Given by Fr Damian Howard SJ at the Autumn Gathering at Stonor Park on 16 October 2021.
Our meeting has been overshadowed by the shocking murder of Sir David Amess yesterday in his constituency. I know that all of us will be praying earnestly for his wife and five children as well as for the repose of his soul. We are offering this Mass with that intention.
The business of politics is above all a verbal one. Its practitioners use words to analyse concrete situations. They assert key values and principles and construct a shared sense of vision and aspiration. And they deploy all their rhetorical gifts to garner support, to channel energy and to galvanise people for action.
We all know what power words have. It’s a power we can only marvel at, bigger than we are. We are, are we not, at the mercy of words, our own sometimes but more frequently those of others. Sometimes words can wound us. But more frighteningly, they can create a shared sense of things which commands such plausibility that we imprison ourselves, cutting off fruitful possibilities because of the what can no longer be said.
The Gospel lauds those who are able to confess the Lord in the public domain. The first generation of Christians knew that what they were doing by invoking the authority of Christ. They knew it imperilled an easy relationship with the synagogue just as it threw up all manner of difficulties for the Roman state. Above all, by relativising the status of the Emperor, recognition of Jesus as the true Son of God invited the accusation that Christianity was anti-social, anti-political, anti-Roman.
This great house has in its time seen the coming and going of a good number of dedicated Christians who saw their mission as that of relativising the pretensions of princes, refusing to allow them to usurp the place of God and His Church. We owe them a debt of gratitude for their public confession of faith, even though so many of the went to their death without seeing any indication of the fruitfulness of their testimony.
So what is the call to us who live at a time when visceral divisions and polemics literally constitute a danger to human life? The answer is easy: to confess Christ before men and women, to acknowledge Him as the only one worthy to receive praise and honour and glory and worship. But lest that be construed, as it so easily is, as yet more sectarian polemics, let’s spell out what it means.
To proclaim Christ as King is to say that His way is the one way that is pleasing to God. And that is the way of peace, not violence. It is the way of mercy, not vengeance. It means accusing oneself before one accuses another. It means a politics of service, not of domination. It means bringing people together, not dividing them. It demands that we honour the image of God in all His people, no matter their stage of development, their colour, their sex or gender or their creed. Christ’s is the way of universal fraternity, of trust, of solidarity and of justice.
I know it’s easy for me to say such things. I am not the one who has to canvass support to win elections, to reach compromises in order to achieve this or that laudable goal, to adhere to the limits which the culture of the day imposes. For so many of those involved in politics, it is so much easier to sound a note of cynicism, to appeal to the baser instincts of the populace, to scapegoat and lie and distort. We all know that a great deal of political discourse in our country is debased. We can feel stuck in that, unable to change an entire system, too small to make a difference. I know people who have quit politics because they no longer see it as a place in which change can be made.
But listen to the appeal of the Lord this morning. Listen to the testimony of our martyrs. Listen to the kindness of Sir David and the plea of those who mourn Sir David as they cry out to heaven. Anyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man will acknowledge him before the angels.