Chris Chatteris SJ's blog

A visible and practical legacy of Vatican II is the reinstated permanent diaconate. There were two reasons for this return to an ancient Church structure. The first was pastoral – to provide assistance to an overstretched clergy in the deacon’s traditional ministerial areas of charity and justice, and of Word and Sacrament. A second was theological – to make complete something which had been lost sight of in our modern era, namely the threefold hierarchy of bishop, priest and deacon.

Any university chaplain will tell you with what delight young people go about reinventing the wheel. In the same way, young religious were exhilarated after the Second Vatican Council: not only were change and even revolution in the air, they were also given the official sanction of the Church.

Anders Behring Breivik seems at first sight like a crazy freak of nature – a Norwegian terrorist. After all there hasn’t been a great deal of terrorism coming out of the Nordic nations in recent centuries. But on closer examination, Breivik looks a little more familiar. He has already been pigeon-holed by the press with the blond-haired and blue-eyed Timothy McVeigh.  Indeed the window-shattered government offices in Olso bore a haunting similarity to the gutted administration building which McVeigh bombed in Oklahoma, also with a fertilizer-based device. The far-right ideology of Breivik is also not so unfamiliar in a Western world in which right-wing parties are gathering momentum on an anti-immigration and particularly anti-Muslim political tide.

Vatican II famously addressed not just the Church but the whole world– believers and unbelievers alike. The document Gaudium et Spes boldly proclaimed that ‘the Council wishes to speak to all people in order to shed light on the mystery of humanity and to cooperate in finding the solution to the outstanding problems of our time’ (G&S 10). The Council envisaged as its partner in dialogue as ‘people of good will’ men and women with open minds and hearts and therefore open to dialogue.

Christian churches have recently been attacked, it is assumed by Muslim fundamentalists, in Alexandria in Egypt and in Jos in Nigeria.

Writing in the Korea Times, ‘visionary and plant communicator’ (I’m not kidding: that’s what he calls himself!) Roar Shepperd predicts a tough year ahead which will see ‘various natural disasters, more exposures of government and corporate wrong doings’. We may laugh at Mr Sheppard’s qualifications which seem like those of a New Age crystal-ball-gazer.

Christmas is coming and the parents are getting fit. They do this by traipsing around shopping malls in the long search for presents for their children, one of the many things that adults have to do during the frenetic pre-Christmas rush.  This time is so full of activity that, for adults, when Christmas finally comes, it often feels like a curious anti-climax.

(Last week Fr Rigobert reflected on the ‘soup kitchen’ and challenged us to go beyond this important work of mercy, to consider some of the issues of justice surrounding such works and the reasons why they are necessary. In this week’s reflection, he develops the theme further and considers more deeply the plight of refugees and migrants)

Each Monday evening, the Saint Vincent de Paul Association at Holy Trinity parish organizes the distribution of soup to a hundred people.   Each week it is the same ritual: Men in the majority with two or three women among them, stand in line; they are silent, disciplined, awaiting their turn to receive a piece of bread and a bowl of soup.

In his book Gobbledygook has Gotta Go, John O’Hayre gives a wonderful example of how self-important politicians can spout a lot of hot air.