Our vision for the Catholic Voices Academy
23 September 2011 - University of Notre Dame in London
by Austen Ivereigh
The Catholic Voices Academy, which we’re proudly launching tonight, honoured and encouraged by the presence of His Grace, the Archbishop of Westminster, takes seriously two of Pope Benedict XVI’s most emphatic invitations on his historic visit last year.
The first was made at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow, when he spoke of evangelising our culture at a time when there is an active movement to exclude religious belief from public discourse or to privatise it in the name of equality and freedom. “I appeal in particular to you, the lay faithful,” he said, “to put the case for the promotion of faith’s wisdom and vision in the public forum”; and he told us not to be afraid to take up this service. In that same passage he also spoke of the need for “clear voices” which “propose our right to live, not in a jungle of self-destructive and arbitrary freedoms but in a society which works for the true welfare of its citizens and offers them guidance and protection in the face of their weakness and fragility”.
Perhaps because of use of the word “voices”, it seemed to us at the time - I think we were in the press centre in Parliament Square - that this was an invitation being addressed very directly to us, one that suggested a path to follow after his historic visit. It suggested that Catholic Voices could be not just about equipping Catholics to put their case effectively in the fast-flowing environment of 24-hour news, but about helping Catholics to develop a new public language, one that could bring the depth of insight of church teaching to bear on contemporary questions.
The other moment when the idea for the Academy took root was next day, when I was in Westminster Hall to hear Pope Benedict address parliamentarians and civic leaders. Something happened that day in that great place which is hard to name; it was as if the message that the Pope had come to bring - a call for reason and the public square to open to faith - actually occurred, even before he arrived. It was not just that the myth of the British nation-state as Protestant had died: after all, here was the entire British political establishment sitting waiting patiently to be addressed by the Successor of St Peter. It was also that a new kind of a space in British public life had been opened up. It was fleeting, it was a glimpse. And you might say we’ve seen no more of it since then. But I came away convinced that it was real, and that, as a Church, we must help make it so.
In that Westminster Hall speech, just as in Pope Benedict’s thrilling address to the Bundestag yesterday, was the genesis of what I want to dare to call a new Christian humanism – one that breathes the insights of our faith into the national public conversation, to bolster what the Pope called “the ethical foundations of civil discourse”. In what is the most widely-quoted part of his Westminster Hall speech, Pope Benedict described the benefits of political thought and faith entering into dialogue – benefits not just for reason, but also for faith. “This is why”, he said, “I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilisation”.[1]
This fruitful exchange – which is the direct opposite, of course, of the secularist ambition of excluding or privatising faith as an individual matter of personal belief – is the best way, the only way, of overcoming the temptations to sectarianism and fundamentalism, whether of religion or of political creeds; and it is the foundation of authentic pluralism. Only when we as Catholics have developed a clearer understanding of what is necessary for true pluralism - namely, religious freedom, the foundation of all our other freedoms - can we make a compelling, universal case against gay marriage, assisted suicide, or whatever the news issue of the moment is that brings us into the studios. For at stake in these questions is not what we, as Catholics, believe, as one group among many in society; it is about what is good for the whole of society – the common good. We, as Catholics, need to be part of that discernment of that common good.
Last year, when the Pope left us those precious, challenging words in Westminster Hall, they seemed prophetic. Now, a year later, they have taken on a sudden urgency, especially in the wake of the eruption of disorder in early August, which lifted in the veil on chronic unemployment, alienation, family breakdown and criminality among vast numbers of people who are poor, purposeless, and angry, while the rest of Britain has enjoyed unprecedented wealth. The riots, coming in the wake of scandals in banking, journalism and politics, have led to call for a way of “re-moralising” society with values and virtues. What we are living through is, in essence, a crisis of the liberal project. Britain’s liberalism has long shown itself capable of managing and reconciling different interests. But the respect for autonomy which is the cornerstone of this philosophy is unable to meet the very different challenge of this new time, which is essentially cultural: it is the culture on which politics, economics and society depend which has proved deficient. The liberal project, so successful in expanding the freedom of some, often at the expense of many, has reached its limits; it cannot generate the virtues and values necessary for a healthy democracy and economy. A society will break down when progress is defined as the endless expansion of opportunities for the exercise of personal autonomy.
Who can generate sobriety, frugality, and self-restraint? Who can muster the energies for a common purpose of social regeneration? Culture needs scrutiny according to ethical criteria which are not of its own making, criteria based on a coherent philosophical overview, on universal tenets accessible to reason, that can supply its own answers to questions of human motivation and human destiny. Answering such questions has always been the business of the major faiths. The renewal of culture has to come from civil society, not the market and the state; and it was for us as Catholics among other faiths to be allowed to do so that the Pope appealed in Westminster Hall. It was a twin appeal: to the public square to open up, and to Catholics to take their place in the national conversation.
We have, after all, great gifts to share: the tremendous body of Catholic social teaching, culminating in Caritas in Veritate, and the witness and experience, here in England and Wales, of the Catholic charitable sector – especially through Caritas and Cafod; we have the Pope’s own very deep thinking about religious freedom, laid out in his historic speech in January this year; and, of course, the many teaching documents of our bishops –the tradition and witness of our Church, the depth of its teaching, and her institutional presence among all races and classes, which makes her the most significant actor in civil society across the world today.
As Catholics, we do not “possess” this tradition. Andrew Brown, editor of the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ site, who is here tonight, is a Protestant atheist; he gave many reasons in a recent piece entitled ‘Why I am not a Catholic’. But he said that “Catholic social teaching, and the attempts to produce an economics centred around the needs of humans, rather than of money, look like the only thought-through alternatives to unbridled market capitalism – and certainly the only ones which have a chance of widespread popular support.” It is striking, in fact, that among the most influential channels of Catholic Social Teaching in Britain today are non-Catholics. The Government’s Big Society idea owes much to Phillip Blond’s immersion in Catholic social teaching via Professor John Milbank, just as some of the most interesting new thinking in the Labour Party is the result of Lord Glasman’s own insights from that same tradition. We have all learned much from London Citizens and CitizensUK, under the leadership of Neil Jameson, also here tonight, which puts into practice the politics of civil society called for in Catholic social teaching, and in which Catholic schools and congregations here in London play a key role. Phillip Blond is Anglican; Lord Glasman, Jewish; Neil Jameson, a Quaker. So while the Catholic Voices Academy will be a place for unwrapping the Church’s gifts and insights, we will find that some of the best teachers of those insights will be from other traditions.
Providentially, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales are celebrating the papal visit anniversary by launching a five-year plan to help Catholics be more courageous and confident in expressing their faith. They want us to grasp that at the root of what they call a “truly human, just and free society” is the Gospel and the core moral truths about human beings – truths that respect what Pope Benedict in his address to the German Parliament yesterday described as a “human ecology”. The bishops invite us, a year on from his visit, to be inspired by Pope Benedict’s model of confidence combined with gentleness; and we’d like to think that was an excellent description of the Catholic Voices approach. In both of the books being launched tonight you will find our “10 Catholic Voices principles of good communication”, at the end of which we note how the Pope never falls into the role of persecuted victim. We write: “What did he do, after landing in Scotland? He praised Britain, gave thanks for the hospitality, kissed babies and melted hearts. He had strong words – scandalous words – for his listeners; but they were words of reason, compassion and conviction. He did not command, but appealed. He showed compassion, empathy and real love. And because he had first witnessed, the British people were ready to listen. That was his victory, and it is the only kind we should seek.”
What we developed last year in Catholic Voices– although we didn’t perhaps realise it at first -- was an approach, a method, a language for putting the Church’s case, one that was appropriate to the media and the public square, a language that was universal and accessible, confident but not aggressive. We did this, as you’ll see from the books we’re publishing tonight, by developing techniques and habits of preparation, tips and principles such as you’ll read about, and a certain mindset. These emerged from the Briefings we held every two weeks over the six months before Pope Benedict arrived; the Catholic Voices who did all those interviews last year, and continue to, say it was the thinking-through time in those sessions which gave them the chance to make their case effectively – by understanding the values behind the criticism, by understanding the need quickly to undermine the preconceptions of the Catholic position imposed by the existing frame. Our “white book”[2] is the fruit of all those sessions – taking each “neuralgic issue” and working it through, so that, we hope, ordinary Catholics need no longer pray for the ground to swallow them up when a dinner party freezes over.
The Academy seeks to continue, and widen, that thinking-through space, with the aim not just of preparing for interviews, but with the broader ambition of equipping lay Catholics to evangelise our culture. We might think of the Academy as the means by which we translate the wisdom and insights of our Church into the language of the public square. So our links with church organisations and many experts and intellectuals will, of course, be vital. We are delighted to be assisting the Margaret Beaufort Institute in Cambridge, for example, in the lectures they are putting together on Catholic social teaching next year. It has been great to be part of the meetings organised by Caritas and the bishops on deepening social engagement. The Catholic Voices book is, of course, fruit of so many people who helped us last year and I hope will support the Academy by continuing to make available to us their skills in distilling and applying the gifts of our tradition to contemporary questions.
The Academy is being launched at an exciting and propitious time - a time of crisis in the liberal project, a time of a national search for values and virtues capable of revitalising civic life. It has happened before. As the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has been pointing out in many articles since August, this current time has great similarities to the early nineteenth century, an era of tremendous dislocation, grotesque inequality, social violence, egotism and greed – a high noon, as now, of liberal individualism. Yet the late nineteenth century saw a rapid growth in charities, schools, associations, political campaigns – most of it driven by faith. Within a single generation, crime rates came down, social order was restored, and politics was revitalised by great moral campaigns against slavery, child labour, and so on; what has been done before can be done again. The energy and vision then came from civil society; and the principal engine of civil society, then as now, is faith. The Pope calls us to take our place, in other words, just at the moment when history begs us to.
When we talk of the Academy developing a new ‘Christian humanism’, this is not an attempt to develop an ideology, still less any kind of political or parliamentary movement. Professor Vera Negri Zamagni, professor at Bologna and wife of Stefano Zamagni, one of the principal thinkers who contributed to Caritas in Veritate, has argued that European Catholics have spent too long focussed on the state and political parties. The same could be said of Catholics here. Zamagni says that Catholics need to come together to develop common ideas, rethinking from scratch the application of Catholic social teaching, and to form what she calls a “critical mass”, creating forums outside and across parties, and exerting pressure on politics from civil society – in other words, holding state and market to account to civil society.[3]
The first step in that direction, then, is the creation of a forum, a zone of friendship, as John Allen has kindly described[4] Catholic Voices, where Catholics of different tendencies - with others outside the Church who can articulate our own tradition sometimes better than we can - come together with the shared purpose of developing common responses to the challenges of our time. It is a space for bringing to bear the gifts of the Church on major contemporary questions. Over time, if it is fruitful, and it may take years, Catholics disappointed with what is currently on offer from our spent ideologies, whether of left and right – all variants of an exhausted liberalism – can look to the Academy, and the new Catholic humanism which has emerged from it, for inspiration, and say: “yes, this is what I believe”. I was looking for that, as a young Catholic, and did not see it around me – only abroad, or in history. Our contact with young Catholics through Catholic Voices suggests that they, too, are looking for it.
That set of beliefs and principles, that habit of thinking, we are calling “Catholic humanism”, because it is about criteria for all, for the common good, rather than merely a defence of a minority view. The term will remind some of you of the phrase “integral humanism” associated with Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier and others in 1940s France, and which would prove so influential on the creation of postwar Christian democracy.[5] But the term is not fixed; it may change; perhaps we should call it Christian humanism or spiritual humanism, or a specific Catholic contribution to the emergence of these. But for now, it is a useful shorthand for what we think could be a major long-term fruit of the Catholic Voices Academy.
This, then, is the vision. The practical questions of format and membership are not as clear; we want to leave room for the Holy Spirit to act. We have booked three meetings in the next few months – all here at Notre Dame. The first, on 13 October, will consider the topic: “How the Church can help mend broken Britain”. There will be a panel of speakers, who will speak for 10 minutes each; we will grill them; and we will deduce from this some ideas and principles, which will then be shared. Future Academy events may be lectures, or debates. Between now and Christmas, there will be no formal membership or fees to pay; we will supply the wine, and the venue - -which you’ll see downstairs. And by Christmas, we hope, we will have some clearer idea of how to organise these sessions; and how to give it some more permanent footing.
I want to give the last word to Pope Benedict, in his address yesterday to the German Parliament:
The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.
[1] Pope Benedict XVI, ‘Address to politicians, diplomats, academics and business leaders’, 17 September 2010.
[2] Austen Ivereigh & Kathleen Griffith, Catholic Voices: putting the case for the Church in an era of 24-hour news (Darton, Longman & Todd), available from Amazon and all good bookshops.
[3] Vera Negri Zamagni, ‘The political and economic impact of CST since 1891: Christian Democracy and Christian Labour Unions in Europe’, in Daniel K. Finn (ed.), The True Wealth of Nations: Catholic social thought and economic life (Oxford UP 2010) pp 109-110.
[4] John Allen, ‘Thoughts on post-tribal Catholicism’,
www.ncronline.org/blogs/all-things-catholic/thoughts-post-tribal-cathol... (15 April 2011)
[5] Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (1936).
catholicvoices.org.uk/monitor-blog/2011/09/academy-launch-austen-ivereig...