Homily for the fifteenth Sunday of the year 1970 (12th July).

Readings: Amos 7, 12-15; Eph. 1, S14; Mark 6, 7-13.

There are many things which one can admire in Jesus, whether one is a Christian or not. But in some things Jesus is rather primitive and does not seem to know what he is doing.

I have no doubt Jesus would be turned down if he were to apply for the job of sales manager. At least, if he dared tell how he is accustomed to ‘sell’ his own message. His method seems entirely wrong.

Of course one can say: ‘Jesus is not selling soap or encyclopaedias; he is bringing a religious message.’ This may well be so, but does that make any difference? A message is a message. There are lots of people who sell religious and political messages. They want to make us their allies and they do it well.

To send one’s disciples away to preach without any material provisions seems rather irresponsible. Jesus’ order not to wear two tunics looks fussy. Much planning is not done, either. You just stay where you are received without even wondering whether there are not more strategic points from which to work. When people refuse to listen to you, you simply leave and do not really try to force on them the idea that they would be much happier if they listened to you.

Sending our preachers in rather poor conditions may be a gimmick, but not planning carefully where you stay and for how long, and refusing to put in too much effort, suggest that Jesus' preaching methods could be improved on. His message may be interesting but he does not know how to sell it.

The present renewal of the eucharistic liturgy can be seen as an attempt to remove some of the long-term effects of the imposition of extrinsic rites and ceremonies on the once-and-for-all given sign which is the means by which believers have access to the mystery of God in Christ. But what is that given sign? Bread and wine, certainly, but bread and wine precisely as bread and wine, in their full reality, bread demanding to be eaten to be bread and wine requiring to be drunk to become what it is. Not two substances which could be any other two substances, which could be say wood and iron, but bread and wine to be eaten and drunk. The sign is not therefore simply the two substances of bread and wine but all that these substances involve in the very understanding of them as bread and wine: people, and people to eat and drink them. The sign is the meal. The sign is the gathering of people eating and drinking the bread and wine, and the present liturgical reforms aim at making that sign as transparent as possible.

Questions can of course be raised as to just how little of such a sign there has to be in order for it still to constitute the authentic sign. What is meant by ‘people’? Does there have to be anybody there at all for the sign to be the sign? And if obviously there has to be (since a sign of this sort is a sign only for people), then how many people?

This is not a time to be digging the old entrenched positions a little deeper and then defending them, so it is worth noting with caution that each of the terms in this title trails with it a long history of old battles and rigid attitudes. In any case, the old certainty about the meanings of the words we use is one of the new uncertainties.

There is even an implicit assumption hidden in the order in which the terms are used traditionally. We take it for granted, perhaps, that tradition is rooted in scripture, and that the community is first formed, and then grows, by a causal combination of these two prior factors. This view holds that the people of the Old. Testament and of the New were ‘People of a Book’, who were formed by the scriptures which they accepted. They had a clear tradition, as well, handed down to them from the very beginning : ‘It was of importance that this tradition should be preserved without deformation; and fidelity to the received tradition was the ultimate assurance that the doctrine proposed was genuine.’ A little later in the same article the function of tradition as a vital factor in the formation of the community is explicitly stated: ‘… the spirit indeed taught the Church, but communicated no new word beyond that which Jesus had incarnated and uttered. The content of the revelation, once Jesus no longer dwelt on earth, was secured only by the faithful preservation and transmission of the word among his followers. Tradition must therefore be included among the constitutive elements of the primitive Christian community.’

I took advantage of updating sessions in Zambia last summer to put the following question to Zambian and missionary priests that I met: ‘Has your training really prepared you for your ministry?’

The question was deliberately ambiguous; training could be interpreted as spiritual, pastoral or theological. The question was put to eighty-eight priests, and it is revealing that nearly all of them singled out the theological side of their training for criticism. This criticism was certainly not ambiguous : forty regarded their theological formation as mostly irrelevant to their ministry, compared with eleven who considered it useful preparation; the other thirtyseven refrained from making any clear-cut statement, but suggested drastic modifications.

The quasi-unanimous reproach was that their theology had been one-sidedly academic and intellectual, aimed at furnishing their minds with answers to out-dated European questions, rather than at making them messengers of a living Gospel that would be Good News to the people they were sent to.

This sentiment of frustration is a symptom of a much wider problem. A young missionary or African priest, on the completion of a six- or seven-year course of study from which he rightly expected some sort of competence, complains that he has nothing effective to tell his community in his homily, no compelling News to announce to the school children in the period of Religion, no direction to offer to a people puzzled by a rapid social change, no contribution to make to the development of the country.

‘. . . I persisted in denying, and they continued to give me electric shocks, kicks, blows with a rod and punches in the ribs.

Once Captain Albernaz had me open my mouth to “receive the sacrament of the eucharist”. They put in an electric wire. My mouth became completely swollen, preventing normal speech. They shouted accusations against the Church, saying that priests are homosexuals because they do not marry. At 2 p.m. they finished the session. They brought me to the cell where I lay stretched out on the floor.

At 6 p.m. they brought me something to eat but I could not swallow a thing since my mouth was one big wound. A few minutes afterwards, I was led to the interrogation room for an“explanation”. There I found the same team of Captain Albernaz. They asked me the same questions and repeated the same accusations. To explain my resistance to the torture, they concluded that I must be a guerilla and I was hiding my participation in attacks on banks.

The questioning began again, in order to make me confess my share in the attacks: electric shocks, kicks in the genital organs and in the stomach were repeated. I was beaten with small planks of wood, cigarette butts were snuffed out on my body. For five hours I was subjected to this dog treatment. Finally they had me walk the “Polish corridor” (a torture consisting in having the prisoner pass between a double file of soldiers who are beating him all the while until he falls unconscious). I was assured that this was just a sample of what would happen to the Dominicans.

The impossible is becoming a reality in Brazil, the unthinkable has become a fact. Methodical violence, unjustifiable repression, systematic use of denunciation and torture are emerging in a country where they were least likely to do so. Nothing is so opposed to Brazilian culture. Yesterday, speech was still circulating freely in the streets as the light and blood of communication. Today, blood is flowing in police cellars where so many men and women have fallen without knowing why: torture and corpses impose fear and silence everywhere, and dumb and terrifying rumours. Tongues fall silent, censorship and suspicion are rife.

Yesterday, the intelligence, subtlety and the manifold resources of human relationships were enough to solve or cope with all problems. Today, relationships are shattered by the suppression of all discussion; violence breaks age-old links, the brutality of a military order tends to multiply withdrawals, retirements and breaks, except between those who profit from the rCgime. The liberal tradition which inaugurated the first Brazilian Constitution in 1824 is thrown out as so much refuse.

This brutality takes the Brazilians by surprise, in the way in which horror suddenly strikes out of a morning sky which seemed to be dawning like any other. ‘Que cosa!’ Brutality strikes them before they have time to realize that it was possible. And the military may be maiming for a very long time a sort of national Brazilian genius in the way in which they are maiming so many victims of torture.