Editorials
Relic Tour Serves as Sign of Badly Fractured Catholic Church
Volume 32 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 14, 2018
St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral here was the site of a visit for a Jesuit relic on the late-January weekend. It was part of a fourteen-city tour that started Jan. 3 and ended Feb 2 in Ottawa. Titled the St. Francis Xavier Canadian Relic Pilgrimage tour, the interviewed leaders made no direct reference to the perceptual difficulties of presenting the Catholic religion as a relic and archive. A little ironic humour might have helped breach any credibility gap. None seemed to be forthcoming in all seriousness.
As a result, their comments and explanations seemed almost beside the point. The medium is the message and when a religion tries to attract youth by featuring a five-hundred-year-old body part of a founding member of the Jesuits, something seems to be disconnected from the contemporary sensibility. As one local Catholic Religious put it, ‘Bury it in the ground where it belongs.’
St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Cathedral here was the site of a visit for a Jesuit relic on the late-January weekend. It was part of a fourteen-city tour that started Jan. 3 and ended Feb 2 in Ottawa. Titled the St. Francis Xavier Canadian Relic Pilgrimage tour, the interviewed leaders made no direct reference to the perceptual difficulties of presenting the Catholic religion as a relic and archive. A little ironic humour might have helped breach any credibility gap. None seemed to be forthcoming in all seriousness.
As a result, their comments and explanations seemed almost beside the point. The medium is the message and when a religion tries to attract youth by featuring a five-hundred-year-old body part of a founding member of the Jesuits, something seems to be disconnected from the contemporary sensibility. As one local Catholic Religious put it, ‘Bury it in the ground where it belongs.’
2.
I attended the lecture explanation by the conservatively spoken middle aged Jesuit. He fitted into the parallel universe world view that right wing Catholicism continues to perpetuate as its self-image in the face of a woe-be-tide world. The tone at the Cathedral under its current and persistent rector seems baronial, even baroque in its style and ambition. Doom and gloom is the persistent theme in the language, worldview and sick soul spirituality (in the term of psychologist William James in his classic study Varieties of Religious Experience) of the same priest who also occupies the positions of Vicar General and Chancellor of the diocese.
The Times Colonist reportage of January 27 read: “Bishop Gary Gordon of Victoria, who led a near full house in prayer when the relic was first brought to the altar, said events like this have a way of strengthening and nourishing the faith of the Catholic community. They get this great gift of peace, its a confirmation, an affirmation of their faith.”
The evidence for this projection is hard to discern, when one would assume that the oddity of the event and the relic itself, the common curiosity including the media attention would be a safer assumption of what was going on.
Sponsored by a combination of the Canadian Jesuit province, the Archdiocese of Ottawa and an Opus Dei style Catholic Youth Evangelization organization, the tour seems a throwback to Marian devotion pilgrimages of the 1950s, which might be recalled as pre-Vatican II forms of Catholic piety.
RIGHT WING AGENDA
One has to wonder whose agenda is being served locally and who is really in charge of the pastoral program of the Diocese of Victoria, the First Nations-dedicated Ordinary, or his opus dei-oriented second in command.
The visit of the ‘sacred relic’ fits right into the overall agenda of a church lost and looking for its identity in all the wrong places and wrong directions. The global context and struggle of Roman Catholicism under the current progressive pope is to be noted.
It is more than clear that the right-wing traditionalist hierarchy have decided to wait out the Vatican II renewal direction of Pope Francis. They have retrenched against him. Seventy per cent are waiting him out. 10 per cent are enthusiastically behind his program of progressive renewal while 20 per cent are directly opposing it, according to polls done by Catholic media communication firms.
The toxic atmosphere at the cathedral generally, the ‘pastoral; style of the pastor there, the assumption that the immigrant Asian ethnic make-up of the burgeoning congregation will last anything more than one generation at best all seem a tolling bell at last. Until adult education, social justice and prophetic mature ministry regain their proper priority in a context of active ecumenism and multifaith reality, the leadership is merely timeservers afraid to grow themselves in their spirituality and moral development.