4^th Sunday of Lent B

14 March 2021

You may have noticed that this week’s Reflection column in the newsletter is composed by Fr. Michael. In it he writes of the Pope’s visit to Iraq, which happened only last weekend.

Pope Francis greatly desired to visit this country. He knew the risks he was taking, travelling there in the midst of the Covid Pandemic and the awful, nonsensical violence by terrorists. He went, driven, he says, by the Holy Spirit. He felt compelled to visit the persecuted Catholics and other Christians there; to encourage the those who have suffered so much since the invasion of 2003 and that of the Muslim extremists. In this time, more than 2/3 of the Catholic community have been forced to migrate elsewhere or been killed, leaving less than 300,000 of their original 1 ½ million behind. Pope Francis was not only visiting the Christians, however, he wanted to be a sign to all people of good faith that they were not forgotten, and that God still loves them.

There are two images of that visit which remain foremost in my mind. One is the image of the Pope, sitting, intensely listening to an old man in the robes of a Shia Muslim Ayatollah. This is the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The second image is that of the Pope praying in the ruins of a bombed Catholic church in Mosul; a church that had been destroyed by the extremists.

Both of these photos would have been unimaginable five or six years ago. They show how this Pope is opening both the church and the world around us to a movement of reconciliation and mutual respect between people of different religions.  This is leading to a better understanding that all of us, all humans and the whole of creation, are all creatures of the one and same God.

On the plane home to Rome, the Pope told journalists that he had no anxiety at all when meeting with the Grand Ayatollah because he felt deep within that this is a holy man, a man of God. And the Ayatolla proved that in his readiness to receive the Pope in his own home, despite the uproar this could cause among the extremists of his country.

This meeting is a reminder of that other meeting between the Pope and a leader of Suni Muslims, the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb. It was this meeting that encouraged the Pope  to write his encyclical Fratelli Tutti, as he tells it himself in the first pages: “In [the preparation of this encyclical], I have felt particularly encouraged by the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, with whom I met in Abu Dhabi, where we declared that ‘God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters’.”

The Second Vatican Council stated in the decree Nostra Aetate: “Let Christians, while witnessing to their own faith and way of life, acknowledge, preserve and encourage the spiritual and moral truths found among non-Christians, also their social life and culture” (Nostra Aetate 2). The Church is called to be a sign of holiness, of union with God and of unity among all human beings. If the Church remains holy and totally attached to God, then anyone who is seeking God will recognise God within the church and a true, faithful, Catholic will recognise God in other holy people. It is in this spirit that Pope Francis was able to say that he was totally at ease with the Grand Ayatolla Ali al Sistani – because it was 2 holy people meeting in the presence of God.

In many ways this experience of the Pope was similar to that of Nikodemus’ meeting with Jesus, as we have just read in the gospel. If Nikodemus had listened to his friends and fellow- pharisees, we would never have gone to meet Jesus in the middle of the night. He would have stayed among his friends and his life would never have been enlightened by the light of Christ. He would never have known the joy of knowing Jesus. But he did not listen to the advice of fear and hesitation and he went to his encounter with Jesus. He, being a true man of God, was able to recognise the presence of God in Jesus. He found the light.

If the Pope had listened to and taken the advice of the soothsayers of doom, the Christians of Iraq and their Muslim compatriots would never have seen the light of the meeting of the two holy men: both sincere seekers of God. Their hope would never have been rekindled. They would have remained in the darkness of fear and trembling. Now encouraged by the Spirit of forgiveness, of reconciliation and prayer, they will be the light of Christ in the strife-torn country of Iraq and who knows what Kingdom-driven changes we might see there in the coming months and years.

Our hope is that we who live our different beliefs and religions here in GB will also be truly and heartfully attached to God; that we will be so God-centred that we will also recognise the presence of God in each of our religions and that we will cooperate more and more to build God’s Kingdom, to give God God’s rightful place among us.

Terry Madden