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The Fatherhood of God and Man Since the mission to distribute the Millennium Manifesto, a pamphlet written by Fr. Alphonsus Maria Duran, MJ, was started last year, the message has been making waves and catching interest, but not just from Catholics, from Anglicans as well. When Petro S., MJ and Gregory S., MJ were distributing the Manifesto in the center of London they met an Anglican priest who was very interested in the message of the Millennium Manifesto. While they were in England he invited the members to a lunch with the local Anglican priests of the “Anglo-Catholic” movement in Brighton as well as the local Catholic parish priest of Brighton. He has distributed the Manifesto among his parishioners. Fr. Simon Heans is the assistant curate of St. Martin’s church in Brighton. This article he wrote is inspired by the message of the Millennium Manifesto. In James Wood’s novel The Book Against God, the marriage of the central character, an atheist but God-obsessed philosopher called Thomas Bunting, falls apart because he deceives his wife and denies her the chance to conceive a child. ‘What right do I have to bring life into the world?’ asks Bunting. ‘To create a person who at some stage in his life might wish he were dead? Who might complain to me – his father – that he had never asked to be born?’ George Weigel’s excellent biography of Pope John Paul is called Witness to Hope. He explains that this title comes from the Holy Father’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly. In that speech he defined hope beginning with what it is not: Hope is not empty optimism springing from a naïve confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past. Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in the inner sanctuary of conscience where “man is alone with God” and thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the Creator. The definition of hope rejected by the Holy Father is the one associated with the idea of progress. It is the one indispensable idea of democratic politics. Where would our politicians get their votes from if they were banned from making promises? The Brave New World, despite Huxley’s wise satire, is the stock in trade of the political rhetoric of both left and right. But voter apathy in the Western World – the majority choose not to exercise their franchise (so where does that leave ‘majority rule’, the basis of representative government?) – shows that the public have rumbled the politicians’ game. They find no hope in politics, recognizing the hope it purports to offer as, precisely, ‘empty optimism’. Of course Pope John Paul was familiar with the cynicism bred by the collapse of political belief from his experience of a Poland under a corrupt and tyrannical regime. He is familiar with Marxism – the secular creed of hope – from personal experience. In Communist Poland he witnessed to the real source of hope – hope in God. However, in the West – and that now includes the former Communist East – we are faced not so much with an alternative doctrine of hope (the secular idea of progress) as an absence of hope altogether. Thomas Bunting in James Wood’s novel believes that life is poised over an abyss. Therefore bringing a new life into the world is to court disaster. He might encounter the void and “wish he were dead”. Such is the reasoning about procreation of a secular society which believes itself to be ‘alone amid the enigmas of existence’. And here we come to the root of the modern birth rate crisis which the Millennium Manifesto so appositely addresses. It is an existential crisis for modernity (and its fashionable successor post-modernity) means that man believes himself to be alone rather than ‘surrounded by the love of the Creator’. It is hardly surprising that procreation, the most fundamental way in which man, male and female, participate in the love of the Creator is regarded with such fear and suspicion, an activity to be policed by chemical and other means. And we all know that this police state has its death camps – the abortuaries – as surely as any other. In James Wood’s novel, the character of Bunting is contrasted with that of his father, an Anglican priest. He tells his son that it was his belief in the fatherhood of God that had given him the confidence for paternity. Remember that in Wood’s novel it is Bunting, the male character who does not want children. A world without God is a world without fathers – that is the moral of Wood’s novel encapsulated in the figure of the atheist philosopher Bunting. The two go together – atheism and the rejection of fertility, contraceptive practice, are, as it were, bedfellows. No wonder George Weigel considers the Holy Father’s ‘theology of the body’ to be his most important contribution to the evangelization of the modern world. And perhaps that is why members of Miles Jesu hand out the Millennium Manifesto rather than conventionally religious literature! |