Peter CostelloIn search of the ‘Celtic Church’
Recently I was looking up that classic book by Dom Louis Gougaud, Les Chretientes Celtique, about early Irish Christianity, in search of some references about the adventures of the Irish saints at sea, such as St Colmcille and St Brendan.
The book was first published in French in Paris in 1911, an edition of which I possess a copy bought for a mere €2 at the TCD book sale ñ evidence treasures can still be found. However, the book had to wait until 1931 to be translated into English by Maud Joynt, a well-known scholar of the day, under the title Christianity in Celtic Lands (London: Sheed & Ward) – in itself a significant fact. One would have thought that the new Ireland would have eagerly embraced this important, and still valuable, book but that was not the case.
Can it be that the new Ireland preferred to live with its old myths rather that the facts of modern scholarship? Who knows? The book now bore the subtitle 'A History of the Churches of the Celts, their origins, their development, influence, and mutual relations', for he deals with Scotland, Wales and Brittany too.
Dom Gougaud specifically rejects the concept of a 'Celtic Church' distinct from the Church on the continent ñ an idea which still flourished today in some quarters, but leaves the Roman minded very uneasy.
Appeal
However, I was struck by a remark in the preface to the translation. He remarks that the title had to be changed slightly, as the English language had no word equivalent to chretiente, ìused in the sense of a Church in the process of formation and as yet imperfectly organisedî, such as were those Christian communities of the Celtic world in the early Middle Ages.
This implied, for the author, a process of becoming a Church, he suggests. English only conceived of a finished Church, so to speak. This seemed an interesting insight. When did people come to think that the Church was 'perfectly organised'. Certainly the early Christians in the first and second centuries, for whom the mission of Christ must have been alive in a way it never was again in the imaginations of people, were trying to develop structures which would allow the local communities to be united in some way in an age when both travel and communication was difficult.
The idea of a central figure at Rome was not a notion which would have appealed to some early Christians, especially those who were actually outside the borders of the empire. To allow the Church to become too closely identified with the structures of Rome was in a sense to limit its appeal to the much wider world. But then as many early Christians lived in expectation of a second coming and an end of the world, perhaps this did not matter. It was merely a temporary measure so to speak. In time a firmer hierarchical structure evolved, modelled, of course, on the administration techniques of the Roman Empire. But to see the Church of the Middle Ages as 'perfectly organised' as Dom Gougaud might seem to imply is to place later changes in a perspective.
Structure
The present structure of the Church operating through the Sacred Congregations in Rome, rather than through the local rule of bishops in the apostolic succession, is modelled again on the new administrative ideas of the emergent nation states of the 16th and 17th Centuries, in which powers were increasingly focused on the monarch. This, too, cannot be conceived of as a perfect structure, and in our times as the rapidity of communication means that responses must also be nearly immediate, the dilatory nature of Church administration is becoming all too apparent.
How can a few people in offices in Rome rule in detail the local lives of billions? Perhaps we should return to that notion of chrÈtientÈ, to seeing the Church not as a fixed organisation in any permanent way, but an organisation always in the way of becoming, a growing body rather than a fixed one. Growth and change after all are the signs of life. To cease to grow, to cease to change, is to begin to die.