HOMILY FOR SOLEMN MASS FOR THE NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, YEAR B
ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 11 AUGUST 2024
The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has an illustrious CV. For 13 years he held the University of Oxford’s Chair in the Public Understanding of Science and in 2001 was made a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. He’s authored nineteen books and countless articles and received numerous honours. His most important work has been on the role of genes and DNA in evolution, culminating in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene—the book which introduced the term meme to the language.[1] Yet knowing lots about one area doesn’t make you expert in all, and the risk of too much fame is that you start pontificating on matters about which you actually know very little.
: In Dawkins’ case it was his 2006 book, The God Delusion, that catapulted his name into pop culture.[2] It was a rather unsophisticated polemic against any belief in a supernatural creator, and it earned Dawkins his reputation as a ‘secular fundamentalist’. But The God Delusion was a bestseller and Dawkins became the poster boy for the ‘New Atheism’ movement that blossomed briefly in the twenty-noughties.[3] It included philosopher Daniel Dennett,[4] cultural critic Christopher Hitchens,[5] and neuroscientist Sam Harris.[6] These “four horsemen”, as they delighted in being labelled, were notorious for their scathing attacks on religion and their adherence to a dogmatic scientism. They claimed faith was irrational, the scientific method the only arbiter of truth, and religion a benighted, often dangerous phenomenon. Never shy to joust with those advocating religious belief, on one occasion Dawkins debated our own Cardinal Pell on the ABC’s Q&A programme.[7] The ABC audience vote and the press reviews largely reflected the prior postures of the commentators and their publishers.[8]
All of which makes Dawkins’ comments on Christianity last Easter a little surprising. The great champion of unbelief professed himself ‘a cultural Christian’.[9] “I love hymns, Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos,” Dawkins confessed. This was echoed a few weeks ago by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, who admitted to being “a big believer in the principles of Christianity” and also referred to himself as a “cultural Christian”.[10] Though “not a religious person”, Musk praised the teachings of Jesus as “good and wise” and championed the call to forgiveness central to the Christian faith.[11] For Dawkins and Musk, it seems the central claims of Christianity are false but believing in them has had some good effects like art and music, charitable works or a compassionate morality. They think there’s something to turning the other cheek, feeding the hungry, and building great cathedrals, but they don’t buy into the Incarnation, Resurrection and Salvation stuff.
They’re not alone. Many of America’s founding fathers were deists, who thought Christianity essential for the new democracy, but doubted the divinity of Jesus.[12] André Malraux, the French novelist, art theorist and Minister of Culture, though apparently agnostic, thought Christian faith good for society and said that “The twenty-first century will be religious or it will not be at all.”[13] The Belarus President, Alexander Lukashenko, calls himself ‘an atheist Orthodox’.[14] His French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, is ‘an agnostic Catholic’ or a ‘zombie Catholic’.[15] And the Italian philosopher-politician, Benedetto Croce’s book Perché non possiamo non dirci ‘Cristiani’—Why we cannot not call ourselves Christians (1942)—is from the same stable.
I suspect it’s a much more common attitude than we generally appreciate. How many people call themselves Christian or think Christianity is on balance good for people, but live as practical atheists, such that God and the things of God have no purchase on their day-to-day lives?
Yet is such zombie Catholicism—where the faith has died in people’s hearts but lives on in their culture—really sustainable long term? Is it rationally defensible to promote a religion you don’t think is true? Can we have the fruits of a Christian civilisation without its foundational beliefs? Are we able to maintain that human beings have infinite dignity and intrinsic rights while dumping the idea that they are made in the image of God? Can liberal democracy, liberal education and much else we take for granted in our society survive without their original philosophical-theological underpinnings? Can we, for instance, promote endless forgiveness if people don’t believe God forgives, even from the cross, and enables us to do so, even when it’s very hard? Will an age without God keep producing works of exquisite beauty in art, architecture, literature and music? Perhaps the best answer to this is: perhaps. But an edifice built on such shaky foundations risks collapsing altogether…
In today’s Gospel (Jn 6:41-51) Christ is quite direct about this: “Unless you accept that I am come down from heaven, unless you are willing to be taught by Me, unless you let yourself believe, you will be like those wandering hungry and lost in the desert and you will not have eternal life.” What He offers is not just a vague ethos or aesthetic. Not the promise of a comfortable secular life dressed in some spiritual bling. It’s something much more confronting, more profound, more fulfilling: “I am the living bread come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever. And the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”
Wow! But what could this mean? When Jesus first called Himself ‘the Bread of Life’ and ‘the Flesh of God’ there were more than a few who thought Him delusional and abandoned Him (Jn 6:30,36,41,52, 60,66). “You’re just Joe and Mary’s son,” they protested, “We know where you’ve come from, and Nazareth is no heaven! And as for eating your flesh: no thanks, we’re no cannibals!”
Yet extreme as it sounds, it’s the heart of the Christian faith. God’s desire for union with us is so intimate, it brings us into being; so intense, it brings Him into ‘non-being’, emptying Himself of His glory to be one of us; so total, He gives us everything He is in the Bread of Life. Like the five thousand (Jn 6:1-15), like Elijah (1Kgs 19:4-8), we need to be sustained on our way, a journey not just to earthly approximations of truth, beauty and goodness, but through them to total communion with the God Who is Truth, Beauty and Goodness itself. And so He gives us not just words but substance, His substance, His flesh and blood, His body and soul, His humanity and divinity, in the Eucharist.
Receiving Christ in word and sacrament isn’t just an optional extra, added on to a cultural Christianity; receiving the Eucharist isn’t just a Catholic decoration for some vanilla or mere Christianity. No, as Paul explains today, Christ “gave himself up as a fragrant offering to God” and we must follow Him in loving in this self-sacrificing way. It is this Eucharistic life that has power to transform us and transform the world. Only then will there be a genuinely Christian culture to sustain us and us faithful to sustain it. Christianity without Christ, Catholicism without the Eucharist, civilisation without God: that’s the real delusion!
[1] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (OUP, 1999).
[2] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006). He had in fact previously published The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1986).
[3] Steven Poole, “The Four Horsemen review: Whatever happened to ‘New Atheism’?” The Guardian 31 January 2019.
[4] Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin, 2006); Religion and Science: Are They Compatible? (OUP, 2010); Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (Pitchstone, 2013).
[5] Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Hachette, 2007)
[6] Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Norton, 2004); Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006).
[7] ABC Q&A 5 April 2012. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwPeyssjIPY. Transcript at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/culture/debate-richard-dawkins-cardinal-george-pell-transcript/
[8] Leesha McKenny, “Dawkins and Pell battle it out in one hell of a debate,” Sydney Morning Herald 10 April 2012; Andrew McGee, “Bloody Pell! Q&A stoush with Dawkins fails to bridge the gap between faith and science,” The Conversation 13 April 2012; Karl Quinn, “Dawkins shades Pell in battle of belief,” Sydney Morning Herald 10 April 2012; Neil Ormerod, “Bruises all round in Pell-Dawkins street fight,” Eureka Street 11 April 2012; Guy Rundle, “Why Pell and Dawkins need each other,” Crikey 18 April 2012; Tess Lawrence, “For whom the Pell trolls: Dawkins smites George the ‘Spice Girl’ Dragon,” Independent Australia 14 April 2012; xxxxxx, “Pell and Dawkins struggle with the mystery of faith,” The Australian 11 April 2012; Greg Sheridan, “Pell’s performance was a revelation,” The Australian 122 April 2012.
[9] John Stonestreet and Shane Morris, “Richard Dawkins, a ‘cultural Christian’,” Breakpoint 9 April 2024.
[10] Simon McCarthy-Jones, “Elon Musk says he’s a ‘cultural Christian’—why some leading thinkers are embracing Christianity,” The Conversation 26 July 2024.
[11] Michael Cook, “Elon Musk is a ‘cultural Christian’: How does that work?” Mercatornet 25 July 2024.
[12] Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology (Kentucky UP, 2000); Thomas Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (Yale UP, 2017); Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol (Free Press, 1987); Bruce Miroff et al., Debating Democracy: A Reader in American Politics (Cengage Learning, 2011), p. 149; Michael Corbett, Politics and Religion in the United States (Routledge, 2013).
[13] Glenn Olsen, The Turn to Transcendence: The Role of Religion in the Twenty-First century (Catholic University of American Press, 2010).
[14] “Belarus president visits Vatican,” BBC news 27 April 2009.
[15] “France’s new president is a ‘zombie Catholic’,” Catholic News Agency 10 May 2017; Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras, Le Mystère français (Seuil, 2013).
INTRODUCTION TO SOLEMN MASS FOR THE NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME, YEAR B – ST MARY’S CATHEDRAL, SYDNEY, 11 AUGUST 2024
Welcome to St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney for the Solemn Mass of the nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Today is of course St City to Surf Day and some of you will have run your own obstacle course just to get here: I applaud you for your perseverance!
To everyone here today, both regulars and visitors, a very warm welcome to you all