In his letter to mark the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 (8 Dec. 1999), Joaquin Fernandez suggested that, if the Society of Mary is to meet the challenges which lie ahead, we must be prepared 'to deconstruct all those certainties (and they are many) - material, intellectual .and spiritual which we have built up with great effort over a long period of time'. These 'certainties', he continued, 'prevent us from discerning the newness of God, to be free to proclaim a message of true hope and to place ourselves, in coherent fashion, in the midst of the world'.
'Deconstruction', of course, is a theme emphasised by the 'post-modernists'. It refers to the recognition that virtually all human awareness has an ideological dimension - the bias and subtle distortions that come from identification with the interests and securities of a particular social group. The inference which some contemporary thinkers draw from this insight - that objective truth is an unattainable illusion - is self-contradictory and unacceptable to Christian consciousness. On the other hand, it would be foolish not to acknowledge that ideological bias has shaped our outlook, even our outlook as believers.Recognition of the part played by ideology sheds important light upon some of the puzzles and enigmas of the church's long history. Some obvious examples come to mind. The theology of the manuals in common use when I was a young man was heavily ideological in its evaluation of a rival Protestant tradition; Protestantism's 'The Scriptures alone will be our authority' was equally ideological.
Joachin’s invitation prompts reflection upon questions which, I am sure, have preoccupied many committed Marists. Our Marist charism is a remarkable response to the call of the gospel, second to none in its inspiring and life-giving potential. It provides a response at once accessible and profound to many of the problems the church faces today. (Many of us have found confirmation of this, I am sure, in the grateful and enthusiastic response of people from all kinds of backgrounds, to the plea of our Marist confrere, Fran9ois f1eca, for 'A Marian Church'.) Why then has our Marist way not prospered more? Why has the Colian vision not engendered more enthusiasm among members of our society? Why does the Society of Mary seem to have had so little impact upon Catholic awareness?Let us admit immediately that the questions themselves need to be 'deconstructed'! In asking these questions we gave little reflection to the criteria according to which the 'success' of the Society of Mary might be judged. Were they the criteria of the gospel or the standards of 'empire building' commonly accepted in human affairs? The 'deconstruction' Joachin calls for will help us to formulate the life-giving questions the gospel puts to us. I believe that it will also help us to find the beginnings of an answer to these questions, and that it will help us to understand the very real hopes we can have for our Marist way.
I had the immense privilege, in the 1950s, of living in the international community of Via Cernaia at the time Jean Coste was a student there. We were given to share in the excitement and enthusiasm with which this great Marist was initiating the investigations into our Marist origins which were to prove so important for the whole Marist family. When I returned to Australia in 1958, eager to share Caste's insights, my efforts met with a mixed reaction. Young Marists responded positively; older Marists were less enthusiastic.Looking back now, I can recognise that the response of confreres of my generation and older often had a clearly recognisable ideological component. We are speaking of the period prior to the Second Vatican Council's call to a renewal of religious life through a recovery of the 'charism'' which inspired the foundation of particular religious institutes. The vocation decision of Marists of my generation and older was primarily a decision to embrace the Catholic priesthood; subordinated to that basic decision was the choice which had to be made between life as a diocesan priest and life as a member of a clerical religious institute. It was association with Marist works, friendship with particular Marists, admiration for such things as the approachability and 'family spirit' of Marists, which led the typical candidate to opt for a priestly ministry in the Society of Mary.
Having set their course in life, these Marists found it difficult to come to terms with the suggestion that their Marist vocation was more fundamental to the living of their Christian life than their priestly identity. Moreover, happy in the Marist commitment they had made in the generosity of their youth, they found it difficult to be open to the suggestion that there were important aspects of our Marist inspiration and tradition which were no longer appreciated by the generality of Marists.
The difficulty these Marists experienced, however, had more complex roots than this. Looking back on the history of the Society of Mary we may recognise that from the beginning the Society has experienced great difficulty in giving its apostolate a concrete focus. This difficulty had its beginnings in the experience of the Founder. It is the hesitations he experienced, as he endeavoured to relate the Marist ideal to the concrete actuality of a religious institute in the church of the 19th century, that make Jean Claude Colin such a difficult figure to interpret.
I recall several frustrating conversations I have had with Jean Coste, when we met up during the decades between the Vatican Council and his death. As my theological work in Ecclesiology and Mariology made me increasingly aware of the remarkable way in which our Marist charism situates us at the very heart of the church's life in the gospel, I was anxious to enlist Jean Coste's remarkable gifts to help me explore my insights. Invariably, I ran up against a brick wall. I now realise that it was Coste's scrupulous methodology as a historian which made him reluctant to discuss developments of Colin's thought. Even if these insights were in harmony with Colin's vision and a valid development of its implications, Coste was wary lest they contaminate or distort his understanding of Colin's authentic genius - an understanding which he was still labouring to clarify and define.
Gaston Lessard's publication, after Coste's death, of the documentation which records Coste's maturing reflections, Marian Vision of the Church: Jean-Claude Colin (1998), is a work of unique importance for our Marist tradition. It confirms the interpretation which I have made. Coste is quoted, describing the book he planned to write as not 'a work of hermeneutics in which Colin would be rethought, reformulated in terms of a modern approach'; instead, it would be a 'synthesis on Colin's original thought, done by a historian who is familiar with Colin and his time and who does some thinking'.
As the history of the Society of Mary unfolded, the hesitations of Jean-Claude Colin, which made Coste's task such a difficult one, were mirrored in later developments. The confusion caused by the attempt of Father Colin's successor, Julien Favre, to finalise a rule for the society are well known. So too are Peter Julian Eymard's efforts to provide a satisfactory organisation for the developing lay branch of the Marist project. Both of these well intentioned Marists found that the Founder disapproved of their efforts - in what must have been a very frustrating situation, adversely affecting the morale of the Society of Mary at this crucial stage of its development.
Alois Greiler sums up well the ambiguities of Colin's attitude, as he contrasts the styles with which Marcellin Champagnat and Jean-Claude Colin made their contributions to the Marist project. He explains Colin's 'slowness to take irrevocable action' in his responsibility for the institutional development of the Marist project, and 'his constantly evolving ideas with regard to the various branches of the Marist family' by recalling Coste's interpretation of Colin's thought: 'Coste distinguishes two levels: at the level of vision, Colin kept to the original idea; but on the practical level he never succeeded in translating the vision into an organic unity'
The policies of the society with regard to parish ministry are an example of this unresolved tension at the heart of the Marist project. As Marists, we are to be ready to do any work called for in the life of God's people. The prevailing ethos of parish life in the church of the 19th century made Jean Claude Colin concerned that this ethos would undermine the Marist spirit of men taking on this work. Today the formation of parish communities is perhaps the most urgent need of the church in the process of renewal. The Founder's attitude to this apostolate bas been reflected, however, in the ambiguity and uncertainty of the Society's policies in regard to this apostolate. Looking back on these hesitant policies, we may well judge that we should not have turned our backs on this work, but that we should have taken it up with a very clear charter and conscious commitment to the forming of parish communities reflecting the essential values of our Marist vision.
'Deconstructing' the history we are discussing - in other words, identifying the ideological .influences at work in that history - is very enlightening. An ideology, as we have said, is a cognitive perspective which interprets a situation in a way which is shaped by the interests and securities of a particular group of participants. The Marist movement came into existence at the turning point in history. The French Revolution had broken the mould of a centuries-long civil and ecclesiastical establishment. A situation had been created which was highly charged with the competing ideologies of the stake-holders in French society, whose situation had been profoundly affected by the changes brought by the recent upheaval. The ideals which came to unite the first Marists - ideals in the emergence of which Colin's visionary leadership was a key factor - were at variance with the ideology which had sustained the old establishment, and which many contemporary churchmen would have been happy to revive. The Marist group recognised, not only that the old outlook would find little sympathy from the common people, but that it was at variance with their new-found inspiration, the gospel values which shaped Mary's involvement in the mystery of salvation.
When we carry our ideological analysis to another level we come to see the Colinian paradox in a new light. The church of the Counter-Reformation had developed a powerful and very effective ideological consensus, reflecting the radical nature of the crisis provoked by the Protestant Reformation. Many of the church's present problems and tensions, in fact, are related to the disintegration of this ideological consensus, as the true spirit of the Second Vatican Council finds expression.
One of the dominant features of the ideology which united Counter-Reformation Catholicism was its emphasis upon institutionalisation. The church closed ranks before the threat of Protestantism: in its many forms of expression, canonical discipline became a dominant formative influence in the church's life.
During the Superior General's recent (1999) the Australian province, the discussion of the I took part in brought home to me the fact that take for granted as essential to religious life visitation of regional group many things we are really the outcome of the institutionalisation and canonical discipline of the Counter-Reformation era. As we discussed the challenges facing the Society in our time, one of the confreres pointed to factors which compounded these challenges. One, he suggested, was the dividing of the Society into self-contained provincial unit which must provide their own leadership and infrastructure, making difficult the world-wide sharing of creative-energies to be found in the Society. The other was the pattern of institutional apostolates or “corporate worksâ€, which became the norm for religious institutes in modern times – a pattern which gave rise to a very distinctive form of community discipline, making it very difficult for religious to think imaginatively of the prophetic contribution they should make to the life of the believing community. It is not difficult to recognise the link between these institutional forms and the canonical discipline of the Counter-Reformation ethos.
Once the question is raised, it is clear that the establishing of self-contained provinces is only one of the many possible forms that could be adopted by a group of Christians wanting to adopt the evangelical life as a witness to God's people in their own times; moreover, while providing a convenient structure of administration and supervision, it is not necessarily the most effective for the realisation the mission to which the group is called.The almost exclusive dedication of the energies of modern religious to corporate apostolates also has clear links with the institutionalising tendencies of the Counter-Reformation outlook. The Second Vatican Council set out to redress a situation in which an excessive institutionalisation severely inhibited the expression of the prophetic dimension of the church's life. Religious life belongs essentially to the “charismatic†or prophetic, element of the church’s life. The institutionalisation referred, however, inhibited the prophetic contribution of religious to the church's life. Religious institutes tended to become labour forces, called upon to bear a large part of the burden of catholicism's institutional initiatives.
Corporate life is one of the most important issues which must be faced in the crisis of survival through which institutionalised religious life is passing. It is only through corporate life that the prophetic contribution proper to the grace of a religious foundation can find a continuing and recognisable expression in the life of the believing community. History helps us to understand, however, that the corporate apostolate which became the norm during the Counter-Reformation era is not the only or necessarily the most appropriate way in which the corporate life of a religious institute can find expression. In the typical mendicant community of the medieval period, the friars were engaged in a variety of different urban ministries; they fostered and gave expression to a corporate identity which made a prophetic contribution to the church's life, through the common liturgical and devotional life of their tradition.
It is clear, in the light of the analysis we have made, that while Colin and his companions could recognise the inadequacy of the ideological bias of the old French establishment, they had to contend with far more subtle ideological influences in their project of establishing the Society of Mary. They had been blessed with an insight which provided an antidote to many of the problems facing the Counter-Reformation church; but, on the other hand, they shared in the concrete life and many of the assumptions of a Catholic culture formed by the Counter-Reformation - in order to establish a religious family given to the sharing of their Marian vision they had to deal with diocesan bureaucracies and the officials and canonists of the Roman curia; the survival of their project depended upon their obtaining of canonical approval; an acceptable set of 'Constitutions' had to be formulated etc. It was impossible that Colin should understand fully the nature of the conflict which was at the heart of his project – the conflict which put the prophetic contribution Marists can make to the life of the church at odds with the prevailing ideological ethos of the 19th century Catholicism.
Colin’s ultimate greatness probably consists in the fact that, despite all this, he never turned his back on his prophetic vision, convinced that it was authentic and of great importance for the life of God’s people.
In practical terms, of course, the struggle we have described prevented Colin, and the Society of which he was the leader, from entering wholehearted into the enterprise shaped by the ideology of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. The dominant temptation of this highly institutionalised enterprise has been the tendency to empire-building. The true spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and its call to a return to the gospel as the authentic source of the church's life, constitutes a radical challenge to this temptation. The more the ethos of modern religious foundations has been given to empire-building, the more radical is the challenge they face.
Empire-building which is inspired by identification with a cause is a very common human proclivity, and it would be foolish to tell ourselves we have not indulged in it. I recall, for example, about the time of my ordination, reading a statistical survey which, if I remember rightly, listed the Society of Mary as the 13th in a membership-numbers list of male religious institutes. I blush to recall my reaction at the time: I was disappointed that we were no higher on the list; but I also consoled myself with the thought that, when the various branches of the Marist Family were put together our particular empire looked more impressive.
Another example. When Peter Channel was canonised, I recall an astute confrere complaining that we Australian Marists had not made more of the fact that the proto-martyr of this part of the world was one of our own. If he had been a member of some of the other orders established in our region, he said, it would have been a very different story. As the years have passed, I have come to have a very different reaction to this remarkable fact. Our reluctance to indulge in a triumphalistic proprietorship of Oceania's proto-martyr was not the outcome of a lack of zeal, but an expression of the very spirit which Peter Chanel had made his own as an early member of the Society.
One day, perhaps, one of our Marist historians will compare the careers of Peter Chanel and his companion missionary, Bishop Pierre Bataillon. Bataillon emerges as a truly heroic figure, an outstanding example of the Counter-Reformation missionary. Among his people he adopted the style of a 'chief', even to the heroic gesture, at the time of his death, of asking to be allowed to die on the bare earth. We see another side of his character, however, when we learn of the headache he created for the community of Villa Maria in Sydney, as he maneuvered to take over the premises for his ill-advised (and as it turned out, disastrous) scheme to educate young polynesians for the priesthood in Sydney.
The style adopted by Peter Chanel was very different. In the terms adopted by Marshall McLuhan, Bataillon's Counter Reformation style was a 'hot' communication. Chanel's, on the other hand, was a 'cool' communication - a presence to his people, a witness which shared what he was with them, so that they came to know him as 'the man with a good heart'. Today we recognise, not only that this was a more authentically Marist approach, but also that it is a far more effective manner of inculturating the gospel - after all, only life teaches about life. It is the Christ-like pattern of Chanel's short apostolate which has most often been recalled we celebrated his martyrdom his brief and apparently unsuccessful ministry, the machinations of a threatened power structure, his words as he died, forgiving his murderers and commending himself into the hands of God. But it may well be that his ultimate greatness was the model he unconsciously provided of a truly Marist apostolic style – a style which he learned as a member of the first community of the Society.
The struggle which Colin found himself involved in, as he endeavoured to establish the Society of Mary within the institutional reality of 19th century Catholicism, while holding to a prophetic vision which challenged the shortcomings of that institutional reality, made him, as we have said, an enigmatic figure very difficult to categorise. In a sense it is this struggle which constitutes the heart of the prophetic awareness essential to our Marist Spirituality.
We live in a pilgrim church which, if it is to be a genuinely human community fulfilling its mission in human history, must have institutionalised structures. Only a generous and mature gospel spirit can save the institutional structures of the church from the temptations attendant upon any bureaucracy. Our Marist way is a prophetic blessing so authentic, simple and life-giving that Christian hope inspires us to be confident that it will make an enduring contribution to the life of the pilgrim church in ages to come: whatever changes and new-forms the radical following of the gospel - an essential dimension of the church's life - may know in the future.
As we come to appreciate the nature of the prophetic gift we must bring to the church, we should not be surprised to find that the tension Colin struggled with has always been an issue in the life of God's people. In one of the papers published by Gaston Lessard in A Marian Vision of the Church: Jean-Claude Colin, Jean Coste cites the conclusion of the exegete Lucien Legrand in support of Colin's understanding the historical Mary:
Colin's utopia is the primitive church, but with Mary at the core. There lies its richness ... we find Mary, more hidden than any of the apostles, obedient to them, listening to them like a disciple, not taking advantage of her being queen of the apostles and mother of the Messiah, but inserting herself into the Church. And there we find a reality which is historically quite correct ... Legrand shows that there must have been in the early days of the Church a tension between the natural family of Jesus and those who called upon the authority of his spiritual message ... Luke's insistence in Acts 1:14 on the fact that Mary was there, in the middle of the Church grouped together resolves the conflict by showing that, while this tension may have existed, it had been overcome from that time on. While the normal thing was for Mary to be the head of the family cl ... she accepted instead to be a disciple; she identified with the spiritual disciples; far from placing herself outside the Church, she blended into it, allowing Christianity to overcome the initial tension.
We know that the gospel brought by Jesus had deep roots in the Old Testament. The issue we have been discussing was not unknown to the old Israel. The profound ambiguity which runs through the complex history of the Davidic monarchy, and the symbols of its centralised authority, Jerusalem and the temple, is reflected in the remarkable prophecy of Nathan (2 Sam 7). Yahweh, the champion of the oppressed, who led his people out of slavery into freedom, was Israel's Lord. When the loose federation of tribes which the chosen people had become could not effectively counter the threat of the Philistines, the tribes accepted the rule of an earthly king. Ironically, the institutional and administrative apparatus of kingship gave rise to a long history of oppression and exploitation denounced by the prophetic movement. It was only after the exile, when kingly rule was a memory rather than a present reality that the Davidic line and temple could assume the potent symbolic significance they have in the Old Testament scriptures as they have come down to us.
One indication of the prophetic potential of our Marist way is the amazing number of religious foundations whose origins have been associated with the Society of Mary. It is a history which should be told by the Society's historians. While, it must be immediately acknowledged, relationship with our Society on the part of these foundations was not always free of tension and pain, it was never a pain coming from the proprietorship of empire building.
When I was a student at Via Cernaia in the 1950s I came to know and admire the simplicity and friendly spirit of a dynamic group of Mexican students who belonged to the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, an institute which has made an important contribution to the life of the church in Mexico. Though their founder was a Marist, most Marists today are probably unaware of their exitence.
Closer to home, the Sisters of St Joseph are a group of Australian women who have identified with our country's battlers and ministered to their needs throughout our vast continent, far beyond the bounds of established parishes. In their foundation, Blessed Mary McKillop was associated with Julian Tennison Woods, an English priest who, as a young convert, was frustrated by ill health in several attempts to become a member of the Society of Mary. He eventually came to Australia and had a remarkable career as a missionary and pioneering scientist. He maintained his friendship with the Marists in Sydney, at one period making Villa Maria his home. As they study their origins, the Josephites have come to recognise that Julian's association with the Marist tradition contributed to the vision which inspired their origins.
The link between Suzanne Aubert - the Founder of the Sisters of Compassion, and the woman who may well be the first New Zealander to be canonised - and the Society of Mary is far more direct. She came to New Zealand as lay Marist; she championed and participated in the Society of Mary's mission to the Maori people. In the end the main concern of the congregation which she founded was to be the abandoned ones of society. Originally she envisaged her congregation as part of the Third Order Regular which was in the process of evolving into the Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary. The impact of this 'grand old lady of Wellington' was immense: she even had the Governor General of New Zealand rolling up his sleeves as one of a crowd of voluntary workers at the newly established Home of Compassion in Wellington!
It is interesting, in the context of our present discussion, to learn that she spent an extended period in exile in Rome, in order to safeguard her new foundation, the very existence of which was threatened by the small-minded bureaucracy of the local church.
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