Homily for the Vigil Mass of St Peter and St Paul
Readings for Year A: Acts 12:1-11l Psalm 33; II Timothy 4:6-18; Matthew 16:13-19
Unless you were partying in Brixton or sunbathing in Bournemouth, you will doubtless have heard the sad news that Margarita Pracatan passed away last week at the age of 84. Pracatan, a Cuban chanteuse, made an unlikely name for herself in Britain in the 1980s, having caught the talent-spotting eye of Clive James, well-known Australian journalist and weekly chat show host. May she rest in peace.
The joke was that Pracatan was very obviously a truly dreadful musician. To witness her incorrigibly Latin rendition of an Abba number or a song by Lionel Ritchie was a wicked pleasure; the frisson was a result of never being absolutely certain whether she was in on the joke or not. In some ways, Pracatan’s exuberant mediocrity was reminiscent of the work of New York philanthropist Florence Foster Jenkins, a singer so spectacular ungifted that thousands paid good money to pack the Carnegie Hall, with crowds of her disappointed fans having to be turned away. But a pall of tragedy hung over Florence who was so traumatised on reading the reviews the next day, and discovering what the critics really thought, that she died within the week.
Margarita was different. There was no ego trip, no conceit – just an ebullience, an extraverted joie de vivre which carried us all along, distracting us from the agony of having to work out what she really thought her performance was worth. The more the audience howled with laughter, the greater her glee as she clutched her feather boa and proclaimed her love for her “darrrrlings”. As Clive James put it once: “she is us without the fear of failure”.
I‘ve been struck throughout the pandemic at how oppressed we Christians can be by the fear of failure. As the churches shut down and we became rapidly engrossed in the joys of livestreaming, anxious voices announced the death of European Christianity. “They’ll never come back to Mass,” I heard one cleric opine. “The Church will be condemned for not being close to the people at their moment of need!”, said another, apparently oblivious to the many simple ways in which priests and people would manage to find ways of staying in touch. And in some places, church leaders were chastised in the harshest terms for their failure to celebrate the sacraments in defiance of the authorities.
It’s as though we all think that the continued existence of the Church depends on us. Given how weak we all are, that’s a nightmarish thought. For this generation of the Church of Jesus Christ finally to succumb after two thousand years of martyrdom, recusancy, Kulturkampf and all the rest, just because we were scared to say an illicit Mass, is, for those of us with a delicate conscience, a terrifying prospect. Such failure is surely something to be truly feared.
But such fear is hardly in the spirit of St Peter and St Paul. The lives of these two pillars of the Church testifies to the transformative power of faith. But that transformation is not about “manning up”. It’s not a move from fear to courage so much as to an abiding confidence in what God is up to in the world.
The declaration of Jesus about the new Church he is going to build on the rock of Peter’s faith is not couched in terms of fragility and risk. The Lord does not say “I will build my Church. And it will be a very frail and delicate and it probably won’t survive long because human beings are so weak, especially those insipid twenty-first century Catholics.” No, the vision is of a powerful, irresistible movement that can be opposed but not defeated – one that will prevail even against the gates of death. Individual Christians may be fragile but the Church is anything but.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Greek Orthodox statistician, has coined a new expression to denote the conceptual opposite of the word “fragile”. You probably thought that “robust” or “resilient” did the trick, but he points out that they are both really median terms between fragile and what he calls “anti-fragile”. Because the true opposite of fragile is to be able to thrive on danger and threat, not merely to resist attack, but actually to gather strength from it. He cites the mythological example of the hydra, a many-headed monster which grew two heads for every one that was cut off. To be anti-fragile is to be like that. It is probably significant that we didn’t have a suitable word in English until Taleb gave us one.
The early Church was anti-fragile. The worse you treated her, the faster she grew. Those first martyrs going into the arena were not anxious about the survival of Christianity. They went to their death singing God’s praises. Their confidence in God’s saving power was manifest in an absolute conviction that what God had begun in Jesus Christ was irreversible. Nothing could overcome it because, as St Paul puts it, nothing can separate the faithful from the love of God made manifest in Christ.
I hear the same confidence in St Edmund Campion’s famous Bragge:
be it known to you that we [Jesuits] have made a league […] cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood.
This from a man who has seen the Church’s descent into a chaos and a schism on a scale we are unlikely ever to witness in our own time. How wretched is the anxiety of today’s “concerned Christians” next to such death-defying trust?
This is the point: that his sense of the Church isn’t based on empirical observation, it’s not the result of some anthropological field study. Look at the Church without the eyes of faith and you’ll see a shambles, a bunch of sinners and hypocrites, charlatans and egotists. It couldn’t possibly survive on its own, let alone faithfully carry a message of peace and mercy through the generations. This is the Church of Paul the fanatic and Peter the coward. But the eyes of faith see something surprising, something hidden since the foundations of the world. Something anti-fragile. Because in this Church the unfathomable ambiguity of the human being meets the infinite mercy of the living God, and does so again and again, drawing out of it something new, human and divine.
Let’s not be the Church of poor old Florence Foster Jenkins, forever trapped in the fantasy of our own glory, perpetually vulnerable to the disclosure of the truth. Let us follow instead the indefectible way of Margarita Pracatan. Let our song be her indomitable, shame-free ballad. Let us be for ever a people unmindful of the prospect of failure.
Fr Damian Howard SJ