(18 Nov 2009)
Fr Brendan McConvery, CSsR, is the author of ‘The Year of God’s Favour’ - Redemptorist Communications' latest publication. He speaks about Scripture, the Holy Land and his new book.
Q. What prompted you to write this book?
I was prompted to write this book because I know from talking to people, especially young people and their parents, that many of them find the readings at Mass hard to understand. It is probably true to say that as Catholics, we have neglected the Scriptures in our upbringing in the faith. Those of us who grew up in the North often envy Protestant Christians for their mastery of the Bible but for many of us, it is a foreign book. We have tended to put the emphasis on the ‘Real Presence’ of Our Lord in the Eucharist.
We have forgotten that at Sunday Mass we are offered two kinds of Bread – the Bread of the Sacrament and the Bread of the Word. If the Bread of the Word is to really become food for our journey through life, it needs to be well-chewed so that we can get the nourishment out of it. Of course, there have been great strides forward in bringing the bible to the people. Many Catholics are now regular readers of the Bible, go to bible study groups or prayer groups. I have spoken to groups like that up and down the country and it is a genuine pleasure to see how much they have come to love the scriptures.
For Catholics, Sunday Mass is the special, privileged time when we hear the Gospel read to us as a community. Yet there are many things that make it difficult for us to get to the ‘meat’ of the Word of God, when we simply hear it read ‘cold’ at Mass. It could be something as simple as the competing sounds in the church or the sometimes difficult language of the readings themselves.
I was invited to help Redemptorist Publications produce some resources for scripture study with a very ordinary audience in view. We started with How to Read the Bible: A Manual for Beginners published earlier this year. This book is a kind of follow up. Both are ‘home study guides’ for people who want to get more out of the scriptures but are not sure where to start. They can also be used in the home or by bible-study groups.
Both are very attractively produced and the credit for this goes to Fr David McNamara CSsR who has a superb artistic and design touch. David was my student first of all in St Clement’s College, Limerick where I taught for a couple of years before going on to do post-graduate studies in scripture, and I taught him again some years later as a student of theology in Dublin.
Q. What is so special about Luke?
What is so special about Luke? How much time do you have while I tell you! Luke is probably the most familiar Gospel to ordinary Catholics. It is Luke who tells us the story of the Annunciation to Our Lady, the Birth of Jesus and the Shepherds at Bethlehem, the parables of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan or the Rich Man and Lazarus. Each of the Gospel writers attempted to present a portrait of Christ. Luke has been called ‘the sweet singer of the mercy of God.’
He was also writing for a world audience that lived in a world that was not too unlike the world of today. It was a world of rich and poor. A great scholar of the Roman world called E P Dodds who taught at Queen’s University, Belfast, described it as ‘an age of anxiety.’ It was an age in which people were looking for salvation from a hostile and unjust world wherever they could find it. Luke wanted to offer them the Good News that Jesus was the Saviour of the world who brought salvation to all comers at no cost. Luke’s audience were mostly pagans who knew little about the Jewish faith in which Jesus and his first disciples grew up and so he had to make his portrait of Jesus attractive to them on their own terms. That remains the most attractive aspect of his Gospel.
Q. - How is our understanding of scripture changing in the light of new research and where is the emphasis these days?
Our understanding of scripture never stands still. I mentioned above how important it is to understand the social world in which Luke wrote his Gospel. We probably know that world much better now thanks to the discoveries of archaeology. Archaeology is a comparatively recent science. People sometimes think it is a search for buried treasure or to find evidence to ‘prove the bible right.’
Archaeology’s real contribution is to help us understand the social and cultural world of the past. In our case that is the world of Jesus and his disciples. For example, there has been a lot of work done over the past few years by archaeologists on a long-forgotten city called Sepphoris, about four or five miles from Jesus’ home town of Nazareth. It was a prosperous place. It had its own open air theatre. Even if Jesus had never been to it, it is unlikely that he could have grown up in Nazareth without hearing about what went on in the theatre a few miles over the hills so that when he comes to denounce people for ‘religious play acting’ he calls them ‘hypocrites’ which is a Greek word for actors!
It was also a socially complex world with large estates that hired workers by the day and paid them a pittance. That is the background for Jesus’ parable of the labourers in the vineyard where the unexpected good fortune of getting a full day’s pay for a few hours work becomes a symbol of salvation. Palestine in the time of Jesus was also a colonial state. Under the surface there was a great deal of unrest and injustice that often erupted into banditry.
In the Good Samaritan story, the man who was left for dead was probably the victim of such a band and the Samaritan was taking a risk in stopping to care for him along the road. That other curious parable of the Unjust Steward also reflects a social world where small farmers were up to their neck in debt to an absentee land-lord who allowed his manager to loan them oil or seed at exorbitant rates. When his sharp practise is discovered, he decides that the best thing he can do is to throw in his lot with the people he had tried to exploit.
Another very important aspect of New Testament study today is the emphasis it places on ‘Jesus the Jew.’ In the past, the Jewishness of Jesus and his family was often ignored. A number of things have helped us to redress the balance. First of all, the horror of the concentration camps with their programme to totally eradicate Jews made us very conscious of the part that centuries of Christian anti-Semitic talk had in creating the climate that made that possible. Secondly, we know more about Judaism in the time of Jesus thanks to the discovery of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. All the mysteries of the scrolls have not been solved yet, but they contribute much towards giving us a clearer picture of the varieties of Judaism that there were around in the time of Jesus.
Q. - You have travelled recently to the Holy Land. Ccan you give me some of your thoughts on that. What aspect brought home to you the linking between the historical, the incarnation of Christ and the everyday reality of life 2,000 years later?
Yes, I was in the Holy Land last October and I am leading another pilgrimage largely composed of our Maynooth students in the spring. Some one has described the Land as ‘the Fifth Gospel.’ Just looking at the landscape, seeing the reality of the desert and people’s utter dependence on water makes you read so many texts in a new way or walking around the Sea of Galilee makes the stories of the Gospel come alive.
It is also in many ways a tragic place. The Palestinians are suffering in their own land. It is important to stress here that many Israelis are committed to the struggle to have the rights of the Palestinian people recognised. One of my best sources for understanding the present situation is an Israeli web-site of a human rights organisation called B’tzelim – in Hebrew, that means ‘in the image’ and it quotes the creation story how – ‘in his image God created them, male and female [as well as Zionist and Palestinian] he created them.’
The situation of the native Palestinian Christians is particularly tragic. They belong to many different churches – Orthodox, Catholic, Maronite for example. They are caught between a very extreme form of Zionism that wants to create a land for Jews alone and Islamic fundamentalists who want an Islamic state ruled by Moslem law. Thanks to the nuns and brothers, most Palestinian Christians have received an excellent education. It makes it easier for them to emigrate to Europe or the United States.
The result is that in cities like Bethlehem or Nazareth where a generation ago Christians were about 75% of the population, they now number about 20% and that is falling rapidly. As Christians, we owe them solidarity not least through our prayers and support for them. It would be tragic if eventually the only Christians in the Holy Land were the foreigner religious who look after the Holy Places.
Q. - How long have you been a Redemptorist. Why did you join this order?
I joined the Redemptorists in 1964 at the age of 17. I was professed in 1965 and ordained in 1974. I joined the Redemptorists probably because I grew up in the shadow of Clonard Monastery in Belfast. It was our church and I and my family were very involved in it. I liked what the Redemptorists were doing. Clonard was a very busy place and continues to be.
I think that producing a book like this one is very much in the Redemptorist tradition. We believe in sound scholarship, not for its own sake, but as something that can nourish the faith and lives of ordinary folk. Alphonsus Liguori was a theologian who broke new ground but he was also a writer for the ordinary people. He took great care in the production of his books (over a hundred of them).
He believed in making the great classics of spirituality, especially the teaching of Teresa of Avila and Francis de Sales accessible to ordinary people, because they had the right to the best. I have also been inspired by an outstanding Irish Redemptorist called Fr Sean O’Riordan. Sean spent more than half of his life teaching graduate students in Rome, yet his presentation of very complex theological ideas was always totally accessible to ordinary people. Sean once joked that if he had not become a priest he would probably have become a journalist.
Q. - You lecture on scripture at St Patrick's Maynooth. Are you seeing more interest amongst the laity in understanding the Word of God. Is this a very 'protestant' thing and have Catholics finally understand the importance of the liturgy of the word?
When I tell people I am teaching in Maynooth they tend to assume that my students are all seminarians. Actually, the majority of students I teach (almost 400 in all) are lay people. The majority are young school-leavers, others are people who are returning to education after many years in a career or even after retirement. At our recent graduation, the oldest student was a man of 71 who had been working in the college since the age of 14 and returned to do a degree in theology after his retirement.
Of the four new doctors in theology, one was a young woman who had entered the college as a school-leaver, went on to do her Masters and finally her doctorate on Catholic marriage in Ireland. Another was a Korean Protestant pastor now working in Slovakia who wrote about violence in the Gospel of Luke, and the other two were laymen. We give all the students a good basic grounding in scripture. A good number return to continue to Master’s or even doctorate level, even if it means they have to work hard to build up their knowledge of the original biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew.
I think it is unfortunate that the bible in Ireland has been over-identified as a ‘Protestant’ thing. There are complex historical reasons for that, not least the Evangelical missions in the poorest parts of Ireland before and during the Famine period when bible-reading became identified with conversion and the debate over bible-reading in the National Schools. As a result, Catholics tended to distance themselves from the bible.
It was not always like that. I have a copy of a Catholic bible printed in Dublin in the late 18th century that has a list of subscribers. One hundred and thirty 130 lay people from the town of Waterford alone are included, for example. The great figures of the Catholic revival like Nano Nagle, Catherine McAuley and Blessed Edmund Rice were all avid bible readers. Edmund’s bible in which he marked many passages that had a special meaning for him has been preserved by the Christian Brothers in Waterford
The high-point of the Catholic biblical renewal was the introduction of a more comprehensive system for reading the bible at Sunday and daily Mass. That was relatively easily. What is more difficult and taking a longer time is making the riches of the bible accessible to the ordinary faithful in language they can understand and giving them confidence in reading it. This is what we are trying to do with the publication of this little book on the Gospel of St Luke.