How the Dean of Clonmacnoise stole Christmas
Sunday January 06 2002
THE controversy surrounding the ideas published on the Dean of Clonmacnoise's website, and his consequent if ineffective silencing by his Bishop, demonstrates the importance of timing in theological debate.
Christmas is (or is not, according to one's point of view) the perfect season in which to announce one's priestly disbelief in Jesus as the son of God.
The Very Reverend Andrew Furlong has been deprived of his authority as a priest by the Most Reverend Richard Clarke, Bishop of Meath and Kildare. Clarke is a fairly argumentative and demanding Christian himself, not at all content either to offer or to accept the benign inanities of some aspects of church orthodoxy.
He is not, therefore, the most likely bishop to reach for the disciplinary crosier; the provocation must have been extreme.
I haven't visited the Dean's website, preferring my theology in small doses as administered in the cool, if authoritative, aisles of the Church of Ireland cathedral in Cork.
There it is taken in with gulps of one of the most graceful, harmonious and consoling liturgies in the world.
It is offered by intelligent men and women operating, I assume, on a single common principle: however complex, divisive and different their personal beliefs may be, they share at least an acceptance, so far as the human mind can accept, that Jesus was divine. Few of us as lay-people can define divinity.
God without the definite article is what Christians make of the gods of other peoples. And perhaps the Dean is both emotionally and theologically correct in asserting that such absolutism is hypocritical in a church which has been historically responsible for the wholesale slaughter and prolonged persecution of those who do not believe its teachings.
From the soldiers on that peak in Darien, to the rebuttal of Galileo, the Christian/Catholic ethos has had its episodes of gross physical and intellectual brutality. But it's pushing this apologetic a little too far to imagine, as I think the Dean does, that he is himself one of the victims of Christian dogmatism.
The Dean insists that his views are shared by many of his colleagues; why should he be silenced? The simple answer is that they if they exist in their legions as he suggests are already keeping quiet. Perhaps they feel that so long as they are willing to take their wages from a church founded on belief in the divinity of Jesus, they shouldn't preach too loudly against that belief, even if they don't share it. And there's the real issue for the Dean: it's not a matter of faith, really, much though it might look that way. It's a matter of putting his money where his mouth is, of not biting the hand which feeds him, or at least waiting until he's finished eating before baring his teeth. It is, vulgarities aside, a matter of good manners an old-fashioned virtue.
Dean Furlong is not a martyr. Instead he's something of a religious Grinch, as in Dr Seuss. How the Dean stole Christmas might be the eventual title of an account of this controversy. The Dean has forgotten another little matter most priests try to observe: his private doubts should not be imposed on his public role until he is prepared to forgo that role. The reason is simple: the church is its people, the communion.
Again, among that diminishing congregation, there will be private doubts, but Christmas is the time when those rebellious murmurings find a kind of transient, revisited and unifying peace in the image of something which might have happened.
