Defeat violence with Christian humanism – Bishop Treanor

Violent attacks on our civilisation should be met with a humanism based on a Christian willingness to emulate Christ’s self-sacrifice, Bishop Noel Treanor of Down and Connor has said.

Speaking in Belfast’s St Peter’s Cathedral, Dr Treanor called the brutal murder in France of the 86-year-old Fr Jacques Hamel the most recent in a line of “barbaric and violent atrocities”. While lamentation is a natural response to such violence, he said, neither it nor enhanced security would be enough. 

“In the face of this vortex of evil, this crisis in history and civilisation,” he said, “prayerfulness, re-discovery of faith in the God of Jesus Christ and living the gospel values are vital to the essential Christian contribution to promoting justice, peace and co-operation between peoples and nations.”

Maintaining that the French priest’s murder by Islamist militants forces us to face serious questions about the meaning of life, Dr Treanor praised the sentiments expressed by Paris’s Cardinal André Vingt-Trois since Fr Hamel’s murder.

He noted how in a homily directed to a congregation that included the French President and government ministers, Cardinal Vingt-Trois had stressed how hope “enables us to avoid succumbing to hate when we are tormented” and emphasised the importance of refusing to surrender to “the delirium of conspiracy”.

Scapegoating

The cardinal had warned against the dangers of scapegoating and circling the wagons, and cautioned against “developing a virtual universe of polemics and verbal violence” that can over time allow aggression to seem normal and become real hatred, he said.

Faced with a sense that growing violence imperils our society, Dr Treanor said, the only hope for our world lies in dialogue linked with faith-based thought and co-operative development work, preferably inspired by “the revelation in Christ of a  self-sacrificing God and by Christians and those ready to emulate that self-sacrifice in the pursuit of justice”.

He continued, “to build a humanism and a civilisation rooted in these values and their concrete requirements, we have to shape and build our own attitudes and convictions on the Good News of the Gospel,” warning against temptations to respond to contemporary issues with indifference, urging people “to resist the deadly temptation to the nihilism of ‘sure, why bother’”.