This is a keynote address – “A Different Fire: Vatican II and New Evangelisation” – given by ARCHBISHOP MARK COLERIDGE on September 19 at a Melbourne conference on the Second Vatican Council
Through much of my time as bishop, I have been intensely involved in the work of re-translating the Roman Missal.
Through that process, I learnt many things, and I want to start by mentioning one of them.
I learnt something stated quite clearly in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, which I must have read inattentively in other times. I came to see that one can trace a single Conciliar arc from Trent to Vatican II via Vatican I.
When I was a young priest, there was a tendency to see the Council of Trent and the Second Vatican Council as polar opposites. It showed how little we knew of history, and how little we understood the two Councils.
The same could be said of our tendency to see Pope Pius XII and Pope John XXIII as polar opposites.
That strikes me now as absurd, whatever the differences of personality and style between Papa Pacelli and Papa Roncalli.
The Council of Trent was the Catholic Church’s bold response to the trauma of the Reformation, the sundering of Latin Christianity, the scars of which are with us to this day.
The Reformation would not have been possible without the Renaissance, so that the Council of Trent could also be seen as a response to the new learning and the new possibilities which it brought to birth.
In that sense, the Council was a response to the birth of the modern world.
If we think of the grand polemic that raged between Martin Luther and Thomas More, we may see it as a clash between the last medieval man, More, and the first modern man, Luther.
Two worlds collided, and did so fatefully. The Council of Trent was not simply a refutation of Luther and a vindication of More. It was not a defence of the medieval world and a reject of the modern world.
Rather it was an attempt to position the Catholic Church to enter the modern world without abandoning the God-given truth she felt duty-bound to defend and promote.
The creativity of the Counter-Reformation suggests that Trent was brilliantly successful, at least until the onset of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century when the project of modernity took a new turn.
Faith and reason took their leave of each other.
Indeed they came to seem enemies, much to the impoverishment of both.
This process gained momentum through the nineteenth century, and it set the scene for the First Vatican Council.
Through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, intellectual revolution was accompanied by political revolution, with ideological conflicts breaking out repeatedly within nations and between nations.
One result of this upheaval was the diminishment of the temporal power of the papacy, with the loss of the Papal States to the forces of Garibaldi.
But at a deeper level, there was the question of the Church’s ability to teach the truth at a time when the very notion of truth was being cast into doubt.
Hence Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility.
Not only was it a reaction to the loss of temporal power, but it was also a reaffirmation of the Church’s ability to teach the truth entrusted to her by Christ.
It was a response to the rising tide of modernity, to which the Church would respond differently in Leo XIII’s Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum (1891).
When Vatican I concluded under the shadow of armed conflict, it was clear to all that the Council was unfinished and that its work would have to be completed at some later time. Subsequently, however, the grand visions of modernity came crashing down as Europe entered upon what was eventually known as the Great War.
The atrocities of World War I came to an exhausted end in 1918, and everyone sighed, “Never again”.
Yet a little more than twenty years later, World War II broke out as a humiliated Germany sought to reassert its dignity and reclaim what it felt to be its right.
Over this second part of the twin apocalypse of the last century there loomed the shadow of demonic ideology – the totalitarian and quintessentially pagan ideology that came to be known as Fascism.
It proved no less murderous than the Communism which had shown its true face in Stalin and which, while claiming to be a polar opposite of Fascism, was alarmingly alike in its effect.
When the guns and bombs eventually fell silent in 1945, it was clear that Europe and the world had endured a twin apocalypse after which nothing could ever be the same.
One of the many troubling aspects of the apocalypse was that the prime mover in each part – World War I and World War II – was one of the unquestionably great Christian nations of Europe, Germany.
The World Wars, therefore, represented the collapse of Christian civilisation as it had been known, at least in Europe.
But it also called into question the supposed liberation brought by the project of modernity, since without the aid of modern science and technology the achievements of, say, Auschwitz and Hiroshima would have been impossible.
Both were, it could be argued, technological triumphs but moral catastrophes. Auschwitz and Hiroshima were the great emblems of the twin apocalypse, and the question was, Where do we go from here? Is there hope, is there life beyond the ash-heaps? And if there is, where might we find it, where do we make a fresh start?
The Reformation was not just an ecclesiastical trauma. It was also a social, political, intellectual and even economic trauma. To all of this the Council of Trent sought to respond in its own way. The two World Wars were even more comprehensive in their legacy of trauma.
They left Europe spiritually eviscerated, with a widespread evaporation of meaning and a loss of confidence in institutions. This is an experience from which Europe has still to recover, and any real recovery is unlikely insofar as Europe takes refuge in a secularist ideology.
The Wall may have fallen in 1989, but the great liberation and unification have not yet happened. The European crisis is rendered more grave because the World Wars also cast doubt upon the grand promises of the project of modernity and brought to birth a postmodernity fraught with deep uncertainties and ambiguities.
This, it seems to me, is the crisis to which the Second Vatican Council sought to respond, knowing that the Church was deeply implicated in the crisis as she had been in the conflicts.
The Catholic Church had seen the fires of the death-camps and the fire of the bomb, brighter than a thousand suns; and the question was, Is this the only fire possible, or is there another fire, an undying light that might lead beyond the ash-heaps of Auschwitz and Hiroshima?
Throughout history, the West has shown a remarkable capacity to renew itself beyond the crises it has known.
But in the years after the Second World War, the question was, Can the West now renew itself from within and find within itself fresh spiritual energy in a time of spiritual exhaustion? Or might this renewal, this fresh spiritual energy, have to come from elsewhere?
Might it have to come from without rather than from within? If this were to happen, it would not be the first time in history.
After the two World Wars, it was clear that the Church could not just put up a sign saying, “Business as usual”, as if beyond this unwelcome and unpleasant disruption we could simply carry on as we had for centuries. But if the Church could not say, “Business as usual”, what could the Church say? That was the question at the heart of Vatican II.
Beyond the ash-heaps, it was not possible for the Church to adopt a hermeneutic of either rupture – as if the past had gone for ever – or a hermeneutic of continuity – as if nothing was changed by the twin apocalypse. In the Second Vatican Council, the Church opted instead for a hermeneutic of reform, which contained elements of both rupture and continuity.
It was not one or the other, but a right mix of the two. We might argue to this day about what exactly a right mix might mean, but there is no doubt that that was the choice of the Council.
One thing it meant for the Council was the rejection of a tendency to yield to a self-protective introversion.
Like everyone else, the Church was battered and exhausted at the end of the Second World War; and it may have been understandable that the Church in such a moment would have closed ranks, retiring behind the battlements of the “rock in strength upon the rock, like some city crowned with turrets, braving storm and earth-quake shock”, as one older hymn had it.
The Church did not stand above the maelstrom but had to go to its heart; and that is what she did in Vatican II.
This meant the demise – or at least the beginning of the demise – of a Eurocentric Church and the birth – or the beginning of the birth – of a world Church.
The implications of this are incalculable, and we are only in the early phases of this epochal shift. The demography of the universal Church is confirming the judgement of the Council, as day by day the centre of gravity in the Catholic Church shifts from the countries of the West, especially Europe, to Africa, Asian and Latin America.
We see traces of this world-wide shift in the changing face of our Catholic people and presbyterate in Australia. The colour of both is changing, as we find more Asians and Africans among us; but this merely reflects the fact that the colour of the Church’s face around the world is changing dramatically.
“I am black and beautiful”, says the Bride in the Song of Songs. The face of the Church, the Bride of Christ, while not yet black, is certainly darkening in colour; and nothing can stop that process.
The Spirit seems to be saying that the Churches of the West – and even the West itself – cannot now renew themselves from within. They need help from outside, help of a kind which perhaps we did not see coming and which we may not immediately welcome.
But the Spirit is also saying surely that the whole Church has to become more missionary. This seems to me to be the heart of the teaching of Vatican II. At a time when we may be tempted to introversion, the Church must become more missionary.
The phrase “new evangelisation” is found nowhere in the documents of Vatican II. Yet it points to what Vatican II is really about. The phrase was first coined by Pope John Paul II when he visited Poland in 1979.
He used it almost in passing and without explication. He used it more deliberately when he spoke to the Latin American Bishops in Santo Domingo in 1979, and there he explained that it had to be “new in ardour, in method and expression”.
These were the words not of the Council itself, but of one who had been a Council Father, an influential one at times, and one who understood the Council from within, who had it in his bones.
Through his long pontificate, John Paul II spent much time and energy spelling out what he meant by a new evangelisation. In a sense, one could see his twenty-six years in the papal ministry as a single long exegesis of that phrase.
His papacy had about it a profusion which at times made it seem bewilderingly complex. Yet at its heart the papacy of John Paul II had great simplicities; and this was one of them.
You can trace an arc from his first Encyclical Letter, Redemptor Hominis (1979) to one of his later and more memorable texts, the Apostolic Letter, Novo Millennio Ineunte (2001). In his first Encyclical Letter, John Paul II wrote that Christianity is not in any conventional sense a religion.
It is more an experience, he says. It is an experience of encounter with Jesus Christ crucified and risen, and therefore an experience of amazement. This, he claims, is the essence of both the Gospel and Christianity, an experience of amazement (10). The amazement comes because it is only in encountering the crucified and risen Lord that we see the full and stupendous truth of both God and the human being.
He echoes the Second Vatican Council in claiming that Jesus crucified and risen reveals not only the truth of God – so often obscured or distorted – but also the truth of the human being – no less often obscured or distorted. If John Paul II was in many ways amazing, it was, I think, because he was so amazed.
In the midst of the murderous lies he had known, the lies of Fascism and Communism, he had discovered the amazing truth; and that sense of amazement simmered in all that he said and did and wrote during his twenty-six years as Pope.
In the Apostolic Letter he wrote at the end of the Jubilee of 2000, John Paul II wrote this: “If we ask what is the core of the great legacy [the Jubilee] leaves us, I would not hesitate to describe it as the contemplation of the face of Christ” (15). Here again, the complexity of the Jubilee resolves, at least in the Pope’s mind, to a grand simplicity.
With all its planning and celebration, its profusion of events, the Jubilee was a single great contemplation of the face of Christ, “Christ…in his historical features and in his mystery, Christ known in his manifold presence in the Church and in the world, and confessed as the meaning of history and the light of life’s journey” (15).
This, then, is where the new energy for new mission will be found – a new contemplation of the face of Christ, a new and more amazing encounter with the Lord crucified and risen which shows us more of the truth of God and the human being. This is something that we have taken up in the Year of Grace.
But it is not new: it is at the heart of the Second Vatican Council and of the magisterium of Pope John Paul II.
The Year of Grace is really the Year of Jesus, in whom all grace is found. It is intended to be a single great contemplation of the face of Christ, pondering his humanity at such depth that we find our way to his divinity and refresh our faith in the truth of the Incarnation.
The same could be said of both the Second Vatican Council and the pontificate of John Paul: in the end, they were nothing other than a single great contemplation of the face of Christ, in whom alone the world will find its way beyond the ash-heaps.
In his Apostolic Letter, John Paul II summons the Church to start afresh from Christ, and this is a call which the Australian Bishops have made their own in the Year of Grace. It was also the call of Vatican II.
Where might Europe and the world begin to build a future beyond the ash-heaps? That was the question; and the answer which the Council gave was, “Start afresh from Christ”.
Only Jesus crucified and risen, according to the Council, could interpret the ash-heaps aright and show a way beyond them. Only he could show the way beyond the fires of the death-camps and the bomb to a different fire which does not destroy but creates.
It may seem strange that an extroverted Council which sought to stir new missionary energies in the Church should start with the liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium) and Scripture (Dei Verbum).
But Vatican II does this because it recognises that the liturgy and the Bible are the prime points of encounter with the crucified and risen Lord, without which there will be no energy for mission.
At the time of the Second World War, Pope Pius XII had foreshadowed what the Council would do.
During the War and in its immediate aftermath, the Pope published two Encyclical Letters, Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) on the Scripture and Mediator Dei (1947) on the liturgy. He understood implicitly what the Council would teach explicitly – that it is in celebrating the liturgy and reading the Bible that the face of Christ would be seen and his voice be heard in the new ways needed now.
The Council’s two great documents on the Church, Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, might give the impression that the Council’s vision was ecclesiocentric.
But this would be to misread both the documents and the Council itself. Though both speak of the Church, they look out to the world and eventually to Christ crucified and risen. Their vision is essentially Christocentric.
If the Church is the lumen gentium, “the light of the nations”, it is only because Christ the true light takes flesh in the community of the Church. We have no light of our own; he is the light.
The “joy and hope” of which Gaudium et Spes speaks are, in the end, found only in Jesus Christ. He is the joy and the hope of both the Church and the world; and it is important to say so clearly at a time when joylessness and hopelessness are not hard to find.
The call to a new evangelisation born of the Council and given momentum by John Paul II and Benedict XVI implies a particular view of the history of the Church.
Looking back across two thousand years, it sees a number of key threshold moments when there was a new surge of Gospel energy, often in dark times and against the tide.
The first evangelisation came with the apostles sent out by the Risen Lord himself, and it yielded immense and unexpected fruit.
The next threshold moment comes with the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the chaos that ensued.
At that point, St Benedict goes into his cave in Subiaco and from that cave is born not only a new way of being Christian, but a new form of human consciousness and eventually a new civilisation that would become medieval Europe. In the medieval period, the friars appear working in ways very different from the monks who were the heirs of St Benedict.
They did not stay in monasteries but walked the roads of the world, taking the Gospel in new ways to the people wherever the people were.
This again brought a new surge of Gospel energy, a new kind of Christian mission and with it a new kind of spirituality.
After the trauma of the Reformation, we saw the emergence of a new phenomenon to meet a new need in new circumstances.
These were no longer monks or friars, but clerical orders like the Jesuits who engaged the changing culture in new ways and undertook missions of a new kind, even evangelising newly found continents.
After the devastations of the French Revolution, when the Church in France was reduced to almost nothing, there was the new surge of Gospel energy which saw the foundation in France of many missionary and teaching orders, some of which have been very influential in Australia and the Pacific.
Through the nineteenth century in Ireland too – a time of great political strife and human suffering – there was also a surge of Gospel energy which saw the foundation of congregations, especially of women, which gave themselves to teaching and nursing; and among these were some of the most influential congregations of apostolic religious women in Australia.
What both Vatican II and John Paul II have said is that, in our own time, beyond the ash-heaps of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and all they symbolise, we need another new surge of Gospel energy, a surge which will come only if there is another new and deeper contemplation of the face of Christ, a new and deeper encounter with the Lord crucified and risen.
Such a surge will bring with it a kind of Copernican revolution.
Instead of seeking to recreate a world where the world revolves around the Church, or at least comes to the Church, the Church will look to the world, will go to the world with the gift of the Gospel.
In the West at least, the world will not come to the Church at this time. Therefore, the Church must go to the world, since the only alternative is for the Church to retire to some introverted, supposedly self-protective world where we Christians speak only to ourselves; and we are surely forbidden to do that.
The question now is, How do we go to the world?
What does this kind of new mission mean? What does it require?
It requires, at least in this country, a recognition that tribal Catholicism is at an end. By tribal Catholicism I mean a sub-genre of what I called earlier Eurocentric Catholicism.
When I was young, to be Catholic meant by and large to belong to an Anglo-Celtic tribe, which had its tribal chieftains in men as different as James Duhig and Daniel Mannix. The two men were Irish-Australian bishops of a kind which it would be impossible to replicate now, even if both embodied certain qualities one would want in a bishop in any time, place or culture.
But whatever being Catholic may mean in Australia in 2012, it no longer means belonging to an Anglo-Celtic tribe.
In the earlier time of tribal Catholicism, one was by and large born into a Catholic family, went to Mass at a Catholic parish and attended a Catholic school.
All of this meant that one became Catholic by a powerful kind of cultural osmosis.
But those days are gone. We have reached a point where being born into a Catholic family, going to Mass when young and attending a Catholic school for twelve years guarantees little. One may or may not choose to be Catholic; but the key word here is “choose”.
Membership of the Catholic Church in the West has become more a matter of free choice than cultural osmosis; and that is one of the reasons why there are fewer people attending Mass on Sunday.
Yet those who do attend can show a quality of commitment and dedication not always evident in earlier times. They have made a deep and personal choice.
Yet it cannot be simply a matter of personal choice, unless we wish in the Catholic Church to see things as some Protestants do.
That is why John Paul II spoke frequently of the need to evangelise culture.
He meant that we need to provide a rich and supportive context within which personal choices can be made. Personal choices made in a vacuum are risky.
Even more risky perhaps are personal choices made in a cultural context which favours wrong choices.
The question may be right, but the culture can powerfully suggest a wrong answer.
That is why John Paul II spoke of the need to evangelise culture.
We need to provide a cultural context which supports and encourages good choices and right answers, the kind of choices and answers which the Gospel urges or at least to which the Gospel points.
This is one of the main reasons why we need at this time in this culture to resist the pressure to push the Catholic faith into a private corner or to disqualify the Catholic Church from speaking at all on issues of public morality.
The sexual abuse crisis has certainly compromised the ability of the Church and particularly the ability of the bishops to speak effectively on issues of public morality.
But it cannot be allowed to reduce us to silence; nor can we be intimidated by those who would dearly love the voice of the Church to fall silent on many issues.
Compromised we may be, but we cannot allow ourselves to be cowed; our credibility may be on the line, but our true credentials are not always what the world recognises. Their source lies elsewhere.
The new evangelisation of which John Paul II and Benedict XVI have spoken, the great renewal sought by Vatican II, has been a more difficult process than anything imagined by us who were young when the Council ended.
Those of us who grew up in the wake of the Council were exhilarated by its agenda – or at least our version of its agenda. It seemed at the time that we could remake the Church and even the world; anything seemed possible.
Yet in the meantime it has not turned out quite as we expected.
Perhaps our sense of the renewal called for by the Council was too introverted, too churchy.
We may have forgotten that the Council was primarily about a new mission. Perhaps readings of the Council and the reform it sought became too ideological, leading to a politicised and ultimately polarised experience of the Church.
Perhaps we were too forgetful, succumbing to a kind of amnesia which saw everything before the Council as negative and everything after the Council as positive.
We may have got wrong the tension between rupture and continuity; we may have misunderstood what the Council meant by reform.
Perhaps we were too inflexible, holding too doggedly to the agenda and understandings of an earlier time rather than adjusting to the later consequences of the Council which did not match our agenda or understandings.
Pope Benedict has been consistent in describing the most troubling phenomenon of the present time as a crisis of faith.
This is surely the opposite of what the Council intended, and yet it is hard to dispute what the Pope has described.
That is why he has proclaimed a Year of Faith as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the opening the Second Vatican Council.
We live at a time when there is an eclipse of God under the pressure of a secularist ideology; even if they believe in God in some sense, people often live as if there were no God.
God is no longer primal or central, even perhaps for believers; and there seems to be abundant evidence now of what Charles Péguy claimed in the early years of the last century – that there is a widespread denial of the Incarnation, even among the devout.
Péguy described this as a disaster, because it led people to think that they had to deny or escape from their humanity in order to find their way to the divinity. Christianity in fact claims the exact opposite – that to find our way to the divinity we have to enter more and more deeply into our humanity.
We have to discover more and more of the humanity of Jesus in order to discover his humanity. That is why it is important to contemplate his face.
The implication of this is that humanity and divinity ultimately converge, as they do in Jesus Christ.
The divinity assumed humanity so that humanity could find its way into the divinity.
This is a claim made more boldly and frequently in the Christian East than the Christian West; but traces of it are found in the Roman Missal, where addressing God in the Third Eucharistic Prayer we say for example, “We shall become like you”.
The claim needs to be carefully nuanced but it is true nonetheless: the divinisation of the human being is the goal of God’s plan.
The denial of the Incarnation is felt in many ways at this time, in particular in the burgeoning of new gnosticisms, which are always a denial of God in flesh.
Whatever about the appearance of new gnosticisms, this element is not new at all – the denial of the Incarnation. With it comes the denial of the body, community and history – all of which the Second Vatican Council sought to affirm unequivocally because the twin apocalypse of the World Wars had denied them so spectacularly.
Any new evangelisation which takes its cue from Vatican II will also be a clear affirmation of the body, of community and of history.
It will need to offer people a new experience of the body at a time when pornography seems an unstoppable tide, a new experience of community at a time when people want belief without belonging, belonging without belief, and a new experience of history at a time when many people subscribe unconsciously to Henry Ford’s claim that “history is bunk” and a kind of cultural amnesia is rampant.
All three come together in the Eucharist which is the celebration of a radically new experience of the body, community and history.
In that sense, the Second Vatican Council has as its ultimate goal a more Eucharistic Church and a more Eucharistic world.
In the Eucharist, the elements become the Body of Christ, which are the words spoken when Holy Communion is distributed; the community of the Church recognises itself as the Body of Christ; and all of history, past, present and future, is gathered up as we look to the final moment, the eschaton, when the triumph of Christ will be complete and God will be all in all.
If the ultimate goal of the Council is a more Eucharistic Church and world, it is hardly surprising that its first document was Sacrosanctum Concilium and that Lumen Gentium describes the Eucharist as “the source and the summit” of the Church’s life (11).
This means that at the beginning and end of the Church’s life and mission are the words of the Lord, “This is my body given for you”, which contrast dramatically with the words heard so often in this culture, “This is your body taken for me”. To move from those life-destroying words to the life-giving words of the Lord is what the mission of the Church is all about.
It is also what the Second Vatican Council was all about at a time when the logic of “This is your body taken for me” seemed regnant.
Never had the human body seemed so cheap as in the piles of corpses in the death-camps; never had community seemed so impossibly fractured as after the two World Wars; never had history seemed so tragic an arena where death held sway.
No wonder the Pope in 1950 pointed to the woman crowned with the twelve stars and with the moon at her feet. The Assumption was the Church’s way of saying that death, for all its seeming dominance, was not native to the human being.
And the Council was the Church’s way of saying that only the encounter with Jesus crucified and risen, the Lord whose scars shine like the sun, could provide the new start that was needed beyond the ash-heaps and the spiritual exhaustion which came with them.
The death-camps and the bomb had brought their fire, brighter than a thousand suns. The question was whether there was a stronger fire and a brighter light which could open a way into the future.
In searching for that fire and that light the Church pointed to Jesus crucified and risen.
The world had been crucified in the twin apocalypse; but it could be raised from the dead by the same power which raised Jesus from the dead, the love of God which is the one power stronger than death.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says at one point, “I have come to bring fire on the earth” (12:49). This is apocalyptic language which Luke adopts only to reinterpret it.
The reinterpretation comes when fire reappears eventually in the Gospel of Luke. We are on the road to Emmaus, and after the disciples’ eyes have been opened at the breaking of bread to recognise the presence of the Risen Christ, they say to one another, “Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road?” (24:32).
This is the Lukan answer to the question, What does it mean that Jesus came to bring fire to the earth?
The fire he came to bring is no conventionally apocalyptic fire. It is a different fire, the fire of the burning heart of those who listen to the voice of Jesus and contemplate the face of the Risen Lord.
The Second Vatican Council sought to respond to the fires of the death-camps and the bomb by setting hearts on fire through a new evangelisation which would enable people everywhere to see the Risen Lord and hear him, and to know that he is the one who walks with them on their journey out of hopelessness into hope.
That different fire is what the Council was all about and what the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI have been all about.
It is the goal of the new evangelisation, which will be the theme of the Synod of Bishops next month in Rome.
We have been talking about the new evangelisation since 1979. The danger is that the phrase can become a kind of vapid mantra: say it often enough and in the right way and something will magically happen.
But there is no magic involved in the proclamation of the Gospel; there is instead blood, sweat and tears – and also a good deal of imagination and courage.
We may hope that the great sharing of the Synod next month will lead us all to see more clearly and practically what we must do if we are serious about a new evangelisation, a new surge of Gospel energy at this time – and enable us to respond more imaginatively and courageously to what we have seen.
Ours must be a vision of fire – the strange fire which for the Bible is often a metaphor of God. In Exodus, we have the burning bush, the flame which does not consume (3:2); Mount Sinai, we are told, “was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire” (19:18); and the children of Israel are led through the desert at night by a pillar of fire (13:22).
The prophet Isaiah speaks of God as “a devouring fire” (33:14); and in his vision of the glory of the Lord, the prophet Ezekiel sees “fire flashing forth continually” (1:4).
There is certainly the fire of hell, but there is also the fire of heaven, which touches the earth at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit appears to the disciples in the form of tongues of fire (Acts 2:3).
The last century was engulfed in the fire of hell, and that fire still burns brightly.
The task of the Church in such a time was and is to point to a different fire, the fire of heaven – and then to lead the world into the strange and beautiful fire which does not consume, into the furnace of the perfect love which sets the human heart ablaze.
