Pray with the Pope: The Gift of the Church’s diversity

Every month Fr Chris Chatteris SJ reflects on Pope Francis’ prayer intention

Intention: Let us pray that the Holy Spirit helps us recognise the gift of different charisms within the Christian community, and to discover the richness of different ritual traditions in the heart of the Catholic Church.

The more we know about the universe, the more we are blown away by its diversity. Some scientists think that it’s so dizzyingly diverse that we humans will never be able to classify it all. We just won’t have the time or the technology. Maybe the effectively infinite variety in the universe is a divine hint regarding its Creator’s nature.

And yet there is a side of us which rails against diversity and displays a rage for uniformity. We do not say “Vive la difference” but “Vive la similitude”.

In theory we concur that diversity is good and healthy, but when it comes to the crunch of dealing with the variety of people with which God has surrounded us, our desire for order and control kicks in and we opt for safe conformity. We prefer “people like us” rather than rejoicing in the interesting challenge of getting to know and appreciate the other.

Many rites in the Church

Sometimes we even pretend to ourselves that there is a uniformity which isn’t really there. Many Roman Catholics are prone to this. How many of us, when we talk about the “Catholic Church”,  mentally include the Maronites, or the Melkites, the Chaldeans, the Coptic Catholic Church, the Greek Byzantine Catholic Church or the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church?

My list has 18 more Catholic Churches, all different rites in full communion with Rome. We meet the metropolitan of one of these rites, the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church, in this issue on page 26.

So if we like to think of the Catholic Church as a massive, monolithic institutional and Roman structure, with the Latin-rite liturgy as the only standard, we are mistaken. Our Church is, in fact, quite a motley and colourfully inculturated crew, all as fully Catholic as Latin-rite Catholics.

St Paul is explicit about all of this. He takes joy in the different charisms or gifts of the Church, where prophets and administrators rub shoulders with each other and where all have an essential part to play. He invokes the metaphor of the body and its different parts, in which even the humblest part plays an essential role in the functioning of the whole.

“Here comes everybody,” as James Joyce famously wrote in Finnegan’s Wake. We thank God for that and ask for the grace to reflect on the Holy Spirit’s preference for variety and diversity.

Published in the January 2024 issue of The Southern Cross