It means that our belief in Jesus Christ has no roots. It is a convenient badge we use on Sundays when we dress up and are given places of honour in the community. It means that the desire to belong to a group, where we give each other mutual support, is stronger than our desire to really know what the group stands for. It is a scandal that in a country where there are so many Christians there is so little compassion.
The Vatican Council of the Church in the 1960s produced hundreds of thousands of words in its long and often inspiring documents. But there are just three little words that I always come back to: “only through them.” The words come in #33 of the document on the Church and the full context is, “lay people are called in a special way to make the Church present and operative in those places and circumstances where only through them can she become the salt of the earth.” When we think of the church we often think of the ministers and pastors as the key people, the shepherds, and all the rest are the sheep, who don’t know their left hand from their right. They have to be guided in everything. This is simple nonsense.
It is the people, the ordinary “lay” people, who are at the heart of all the enterprises that go to make society function. They are the farmers and industrialists, the bankers and the entrepreneurs, the musicians and the journalists, the police and the politicians. If they don’t “get it right” day in, day out, year in, year out, there is simply no hope for humanity. It is “only through them” that a society can be built where all men and women can live a life of dignity and happiness. If they are out to make quick money, like the gold diggers in Nigeria in the news today, or to grab power, like those who manipulate elections among us, or to do any other thing that destroys rather than builds people, then we are in for catastrophic times. Our children and grandchildren are going to disown us as the Germans disowned the Nazis after the war or the South Africans disowned the proponents of apartheid after 1994. All creation has to be permeated with the gospel values. Otherwise we’ve had it.