We are all Family

by Dr Raymond Perrier · November 1, 2015

I have been thinking a lot about the concept of family recently. Not just because it had been preoccupying 300 bishops in Rome over the past few weeks. Nor because my mother is visiting me from England � though she is and that is always delightful.

Archbishop Denis Hurley, a father-figure

It�s rather because family words have come up often as I have been preparing to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Archbishop Denis Hurley, which will be marked with a whole series of activities in Durban culminating in a big gala concert.

Naturally, we will be welcoming members of his own family, from South Africa and Australia, nephews, nieces, and cousins, including Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenburg. They clearly feel a close affinity to �Uncle Denis� and have stories to share about family cricket matches or playing hide-and-seek whose intimacy few can match.

But Denis Hurley also had another family, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the OMIs, of whom he was a member for over 70 of his 90 years. And in the nature of a religious order, it is not only the Oblates that he knew and lived with for whom he is family but also younger Oblates, even from outside South Africa, for whom he is a role model.

Then there are the many Catholics that I talk to, especially over the age of 30, who remember Hurley personally and talk of him with the affection associated with an uncle or a grandfather. They all have stories of how they shared a key moment of their lives with him: first Communion, confirmation, marriage, the funeral of a loved one, their arrival in a strange city.

And then, perhaps surprisingly, there are so many people in Durban, not Catholics, many of them not Christians, who also speak of him with affection and even love because he is, 11 years after his death, still �our Hurley�.

Why else would the mayor and the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Mercury newspaper, and the mosques and the temples and the synagogues, want to get so involved in celebrating his 100 years?� We did not need to persuade them. Instead they seem spontaneously to want to gather next weekend to celebrate a patriarch who, in a sense, is father to so many.

The term �father� is, of course, one that we Catholics use a lot. Even though Jesus specifically commands us not to apply it to anyone on earth (Mt 23:9), we are quite accustomed to addressing our priests as �Father�, and indeed the first among equals of all our priests as �the Holy Father�.

In using �Father� in this way, we are extending a term that we use for a blood relation and applying it to someone else with whom we have a different but also important relationship. We do the same in religious life with the terms �Brother� and �Sister�.

It seems curious that one part of our Catholic custom lets us extend the term �father� so broadly and naturally, while another part (our traditional ban on divorce) does not let people stretch the term to include a second husband.

The children of my dear cousin certainly have no difficulty calling the man their mother has been married to for 20 years �Dad�, rather than using that form of address for the man whom she first married, who produced the children, and whom my cousin divorced after he beat and abused her.

In our Catholic tradition, we live very freely with a flexible notion of family. Religious congregations have in many cases become alternative families. New Christian movements (like Focolare or Sant�Egidio) have all the hallmarks of an intentional (as opposed to natural) family.

For some people, a small Christian community or sodality can be a true place of support and love when their biological families let them down.

If a Muslim trader or a Hindu lawyer or a Methodist bishop tells me that for them Archbishop Hurley was �like a father�, I am secretly proud that a man in whose name I work can have had such an effect on people around him.

And, at a more profound level, it is embedded in our Christian theology of �the one Father�� and our Catholic tradition of solidarity that we treat all people whom we encounter with equal respect as �brothers and sisters�. We are not entitled to privilege some people over others just because we share the same DNA.

Isn�t this what Jesus was shockingly reminding us of when he said, after being told his mother and brothers were waiting for him, that everyone was his mother and his brothers (Mt 12:46-50)?

I have to remind myself of that when we are faced with 300 homeless people waiting to be fed: I have to treat each one of them as my mother or my brother.

Family words are powerful words, the first ones we speak, the ones we reserve for our dearest moments. They are not fragile flowers that need to be protected or defended. They are robust and strong terms that grow through being stretched and tested and used.

The synod struggled with the idea that the term �father� or �mother� or �husband� or �wife� might be used in new ways by new kinds of family. At the same time, the Church has herself, in creative and productive ways, shown how family words can draw us into new and Spirit-filled relationships with each other.

I never knew the grandfathers from whom I am descended. I also never knew the man whose centenary I am about to help celebrate. But it feels like Archbishop Hurley is becoming a third grandfather to me; and I can thank the Church for showing how that term can be stretched.