
Cardinal Radcliffe, who is a former Master of the Dominican order, was chosen by the Pope to be spiritual adviser to October’s Synod in Rome, where representatives of the Catholic Church from across the globe gathered to discuss ways to improve dialogue in the Church.
The Cardinal said the Synod offered new models of encounter to a “post-Western world” increasingly divided. He spoke of his concern about the polarisation of society, and how on a recent visit to the United States, following the presidential election, he found that “tension is palpable”.
And he warned that while many assumed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, that the West’s way of doing things, “was the destiny of humanity, now it is ever more evident that it is not”.
Instead, across the world, there is a need for greater understanding of other ways of seeing things and for reciprocal relationships which are evolving, dynamic and open.
“In the Synod”, said Radcliffe, “we weren’t just talking to one another, but finding ways to do it. The task of the Synod is to keep opening our minds and language to God”.
Reflecting on the synod, which involved hundreds of lay Catholics as well as priests, bishops and cardinals, Radcliffe told his Oxford audience that “We were trying to imagine a renewal of the Church, liberated from clericalism… But this imaginative task was made yet more difficult by the cultural context of the Vatican – it was like trying to make ice cream in the Sahara.”
“Instead of being constrained by fixed, determined, complementary roles, as if we were jigsaw puzzles, we flourished in reciprocity”, he said.
His focus on greater dialogue matches that of the Pope, who spoke during a visit to the Mediterranean island of Corsica last weekend about “the need for dialogue, that is open, frank and fruitful” and the positive impact that “dynamic secularism” can bring.
The island of Corsica is part of France, which, since 1905, has enforced the separation of church and state by law, often known as laïcité.
In the 21st century, said the Pope, there is a need to develop a laïcité, or form of secularism “that is not static and fixed, but evolving and dynamic, capable of adapting to different and unforeseen situations, and of promoting constant cooperation between civil and ecclesial authorities for the benefit of the whole community, each within the limits of its own competences and areas of activity.”
Christian culture and secular culture need not be pitted against each other. Instead, he said, “it is important to acknowledge a mutual openness between these two horizons. Believers are increasingly open to, and at peace with the possibility of practising their faith without imposing it, living it as a leaven within the world and in their communities.
“Non-believers or those who have distanced themselves from religious practice are not strangers to the search for truth, justice and solidarity. Often, even if they do not belong to any religion, they carry in their hearts a great thirst, a search for meaning, which leads them to ponder the mystery of life and to seek out core values for the common good”.
