Cardinal concerns: Four decades after Aggiornamento, where are we heading as Church?

I caught up with Cardinal Soter Fernandez one morning a couple of weeks ago. As the taxi pulled up to a halt, the cardinal was at the entrance and immediately exchanged pleasantries with the driver, adding a very human pastoral touch.

Jan 19, 2018

By Anil Netto
I caught up with Cardinal Soter Fernandez one morning a couple of weeks ago. As the taxi pulled up to a halt, the cardinal was at the entrance and immediately exchanged pleasantries with the driver, adding a very human pastoral touch.

We adjourned to his simple study-cum-living room after some light breakfast. The somewhat spartan living arrangements are a far cry from some of the palaces and mansions of the “Princes of the Church” in other places and eras.

So it seemed altogether fitting that one of the concerns he raised was, have we become a Church for the middle to upper classes?

As I had my own thoughts on this, I asked him what he meant by this.

“Look at who we are catering for, the programmes we are organising — who are they for?” he said. “We must try and reach out” to those who are suffering in society.

For the cardinal, the Bishop of Rome’s metaphor of the Church as a field hospital is all too real. As we chatted, he recalled his own experience in Sungai Petani, how he was thrust into working life, barely into his teens.

As it turned out, the young Soter followed his father’s footsteps taking up a job as hospital dresser in the 1950s, earning 250 Malayan dollars a month. In that capacity, the young Soter found himself exposed to the wounds of horrific accident and burn cases — several of which were enough to make a grown man faint (as a colonial assistant plantation manager who witnessed the injuries in one of the cases found out to his embarrassment).

Today, the Church has to deal with scars and injuries, whether emotional and physical, of the walking wounded. The metaphor of the Church as a field hospital clearly resonates with the cardinal, who has a long history of highlighting the social teaching of the Church and its call to promote authentic human development.

“What do you think of the direction of the Church today?” the cardinal asks me, in a question that he probably would like the whole of the Malaysian Church to think about. He listens intently as I give him my views about how the Church, both global and local, grew more inward looking since the 1990s, losing the dynamism and excitement generated by the Aggiornamento of 1976.

For the cardinal, one of the highlights of the Malaysian Church’s journey since the watershed Second Vatican Council was the Aggiornamanto in 1976.

At the Second Vatican Counil in 1962-1965, two rival buzz words were floated around: Aggiornamento and its rival force, ressourcement. The former meant modernisation, a bringing up to date of the Church and looking forward to the future and engaging with dialogue with the outside world. The latter was a countervailing force, an attempt to focus on a return to earlier sources, traditions and symbols of the early Church.

Clearly, at the Council the overriding concern was aggiornamento — moving forward, updating the Church and engaging with the world.

For the cardinal, the Aggiornamento was a high point for the Church. “For one month, the churches throughout Malaysia were without a priest, he recalls, as the Malaysian bishops and priests, engaged in prayer, study and reflection to discern how to move forward in the spirit of renewal unleashed at the Second Vatican Council.

Out of this came the Christ-centred communities or Basic Ecclesial Community groups and four related needs for the Church to focus on: unity among clergy, religious and laity; formation; dialogue with Christians and non-Christians; and integral human development of the poor.

The local Church discerned that its mission had to include reaching out to the poor and this was an essential part of promoting integral human development and justice.

But the dynamic tension between the two thrusts — forward-looking and a more conservative trend — within the Church continues to this day. Much of the energy of Second Vatican Council’s Aggiornamento seemed to have dissipated as the rival tension within the Church tried to rein in the reforms unleashed by the Council.

And so, until Francis took over as Bishop of Rome, the Church seemed to gradually lose some of the momentum forward generated by the Council. More and more, it once again grew more inward looking, more concerned with rituals and form.

For instance, after Vatican II many of our churches took on a simpler more spartan look, but today there seems to be a return to the ornate and elaborate. As the cardinal notes, statues that once disappeared are now making a comeback.

This outward focus on symbols seems to suggest something deeper at work. The traditional symbols express a more inward-looking Church of the ressourcement which appears to be stemming the Aggiornamento call to engage with the outside world and reach out to the downtrodden and the marginalised.

No wonder the Bishop of Rome now hopes the Church will live up to the calling of the Second Vatican Council in reaching out to act as a field hospital, to nurse the wounds of people suffering in many different ways.

The turn towards a narrow inward-looking religiosity means today many Catholics are more concerned about feast days and devotions. “We have become Devotees not Disciples!” laments the 86-year-old cardinal in exasperation, with some Christians even being reduced to parasites, he says — sucking in the energy without contributing to the growth of the Church.

Cardinal Soter’s mission these days, among other things, is to urge people to reflect on Francis’ Joy of the Gospel. He highlights verse 33 in particular:

“Pastoral ministry in a missionary key seeks to abandon the complacent attitude that says: ‘We have always done it this way.’ I invite everyone to be bold and creative in this task of rethinking the goals, structures, style and methods of evangelisation in their respective communities….”

In short, the Malaysian Church cannot harken back to an era long gone, and be contented with doing things the way it always has been done.

Today, there are new challenges in the outside world — climate changes, refugees and migration, the struggles of the working class, environmental collapse, war and religious extremism — that demand our attention. As the Aggiornamento in Malayisa hoped, we cannot be passive observers but we must be active participants.

Inspired by the Spirit, we have to rise to the challenge as real disciples of the Good News.

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