Photo: St Columbans Mission Society
When I began my formal study in the seminary in the early 1960s, there were three core subjects: the bible, dogmatic theology, and moral theology. I found moral theology to be the most boring subject imaginable. However, Vatican II had begun, and things were beginning to happen in the Catholic Church. Theologians were publishing theological studies that promised to change much of what we understood on various aspects of the Church’s teaching.
Such was the three-volume study of moral theology, The Law of Christ, by Bernard Häring, a German Redemptorist priest who had worked as a medic in the German army during World War II. He served on the Russian front, reputedly the bloodiest of that war, with horrific casualties on both sides regardless of who was winning the battles.
Häring was born in 1912 and died in 1998, aged 85. A New York Times obituary noted that: The Rev. Bernard Häring, a Roman Catholic scholar who influenced the sweeping modernization of Vatican II by emphasizing a moral theology of Christian love rather than the cataloguing of sins, died July 3 at a German monastery (Reference: Barbara Stewart, See the article in its original context from July 11, 1998, Section A, p. 9).
For Häring, morality was related to an encounter with God through faith. He described moral living as a response to Christ, the Word of God. Faith in Jesus Christ, he said, leads us to understand moral values as responsibility - as a response to Christ’s invitation to follow Him.
Häring’s work had little, if any, impact on our moral theology course. However, his three-volume work was in the seminary library, and some of us would dip into it now and then, although not enough to imbibe the framework he used to develop a new style of moral theology. The weight of years of learning the rules of right and wrong during my schooling and once again in the setting of a four-year seminary course on moral theology left me more or less stuck in the cataloguing-of-sins approach despite there being a lot about it that seemed not to ring true.
Fortunately, the down-to-earth common sense of Peruvians with whom I began to work in 1968 helped me open myself up to a fascinating understanding of what being a Christian was all about. The Peruvians got me to open my mind and heart to a way of wondering and searching. Even though I lost the plot at times, life became much more a journey of discovery than the following of rules.
For me, a normal part of parish work in the poor suburbs of Lima was blessing houses, either because they were new or because people felt they were haunted in some way. While I had no trouble understanding the request to bless a new house, blessing haunted houses was another matter. Early on, in the case of the supposedly haunted houses, I would sometimes return a week or so after the blessing to ask how things were. They were always happy to inform me that all was now well - the house was at peace with itself, so to speak.
I remained puzzled and eventually asked some of my more senior colleagues about their understanding of this blessing custom. One priest, who would have been born in the 1920s and hailed from Ireland, told me that blessing a house was quite common in his youth as there were many places where murders had been committed because quite recently there had been a civil war that pitted family members against each other, resulting in the murder of some by their own family. After such a crime, it was common for residents to feel that there was something seriously unsettled about their house or its environment. They called on the priest to bless the house and so banish the evil spirit.
While I did not understand this as well as my older colleague did, I took it on board as an answer that I might have the opportunity to verify. In the meantime, I simply got on doing as people often requested, and blessings became part of the parish routine, as did baptisms each Saturday evening when twenty to forty might turn up for the sacrament. San Martin de Porres was a busy parish in that sense.
One day, maybe in the same parish, but I don’t recall the details, a couple asked me to bless a house in a rural area just beyond the growing urban sprawl of Lima. They were not church-goers, but they had some form of faith and had decided their adobe mud house was haunted. They told me they had come across a human skeleton where they had been digging a trench to pour concrete foundations for a new house. It must have been buried illegally, and so they presumed the person had been murdered. Apparently, an effective way of covering up murders was to get the body to a rural estate and bury it in a field, placing the corpse lower than the plough could reach.
Again, I checked later to find out if the blessing had been effective. It had.
Life on the land was so harsh that they rarely had the chance to get into the habit of going to church. Rural Peruvians generally saw the inside of a church once a year at the annual harvest festival. Many, maybe most, mixed their ancient indigenous religious beliefs with those instilled in them by their Spanish rulers.
Columban Fr Peter Woodruff lives and works in Australia.
Listen to "A Way of wondering and searching"
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