Cardinal on 3 Hopes for Youth
Community, Dialogue, Search for Spirituality
LIVERPOOL, England, JUNE 13, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Here is
the address Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the
archbishop of Westminster, delivered June 4 at the
opening of the Big Hope Conference at the Cathedral of
Christ the King in Liverpool. The speech was titled,
“Integrity, Complexity and the Common Good.”
* * *
It is a pleasure to have been asked to address you at
the beginning of a remarkable international gathering
which is taking place in the European Capital of Culture
for 2008.
This takes place in one of the buildings that is not
only one of the best-known features of Liverpool’s
skyline but also an eloquent symbol of the faith of many
people who live in this part of Britain.
I cannot help recalling my first visit to Liverpool over
forty years ago, on the day this cathedral was opened in
the presence of the Pope’s delegate, Archbishop Heenan.
As the procession left the building, there were local
people cheering the papal delegate; and they cheered the
bishops; and behind the bishops were a group of priests,
one of whom was myself. I shall not forget how one of
the women looked at us and said to her friends, “Ah,
look at those poor priests; let’s given them a cheer as
well.” That strikes me as typical of the Liverpool
people who somehow manage to find humor in every
situation and always give their visitors a warm-hearted
welcome.
I also had to smile to myself when I discovered I was
being asked to speak at a festival called The Big Hope,
because -- as some of you will know -- the motto I took
when I became a bishop over 30 years ago is "Gaudium et
Spes," Latin words that mean Joy and Hope. These are the
first words of a document that was meant to weigh up how
Christians should live in the modern world. These words
exhort us to share the joys and hopes, as well as the
problems and challenges, of the whole human race. Today
I want to say something about the world in which our
young people live and I want to identify a few pointers
which will help them live lives of hope.
It is a fact that in our post-modern era everything is
mixed up and the relatively clear outlines of society
are complex and somewhat confused. The institutions
which only a generation ago inspired almost
unquestioning trust are now, perhaps properly, the
subject of scrutiny and suspicion. Look at any
contemporary institution and you will see that this is
so from Royalty to the Church, to Parliament, to the Law
to academic institutes. Old certainties are questioned
and frequently undermined. You remember Pilate saying
the famous words, Truth. What is truth? Truth, it is
said, in our modern world is no longer received and need
no longer be proved objectively because there is no such
thing as "objective." Your truth is yours, mine is mine.
You are the product of your language and culture just as
I am the product of mine. This is also true of many
people’s attitudes to religion.
I once went into a shop and looked at men’s toiletries!
I do assure you all I wanted was some toothpaste and
some shampoo! But I was amazed by the titles of some of
the toiletries, the ointments, and the language that is
used. You find such products as “transcendence” --
“vision” -- “grace” -- “salvation.” These are, of
course, all religious words but how extraordinary that
society would have taken the words of religion, which
lead to an inner life and an after life, and made them a
philosophy to achieve beauty and transcendence in this
life! Religion can often be seen à la carte -- in a
selective and individualistic way. A bit of Buddhism, a
bit of new age, a chapter from the New Testament and a
course in oriental meditation!
Yet it also seems to me that within this complex and
multi-faceted picture of our culture, that our young
people are remarkably generous and self-giving. I see
three basic pointers to hope among our young people --
the search for community, the need for dialogue and the
importance of a personal spirituality or interior life.
Firstly, there is the search for community. In Orthodox
monasteries at the end of the day, after Night Prayer,
the Abbot sits in his chair and, one by one, the monks
go up and kneel before him and he kisses each one on the
top of his head: a sign of acceptance, forgiveness and
love. It is within a community, of course most notably
the community of a family which is the building block of
any society, that everyone first feels accepted and
loved. It is the best place for profound human
flourishing. Our young people need the experience of
good community in order to thrive. We have to rediscover
our faith in the humanising experience of community and
our respect for the community as a place of healing.
A few years ago I was in Lourdes and went to visit a
community called The Cenacolo. It was an extraordinary
moving experience. It was a house of forty men, all of
whom had been drug addicts. Many of them had been on
drugs for years and had found that all efforts to get
them off the drug addiction had come to nothing. But
through the inspiration of a Sister Elvira, fifty of
these homes had been founded. They were communities
which relied totally on providence. There was a regular
life of prayer and of work. Each one was given a
guardian when they came to help them over the very
difficult times when they were tempted to leave and go
back to their addiction. Each, through the prayer,
through the community, through their service to each
other, had found not only that they were able to
overcome their addiction but also had found a peace and
meaning to their lives. In that community was a glimpse
of the Kingdom of God, which is not won without effort
and difficulty. It is like the pearl of great price
which, having been found, brings great joy. I remember
one of them saying to me, “We are taught to have a mind
to the person beside us in whatever we are doing,
whether it is making a meal, or painting a wall, or
working in the field. It moves us beyond our self to
look at the other.” And I think that is something of
what young people crave. They need to know that they are
loved, that someone is looking out for them. In
community they can discover a place of healing, of
forgiveness, and the opportunity of a fresh start.
The second “pointer” of hope for young people is the
opportunity for dialogue. If we are to live out the
search for real hope in pluralistic, democratic
societies, we need to recognize that not all people
share our views or even our deepest convictions. Some
people could be tempted to describe this as relativism
but that would not be correct. We can recognize people’s
differences without saying that our differences are
unimportant. This is precisely why we need to have space
in our societies for proper dialogue where nobody is
prevented from expressing his or her convictions simply
to conform to somebody’s idea of political correctness.
True dialogue respects everybody’s integrity. Genuinely
strong people have no fear of other people’s views, so
they feel able to allow people of radically different
convictions to speak freely. They are happy to hear what
others have to say.
Not like the story of the man giving a lecture in an
auditorium where there was trouble with the sound
system. He asked his audience “Can you all hear me.” A
man put his hand up, “I can hear you but I’m very happy
to change places with someone who can’t.”
When I speak about dialogue, I am not only thinking of
dialogue between people of religion, but dialogue with
people who do not believe or express any need for
religion. For out of dialogue emerges a commitment to
the common good. That common good by far transcends our
private goals. I suppose my hope for tomorrow’s leaders,
among whom are many of you today, is that you and others
will be people of courage and compassion; people who can
combine a passion for truth with the ability to see
beyond ideas to the men, women and children who express
them. I hope that you will be people who will let the
clarity of reason be tempered by the wisdom of their
hearts. This means a need, not only to express our
views, but to listen and to be humble and to recognize
that, as the poet John Donne put it:
“On a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands;
And he that will reach her, about must, and about must
go.”
My last pointer to hope for our young people is the need
for a personal spiritual life -- a life of interiority.
The first words of the Rule of St. Benedict are,
“Listen, my son.” It is not easy for young men and
women, in a world bombarded by noise and rapidly
changing pictures, to be able to be silent. We have all
heard of “information overload” and probably experienced
it frequently. To stay sane we need to be able to decide
what is worth ignoring and what is valuable. So silence
is a discipline. It is not easy to learn but one which
can help in the discernment of sense and non-sense, good
and bad, what is peripheral and what is genuine. Four
hundred years ago, Blaise Paschal pointed out, “all our
problems come from the fact that we cannot cope with
quiet and inactivity, even though we often complain that
we have too much to do.”
I was very moved some time ago by a visit from the
Archbishop of Prague, a certain Cardinal Vlk, who shared
with me something of his experience of aloneness and
silence curing the Communist occupation of his country.
He was persecuted as a priest by the authorities and
thrown out of his parish. He was told by the authorities
he could not practice his faith and had to make his own
way in the world. He became a window cleaner and worked
for ten years in the City of Prague. One day he was
cleaning windows on one of Prague’s busy streets and he
could hear German tourists below him window-shopping and
wondering what they were going to buy. He began to think
to himself, “No one knows who I am. No one knows I’m a
priest. No one cares about the Gospel that I try to
live.” And then he went on to say, very beautifully: “It
struck me very deeply, a voice within. On the cross God
is present but hidden, and if Jesus could live and die
in this way, then so could I.” It seemed to me that his
silence, his pain, taught him a very deep wisdom and
several years later the Berlin Wall fell and he was made
Cardinal Archbishop of Prague.
So, in summing up three "hopes" for young people today,
I do assure you that I realize there will be others but
I do think that the experience of community, dialogue
with other people and a personal spiritual life are
quite crucial to human flourishing.
Finally, we should never, never forget that within all
these hopes there is a greater one. Pope Benedict
recently put it this way: We need the greater and lesser
hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not
enough without the great Hope, which must surpass
everything else. This great hope can only be God Who
encompasses the whole of reality and Who can bestow upon
us and what we by ourselves cannot attain. The fact that
it comes to us as gift is actually part of hope.
I came across an echo of this in a contemporary modern
author recently. In his novel Life After God, the
Canadian author, Douglas Coupland writes:
“Now -- here is my secret; I tell it to you with an
openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve
again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you
hear these words. My secret is that I need God -- that I
am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to
help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of
giving; to help me to be kind as I no longer seem
capable of kindness; to help me love as I seem beyond
being able to love.”
It is a privilege and a pleasure to express these few
words in this great city of Liverpool, the City of
Culture for 2008, and at this Congress so aptly
entitled, The Big Hope.
Thank you
