Aussie Saints

I smile at the hooplah surrounding the imminent canonisation of the Blessed Mary McKillop. As a dear friend commented to me, it is wonderful to think that our first Aussie Saint, according to the Roman Catholic Church, was once excommunicated by her Bishop - surely the most extreme action a Bishop can take against one of the faithful.

The church has done a great job of creating rules about something only God knows about - indeed the Christian Scriptures dare to describe all followers of Jesus as Saints.

I have become a great devotee to the idea of the Communion of Saints, and I have no problem with the idea of inviting those long dead to pray for me, just as I will ask my friends here present to pray for me. The thing that intrigues me is this idea that prayers to someone after they have died, followed by a miraculous event, are the only pathway to Canonisation.

I also wonder about the ability of someone to declare that their prayers for a miracle were absolutely and only directed to the one whose Canonisation is sought. If I was sick with terminal cancer and I asked my friends among the Communion of Saints to pray for me, how would I know whose prayer it was that God chose to listen to so that they would be able to get the credit?

And then there are the other kinds of miracles.

What about the thousands of miracles that happened in the lives of children at schools run by the Brown Joeys because someone cared enough to ensure thay had access to an education?

What about the miracles that have happened in the lives of women, inspired by Mary McKillop, who joined her religious congregation and carried on the work she began?

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands or even millions, of Australian men and women whose lives of faith and good works have brought miracles into the lives of others, and inspired many other people to live their lives in the same way, passing on the miracle of a life transformed by God. I trust that others will count me among them.

Church conflicts -musings on a tragedy that keeps on keeping on

The owner of this blog has graciously offered me space for a little musing about church conflict. It was this person who said recently "all church conflicts are unique because the factors influencing each person is unique, but all church conflicts are also fundamentally the same".

The story of the Church throughout history is the story of more conflict and more people behaving badly than will fit on the head of a pin.

I recently read a lovely book called "Blessed Among All Women" by Robert Ellsberg -a compendium of the lives of holy Christian women who, for the most part, were abused, vilified, excommunicated, martyred and betrayed -mostly by people in power in the Church. That they kep their faith in such difficulties is amazing -that no-one has ever, to my knowledge, stopped the church long enough to ask "why do we keep doing this?" is even more amazing.

Australia is about to have our first official Saint -the Blessed Mary McKillop, who was one such woman. Her bishop excommunicated her for a time!

I would like to suggest that conflict in the church has as its base the same root causes as all conflicts in the human society we belong to -power and money. Someone has power and is jealous that someone else is more popular or more succesful so that they get afraid and attack. Someone has access to the money and the presige and others want it for their own causes.

Of course we follow a crucified God who gave up power and money to show us what love is like so fights over power and money are horrendously obscene. Perhaps that is why most churches don't want to talk about conflict. They don't want to talk about their last conflict and so they are never able to learn how to work their way through the next one so that a better outcome is possible.

People are different therefore we will disagree with each other. Like married couples however, if we are to live together we need to learn to 'fight fair" and to make up before the sun goes down.

Do you know of any Church that has taken the issue of conflict seriously enough to examine its own conflicts and seek a way through them to a win-win situation?

(There are some historic Peace Churches -the Mennonites and the Quakers for example -who have some valuable things to teach us about conflict. To learn however we would first have to own up to the violence we inflict on each other>