Re-finding the language of faith

There was a fascinating debate in Britain’s House of Lords last week about education achievement and the need for young people to have access to equal opportunities.

The debate was extraordinary for its breadth and depth. While everyone agreed about the need for better outcomes the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Justin Welby pointed out that a “major obstacle” to the education system is “a lack of clear internal and commonly-held values”.

“We live in a country where an overarching story which is the framework for explaining life has more or less disappeared. We have a world of unguided and competing narratives, where the only common factor is the inviolability of personal choice. This means that, for schools that are not of a religious character, confidence in any personal sense of ultimate values has diminished.

Skills

“Utilitarianism rules, and skills move from being talents held for the common good, which we are entrusted with as benefits for all, to being personal possessions for our own advantage,” the archbishop said.

Dr Welby went on to say: “The challenge is the weak, secular and functional narrative that successive Governments have sought to insert in the place of our historic Christian-based understanding, whether explicitly or implicitly.”

The archbishop’s contention that Britain lacks an ‘overarching story’ could as easily be applied to many other countries – Ireland included.

The diminished place of the Church and the fact that many Irish people no longer see religious faith as something to be cherished means that the common set of values and ideas that were once taken for granted can no longer be taken as a given.

The challenge for contemporary Ireland is to ask the piercing question of what fills that space. Is there anything other than rampant individualism, and if so, what guides choices?

Undoubtedly, young Irish people are – for the most part – altruistic and good-hearted in their charitable outreach and concern for the vulnerable. There are instinctive Christian values, even if people choose not to articulate these values using the language of Faith. The task for the Church is to try to help people to re-find the language of Faith. It’s a remarkable thing that many young Irish people spend 14 years in Catholic schools but struggle to articulate anything resembling a coherent Faith.