KEY POINTS:
What do we expect from the church and its leaders? Moral leadership? Social conscience? Good works? Or just to shut up and go away?
If you voted for the latter, you were probably not alone. In Britain, the Catholic Church's fierce opposition to the Labour Government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill - which has it engaging in what some critics call "untruths" and "scaremongering" about human-animal hybrid embryos - has even its friends telling it to butt out.
Lord Robert Winston, a Labour peer and eminent scientist, told the Telegraph: "I have huge respect for the Catholic Church, which does great good, but it will be destroying its probity with overblown statements of this kind."
All right, so maybe one or two cardinals went overboard with their (doubtless) sincerely held but erroneous "Frankenstein" scenarios, but churches have to tread a very fine line these days. Some of us might expect them to be the nagging voice of a nation's conscience, discomfiting governments, and wagging a moralistic finger at the wayward populace, but no one really likes it. Most people have an aversion to sermonising lectures.
In 2004, when the then leader of the NZ Catholic Church, Cardinal Thomas Williams, published an essay on the "spiritual bankruptcy of liberalism", comparing modern politicians to barbarians, whose "failure to protect basic values and rudimentary citizenship [was] fast converting our country into a moral wasteland", I argued otherwise.
I thought the cardinal an out-of-touch, old-fashioned clergyman who could have nothing of relevance to say to me. But on reflection, he had a point.
No one these days wants to hear sermons about morality or sin. In a secular society in which the freedom of the individual trumps all, these concepts seem outmoded and irrelevant. So we laughed when the Vatican newspaper published the musings of Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti on the modern evils of genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, causing poverty, causing social injustice, becoming obscenely wealthy, taking drugs and polluting the environment.
Girotti's social sins later morphed into the "new" deadly sins, courtesy of the mainstream media, but most of them made good sense to me. I can't say with any certainty or seriousness whether hell waits for those who commit these sins. But I think we can be fairly certain that we'll have a hell of our own making if we thumb our noses at them.
And that's the point really. The seven deadly sins laid down by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century - sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, pride - may be characteristics we recognise in varying degrees in every human being, but the Ten Commandments have always seemed about as socially resonant as you can get. Six are about how we ought to rub along with each other, listen to your mother and father, don't murder, steal, commit adultery, lie, or covet other people's things.
Of course, we've been looking for loopholes ever since, but the message seemed clear. Love one another or at least look out for each other or perish.
So it seemed like business as usual when the leaders of the Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, and the Salvation Army, issued a united call last week for "more policies to support social justice and compassion in 2008" under the banner of a campaign titled "Let Us Look After Each Other".
Along with urging voters to make sure they know "the commitment of individual politicians to just and compassionate policies", the church leaders called for a restoration of the benefit levels cut by National in 1991.
This was "ludicrous", charged a Herald editorial. "What point, other than a political one, would be served by restoring any facet of the economy to a position it was in 17 years ago? And why now? The church leaders surely have not been waiting nine years for the Labour-led Governments to heed the hikoi staged in National's last term. It is hard to escape the suspicion they have recovered their energy this year in anticipation of National's return."
What point? I'm just guessing but I imagine it has a lot to do with the increased suffering the churches' 500 social service sites are seeing around the country. If middle New Zealand is feeling squeezed, it's not hard to imagine the pain at the bottom, given rent rises of more than 7 per cent in the last year.
And one could argue that they've been busy where it counts, providing, among other things, child and family services, services for older people, food bank and emergency services.
Most churches know that help comes before sermons - preach too loudly and they turn away those needing help most.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
