2 thoughts on “Place: Pilgrim People UC New Farm Qld”

1. Michael Furtado March 4, 2024 at 12:47 pm

   How lovely and heartwarming! I belong to a similar Church from a rather more complex historical tradition. While in my very early youth I was sometimes frustrated by its trappings, it is still very much my faith ‘family’ and I feel at home in it. Recently one of our pastors, the eminent Jesuit priest, Frank Brennan, was a panelist on ABC RN’s Sunday program, ‘God Forbid’. Presented by James Carleton, it examined the tradition of relics, which, once upon a time, played a big role in Catholic piety but which, since Vatican II, is a topic that has been down-played. As a rebel, and in some ways like my father who excelled at the art of airy persiflage, I remember him relating a hilarious account of the exposition of St Francis Xavier’s body in the Bom Jesu (Good Jesus) basilica in Old Goa, sometime in his youth in the early 1950s. When the exposition was announced, thousands of pious ‘Holy Rollers’ like our family members, would travel to Golden Goa to kiss the feet of this long deceased C16th Jesuit saint, revered around the world and called the apostle of India. Papa, eloquent as ever and bored out of his wits had to explain why, after Vatican II, this foot-kissing practice was stopped. Here’s his account as I remember it. The Cardinal Patriarch of Goa presided over the events leading to the breaking of the seal on the elaborate ormulu Portuguese sarcophagus. There he sat with his mitre on his head and praying devoutly yet with an eagle eye on a very long queue of mendicants, Goa being in India and so most of the most devout Christian inhabitants of which were uneducated and reduced to circumstances of great poverty, processing their way to grab the opportunity of a miracle-invoking kiss of St Francis’ foot. One enterprising old crone, alert to the fact that making away surreptitiously with part of the foot would be a prize worth acquiring, bit the big toe off the foot but the Patriarch noticed the challenge that tearing away at 400-yr old calcified bone constituted for her ancient jaws. In a trice he executed an ecclesiastical grand jete from one end of the immense sanctuary to the other, extended his golden crozier and gently tapped it against the back of the miscreant’s neck, while an enterprising acolyte extended a velvet cushion, itself encased in a platinum box, which was promptly shut and sent off to Rome for veneration. This story, whether fabricated or not, provided the occasion for the release of much hilarity around our sumptuous and very Catholic dinner-table and, in due time, my parents travelled across India’s dusty plains from Calcutta to Goa, to join in their veneration of that historic occasion celebrating the life of a saint who did more than most to evangelise Asia. Now, if James Carleton had asked me, instead of the much more erudite and careful Frank Brennan, about this, that is the story I would have told, replete with humour as well as paradox, to explain why relics once constituted, but almost never now do, the bedrock of Roman Catholicism! Enjoy & Cheers, All.
2. Michael Furtado March 5, 2024 at 3:24 pm

   I’ve had two personal responses to this post, the first seeking explanation for how it connects with the Merthyr Rd invite prior to it, and the second wondering if I was being critical of Frank Brennan. Let me answer them, please. I love the Merthyr Rd UC invitation. It bears all the hallmarks of a progressive Christian frame of mind: welcoming, theologically up-to-date, informative & with a strong emphasis on the liturgy, which is the ‘language’ of Christian worship. It tells me that the persons who have designed it are very conscious of the world in which we live, i.e. the modern world and the templates that frame an approach to religious practice in the 21st Century. While I appreciate that my own Catholic Church and the Anglican Church, from which many of the English-speaking Reformed Churches sprang (and from which the Uniting church is formed), have particular rituals & traditions, especially in regard to the celebration of the Eucharist that are indispensable to their historical identity, authenticity & character, my seemingly idle chatter about relics was meant to give a spur to the reformist tradition in all three Churches which, for instance, dispensed with reliquaries and the like that may have had enormous significance in an earlier age, but don’t anymore in the modern world. A key reformist document of Vatican II for my side of the Christian family was ‘The Church in the Modern World’ (or ‘Gaudium et Spes’, 1965), which set the pace sixty years ago for a dynamic, given momentum to and immensely revitalised by Pope Francis in recent times, which has brought in ‘synodality’ which mode of Church governance our Reformed Sisters & Brothers have been doing now for several centuries. Unsurprisingly, this is brand new stuff for many Catholics, brought up in the tradition of ‘pay & pray’. It struck me then as quaint that Radio National’s James Carleton should resurrect a topic (on relics) that has no relevance for contemporary Christians (although, of course, as a member of the Jewish faith he may not realise this), when the significance of Frank Brennan and his Jesuit colleagues’ return to Brisbane is regarded by our Catholic archdiocese as a signal for dramatic change to a new way of ‘doing’ church, not just logistically in terms of restructuring parishes, but also profoundly theologically, setting aside the hitherto dominant discourse of canonism and the magisterium (or teaching authority) for another privileging pastoral theology in terms of what Pope Francis, invoking a scriptural tradition, calls ‘widening the tent.’ This where I see Frank Brennan, Greg Jacobs & Paul Fyfe, our three Jesuits, as located at the forefront of a complex paradigmatic shift in Catholic ecclesiology that, paradoxically, hopes to bury at long last a culture of clericalism relating to which relics once played an important role. Let me show how this has already been done. The German Church has led the way so far on synodality, which in many respects it has been quietly practising for several decades. It was, after all, as far back as 1968 that, attending Mass at Cologne Cathedral, that I observed the Cardinal Archbishop actually halting the Consecration, that most sacred part of the Mass, to fish around the altar and produce what looked like a large relic. Mystified, I asked Sr Hedwig, a Benedictine theologian who was showing me around, about what was happening. Sniffing disapprovingly, she said: “It is ze thigh bone of St Peter! At ze last count zere were 68 of them!” And that was just after Vatican II! That Frank Brennan’s expertise and time is taken up in explaining the significance of relics at this time would appear to constitute a conspicuous waste of his considerable gifts and talents. May he and his Jesuit colleagues be ‘unleashed’, as it were, to serve a Church that has been shackled to one way of doing things over very many years!