Jesus said:
‘I am the resurrection and the life.
If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live,
and whoever lives and believes in me
will never die.
Do you believe this?’
‘Yes, Lord,’ she said ‘I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who was to come into this world.’
John 11:25 - 27
Fr Jim McMahon MSC served the communities of Ulverstone and Penguin, and the broader Tasmanian community, from 1988 to 2013. The impact of this simple and holy priest on the communities he cared for will be Iong remembered with great affection. His death aged 86 at St Joseph's, Kensington on 20 March marked another stage in the story of our parish. I stood outside late last night and looked out into the brilliant Tasmanian night sky. I remembered God's promise to Abraham and Sarah, and I remembered Fr Jim and Jesus' promise to him for his faithful and good life.
For Abraham, the promise of eternal life was
through his descendants - as many as the stars in the heaven (Genesis 26:4). For
the Hebrews death saw the body returned to the earth while the soul entered
Sheol, the place of the dead. After the Exodus - once they had entered the
Promised Land - the Hebrews looked to deepen their understanding of what lay
beyond death. Further, after the Babylonian exile there grew a sense of
resurrection as a metaphor for restoration from exile as well as a literal
hope, in particular those whose heroic lives became exemplars for the faithful
(2 Maccabees 7:14). By the time of Jesus, the Pharisees had a clear doctrine in
which those (faithful) who experienced suffering would be rewarded by being
raised up by God.
The life, death and resurrection of Jesus are
cornerstones of the kerygma. They are
so intimately linked as to be inseparable. This is particularly poignant for
the Johannine community whose Gospel - written somewhere between 90 - 110 AD -
enabled them to look back to the events of some 70 years earlier and read the
community's issues and tensions with the Jews back into the story of Jesus. Unlike the Synoptics John
highlights Jesus' divinity. For the Johannine community, Jesus is already 'the
resurrection and the life' promising that 'whoever lives and believes in me
will never die.'
Fr Jim preached these words and lived these
words and appreciated - like all good preachers - that like John - we have the
further advantage of looking back and thinking forward. Fr Jim was keen that
all who heard him preach would come to know the love of God and be drawn to a
life of fidelity, hope and love - and consequently not only earn a place for
eternity but receive the ultimate reward of resurrection in the last days.
Father Jim McMahon MSC
1930 - 2017
Requiescat in pace Fr Jim.
Peter Douglas
De-Christianization in the West is a real threat. But Putinism isn’t the answer.
On a visit to Rio de Janeiro in February, Patriarch
Kirill of Moscow invited Catholics and other Christian faithful to join him in
the trenches of the culture wars. “We still have some doctrinal disagreements,”
the Russian Orthodox primate said, according to a report from the Interfax news agency.
“But no one is preventing us from fighting, hand-in-hand, to end the
persecutions, the ousting of Christian values, the de-Christianization of
21st-century human civilization.”
Patriarch Kirill went on to enumerate the ravages of
de-Christianization, or this “evil political force disguised as tolerance.” In
his words, these included people “banned” from wearing crosses at the office
and from wishing each other a Merry Christmas; the expansion of same-sex
marriage and the “refusal to understand marriage as a sacred union between man
and woman”; and abortion and skyrocketing divorce rates.
This was not the first time the patriarch had called for
a united ecumenical front against secularization. In a January speech to the Duma, the lower house of
the Russian Parliament, he underscored the need for “mutually respectful”
dialogue between religious leaders in the common struggle “to protect
traditional values.” Meeting President Horacio Cartes of Paraguay last year,
Patriarch Kirill lamented how “Christian values are being
marginalized in lives of people in several countries.” He
warned: “Europe must not lose its Christian roots.”
While no doubt sincere, the patriarch’s rhetoric is also
of a piece with the new Russian ideology, which presents the Kremlin as a last
bulwark against the degradation and spiritual poverty of liberal order. As
globalization blurs boundaries (both national and sexual), and as social media
and American-style consumerism flatten cultural differences, the thinking goes,
Russia and her church stand for sovereignty, authenticity and Christian vigor.
The message from Moscow has resonated with some leading
Christian thinkers in the West. Vladimir Putin might be a thug, in their
view, but in the rearguard action to preserve faith, family and nationhood
against the liberal and “globalist” onslaught, the Russian strongman is no
enemy. He deserves at least a sympathetic hearing, they think, and he might
even prove to be a useful tactical ally. Call it the Putin Option.
Steve Bannon has considered it. In his 2014 speech on the grounds of the Vatican, the
Breitbart News chief, now a White House advisor, said, “We, the Judeo-Christian
West, really have to look at what [Putin is] talking about as far as
traditionalism goes—particularly the sense of where it supports the
underpinnings of nationalism—and I happen to think that the individual
sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing.” Notably, Mr.
Bannon also went on to describe Putin’s Russia as a “cronyist” and an
“imperialist” power that seeks to “expand.”
In a 2014 account of efforts to re-Christianize Russia
after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the theologian John Burgess sounded
similar notes. “The peril in Russia to genuine Christian faith comes not from
tsarism or communism but instead from an emerging global culture that reduces
human life to material acquisition and consumption,” he wrote in First Things. The Orthodox
Church’s “appeals to the spiritual greatness of the Russian nation may be an
essential witness to the Gospel rather than a capitulation” to the Kremlin, he
added.
For the author and American Conservative journalist
Rod Dreher, the redemptive promise of Putin is a constant theme. In December,
Mr. Dreher wrote of meeting two young Catholics in
Italy who viewed Mr. Putin favorably, as a “strong leader who embraces his
country’s Christian religious heritage, and seeks to defend it and its
teachings, especially against cultural liberals whose views on sex and gender
are destroying the traditional family.” Mr. Dreher added: “And you know what? I
agreed with them, broadly.” He carved out some of his reservations about the
Putinist project but then concluded: “One doesn’t have to believe that Putin is
an angel in order to respect some of what he does, and even to
be grateful for it.”
No thanks. Even if you, like me, concur in the underlying
diagnosis—that the West has become unmoored from
its Judeo-Christian foundations, that liberalism has gone too
far in eroding traditional authority and moral precepts—the Putin Option is no
cure. And it entails hazards that could prove ruinous to the cause of reversing
the West’s spiritual fortunes.
Putin: no friend of religious liberty
Start with the moral downsides of embracing the Kremlin
in the name of morality. Christians should judge Vladimir Putin’s professed
commitment to faith, family values and traditional notions of nationhood
against his corrupt and murderous rule at home and his aggression against
Russia’s neighbors.
Contrary to Patriarch Kirill’s assertions about
interfaith solidarity, for example, Russia is increasingly restricting the
domestic space for worship, evangelization and other religious activities.
Under an “antiterror” law enacted in the summer,
all missionaries in Russia must be affiliated with “registered organizations,”
and evangelization outside state-approved religious sites is strictly
prohibited. Violators can be fined as much as $780, and their churches $15,500.
The law does not exempt the Russian Orthodox Church, but
evangelicals, Mormon missionaries and other spiritual seekers who have strayed
from Patriarch Kirill’s flock will bear its brunt. Underground evangelical
house churches are gaining popularity in Russia, as in much of the rest of the
region, and some Protestants reject state registration as a matter of ecclesial
principle. These pastors now find themselves caught in Putin’s anti-missionary
dragnet.
At least seven people had been charged under the law by
September, including an American Baptist preacher who ran a house church. The
Mormon Church, meanwhile, has been forced to reassign 65 missionaries away from
Russia, and others have been reclassified as community-service volunteers who
do not engage in missionary activity. In December, a court in Vladivostok
relied on the law to order the destruction of 40 Bibles confiscated from
the Salvation Army, on the grounds that the books had not been properly labeled
“religious material.”
Not even yogis are immune. A Russian computer programmer
in October was briefly detained and charged under the law for giving a talk on
the philosophy behind yoga at a festival. The complainant had accused the 44-year-old of recruiting
“young people into the ranks of this pseudo-Hindu organization.”
Mr. Putin’s war on missionaries has been accompanied by a
broader crackdown on civil liberties, including a new “patriotic stop list”
that targets think tanks and other nongovernmental organizations deemed to be
subversive “foreign agents,” as well as domestic activists who receive funding
from such groups. Leading dissidents, such as the anti-graft campaigner Alexei
Navalny, are tried on trumped-up charges and barred from running for office.
Others tend to die under suspicious circumstances.
When the Islamist regimes in, say, Iran or Turkey behave
this way, Christians do not hesitate to denounce the repression, and rightly
so. Yet there is a tendency in some conservative Christian quarters to ignore
or play down Mr. Putin’s assaults on political and religious liberty, or else
to use sophistic relativism to excuse him.
Mr. Dreher, for example, protests that the Kremlin should not be
held to the same standards as governments founded on “Enlightenment-era” ideals
such as the separation of church and state. Mr. Putin, writes the St. John’s University legal
scholar Mark Movsesian, “is not acting against the wishes of his own people”
when he promotes “nationalism, authority, loyalty, and religion” as
authentically Russian alternatives to the “Western, Educated, Industrialized,
Rich, and Democratic” worldview that prevails in Europe and the United States.
Let us grant that Russia is a post-Communist state that
is trying to recover its historic Orthodox tradition. There is justice, for
example, in the state restoring swiftly to Patriarch Kirill church properties
expropriated by the Communists, even if this displeases Russian liberals who
would prefer the museums and other assets to remain in public hands. Let us
grant, too, that Mr. Putin’s rule is popular among broad swaths of Russian
society (setting aside the role of censorship, propaganda and fear in this
regard).
The question for those who see Moscow as a great
protector of faith then becomes whether Putinism is good for Russian
Christianity. And a follow-up: Is the rules-based, liberal-democratic order
really so irredeemable that Western Christians might look for an alternative in
Moscow, warts and all? The answer is no, on both counts. And if past is
precedent, K.G.B.-style authoritarianism dressed in Orthodox garb is likely to
undermine both church authority and Russia’s spiritual welfare in the long
term.
A mere spiritual gloss
Recall how, following the decimation wrought by the
October Revolution, Stalin sought to revive the Orthodox Church during World
War II, and the church helped stir the Russian soul to the nation’s defense.
Yet after the war, Khrushchev and his successors launched fresh anti-Christian
campaigns, intimidating much of the Orthodox leadership into collaboration.
Those who insisted on the church’s independence, such as the dissident priest
Father Gleb Yakunin (1934-2014), were dispatched to the gulag.
Likewise, what Mr. Putin giveth, Mr. Putin can take away.
Kremlin patronage has empowered the church once more since the collapse of
Communism, and there is no denying the beauty of its monastic and mystical
dimensions or the holiness of its ministers. Most Russians now identify as
Orthodox, and the church no doubt provides them with great solace (though,
tellingly, no more than 10 percent attend services regularly, according to
multiple recent surveys).
But it is equally undeniable that the regime relies on the
church’s senior leadership to lend a spiritual gloss to its
nationalist-authoritarian project. The church has obliged, partly out of
ideological fervor and partly because it has no choice. As George Weigel
has observed, “The Russian Church leadership has
neither the will nor the capacity...to speak truth to Putinesque power; those
who try to do so are quickly marginalized or exiled.”
Take the question of Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill has
endorsed, as a sort of Orthodox crusade, Mr. Putin’s stealth invasion of
eastern Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea. The president has described Crimea as the Russian
equivalent of “Temple Mount in Jerusalem for Jews and Muslims,” where “our
ancestors first and forever recognized their nationhood.”
As Mr. Weigel has noted, the Russian Orthodox Church is
waging theological warfare against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in
parallel with Mr. Putin’s military operation. Under Communism, the U.G.C.C. was
forcibly incorporated into Orthodoxy, and it did not regain independence until
the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now Russian Orthodox prelates slander
Ukrainian Catholics as “schismatics” and “uniates,” and they have sought to
sideline the U.G.C.C. in ongoing ecumenical dialogue with the Vatican—so far
with little success.
Again, the path out of the West’s current spiritual
crisis will not be found in a Christianity that is so bound up with revanchist
nationalism. Christians concerned about the excesses of liberal
transnationalism should be equally alert to the dangers of a Russian
imperialism that seeks to subjugate sovereign nations, like Ukraine, whom
geographic misfortune has cursed to live in Russia’s shadow.
Western Christians should also be wary of a regime that
maintains such a tenuous relationship with the truth. Truth is an “essential
condition for authentic freedom,” as St. Pope John Paul II frequently emphasized. Christians cannot laud the
Kremlin’s supposedly pro-family stances without also being mired in its empire
of falsehoods—about Russia’s role in eastern Ukraine and incidents like the
shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by Kremlin-backed rebels in 2014;
about Putin’s brutal campaign to destroy the non-Islamic opposition and prop up
the Assad regime in Syria; about the massive and systematic graft that greases
his system.
Nor is the Russian Orthodox Church’s current supremacy
guaranteed. Should it fit the Kremlin’s purposes tomorrow, does anyone doubt
that the regime would repress the church leadership over this or that dispute?
Despair over the cultural left’s stridency and triumphalism in recent years, on
questions like abortion and gay marriage, should not cloud Christian judgment
about the fundamental differences between free and unfree societies, between
democracy and dictatorship.
For all its flaws, liberal order still
affords Christians the chance to persuade fellow citizens, to change their
governments, to bring suits before fair and independent tribunals, and to bring
the good news and the riches of tradition to the democratic public square.
Under Putinism, by contrast, Christianity is at the mercy of the strongman and
his ruling clique. The policy outcomes might be “pro-family,” for now, but
church and conscience are compromised by unaccountable power.
This article also appeared in print, under
the headline "Christianity’s Russian Temptation," in the April 3, 2017 issue.
Sohrab Ahmari, an
editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal in London, is the author of The
New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts (Biteback).
