Bishop's Pentecost Letter 2003

Dear Friends,

In my Easter letter to you I referred to Pentecost as our coming of age as followers of Christ.

The disciples, who had been following Jesus around for some three years, learning from him, being changed by him, had come to the point where they could take up his work. Like fledgling birds, they had already been pushed out of the nest and been sent out in pairs to preach the Good News; now they were expected to fly.

They were nervous enough when Jesus first sent them out; this could have seemed far worse. They could have felt so alone, and it must have been terribly daunting to be called on to take up a mission in which Jesus himself had appeared to fail.

And yet, when we read the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we are struck by the confidence with which they now spoke, struck by their deftness of touch. If they were daunted by their mission, they rose to the challenge magnificently and the text makes it clear that this change in them was due to the coming of the Holy Spirit.

What did the Holy Spirit do for them or do in them? Well, first off, it did not turn them into magicians or into gurus; they remained "uneducated and ordinary men" (Acts 4:13). All that they did was to preach the fact of Jesus resurrected from the dead and the Good News that Jesus himself had preached

ALL! These few words had the power to make sense of the whole of existence, power to free everyone who heard them from the sins of their past, power to unlock a future of unimaginable depth and beauty. What the Holy Spirit did for the Apostles was to give them that depth of understanding of the fullness of Christ's message which enabled them to preach it with simplicity and to preserve them against the temptation to modify it to fit the delusions that pass for wisdom in the world.

What had seemed failure in worldly terms was now revealed as triumphant victory over all that diminishes and demeans the human spirit.

It is that confidence in the efficacy of fidelity to the Word that we must recapture. It is so easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the Church as our Church, rather than Christ's. It is so easy to define what we are about in terms of preserving what we have built - whether we mean by that buildings or institutions or initiatives or programmes. I am not saying that nothing must ever be preserved, but it must always be as a result of discerning what God's will is today and not as an automatic assumption.

If we insist on defining the Church in worldly terms, then our perception of what we are about is inevitably destined to be rooted in failure: the shortage of vocations to the priesthood, declining Mass attendance, the absence of young people from our congregations, the perpetual drain on our resources of maintaining buildings that are rarely, if ever, used. And the same is true if we define ourselves in worldly terms. We will fail, if we insist in trying to do things our way and if we insist in imposing our agenda rather than Christ's on the Church.

It takes confidence rooted in faith to believe that, with God, we can do anything. None of us is so old, or so infirm, or so tired, that our lives cannot still be turned upside down, that we cannot still work wonders with and for God. I am totally convinced that all our diocese needs is the confidence to let go and follow the Lord. ALL!

We have a wonderful example of this in the present Holy Father. In ill health and at an age when his contemporaries have long since retired, he continues to carry the full burden of the Church; a thousand million of us depend on that one man. He is a fantastic inspiration to all of us who are getting older.

But he is not just a witness to the virtues of soldiering doggedly on. His ministry remains ever-fresh; he is continually and visibly growing in the Lord. Reflect on the developments: the traveller who has taken the pope into all comers of the world; his incredible accumulation of languages, which demonstrates the true charism of tongues; his building bridges of prayer with other Faiths; his reaching out to young people.

And still the changes come. Most recently we have seen him apologising, and seeking reconciliation, on behalf of the whole Church for all she has done wrong throughout the centuries. Note that he never says, "We both got things wrong; we'll apologise to you, if you apologise to us." His apology is absolute and unconditional- and quite magnificent.

Like most things that are sublime, his example is quite simple. It is not a matter of grand designs planned to solve all of the world's ills; instead it is ' the simple application of the love of Christ to all that he encounters.

We can all imitate him in this - and imagine what a transformed world we would live in if all of us did. We are told that we must "not be conformed to the world" (Romans 12:2), but that does not mean that we can ignore the world. God loved the world so much that He sent His only Son to die for us, all of us. Our relationship with the world must not be: "Why should I be concerned?", but “How can I help?”

This is what we are trying to achieve in my visitations to the whole of a deanery at a time. These have enabled us to start to renew our contact with the wider community - politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, traders, fanners, other Churches and other Faiths. Our message is clear: We are here; we want to share what we have with you. I am very pleased with the progress we have made so far, but we must not delude ourselves that we are at anything other than the beginning of a very long process.

It will take time for others to take us seriously, for them to believe that we really do have something to offer, and for them to believe that there are no strings' attached - that our motivation is not a desire to make ourselves 'important' or to be 'successful' in terms of Mass attendance or converts or anything else, but comes out of pure love for them.

And it will take time for us to change so that the whole of our effort - for all of us - is devoted, not to the preserving of what we have built, but to filling the world around us with the love of Christ. That, after all, is why the Holy Spirit was sent to live within us.

May God bless you all.

Patrick O'Donoghue, Bishop of Lancaster

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