Twenty years ago I sat in a hall with several hundred people listening to a Catholic priest describing the state of the Roman Church. It seemed to me that so many people present, adolescents at the time of Vatican II, became adults at the same moment as the Church began to renage on the promise of the Council that we, the laity would be treated as adults and given a new place in the Church. The altar came closer to us. Then barque of St Peter, faced with profound change in the secular world hit the rocks becoming flotsam and jetsam left to the oceans’ currents.
Our childhood had shaped our religious consciouness: we had a shared vocabulary, embedded cultural attitudes which shaped our morality, the same sacramental initiation for all and a sound heritage of spiritual wisdom, often armour-plated, and disguised in gold leaf, by a theology shaped by a need to justify, convince and contain; intollerant of other positions. We had been shaped to fit, like corks, we were cast overboard in the shipwreck of a Vatican suddenly out of touch, at least in Western Europe. The betrayal was followed by widespread sexual abuse and financial corruption comin to light which slowly helped undo the claim that this was the only one true Spiritual authority on the planet. Nonetheless we harbour, in this last phase of our lives, an affection for Christianity and an awareness that the wreck contains treasure of infinite value. The raft of corks is a simple metaphor for the simple life-raft those of us who fell or jumped overboard now have to cling on to.
Perhaps the greatest change is that through our own experience God is revealing himself to ordinary people and not, as we were told as children, only through a the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.