A conversation with Michael Morwood

Catholic New Times, Dec 18, 2005 by Ted Schmidt

For 28 years, Michael Morwood as a Sacred Heart priest in Victoria, Australia, active in adult education. Then he was silenced in February, 1998, by the Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, the most conservative of papal watchdogs. Without the due process of theological investigation, the popular educator was warned by his religious superior not to speak on the topics of Incarnation, Redemption and the Trinity, which had been the core of his 1997 book, Tomorrow's Catholic: Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millenium. His religious order then sent Morwood to Sydney, only to find that the ban on him was moveable. By episcopal fiat, he found himself virtually unemployable. He resigned from his priesthood of 29 years.

Since that time, Michael Morwood has been busy on the international circuit talking about the very ideas the Archbishop refused to consider. Tomorrow's Catholic w has proved to be a popular book in adult faith groups. The author's purpose was fairly basic: "to help Catholics re-image and re-language some of the basics of their faith, including a cohesive religious worldview in harmony with our place in the universe." Morwood is among many contemporary faith animators, well-schooled in theology, who are helping church people to revision their place in a universe whose nature is radically different from that of the authors of the Bible.

We must start, these writers insist, with the new cosmology. Morwood's inspirations are cosmologists like Brian Swimme and theologians such as Thomas Berry.

Since 1998, Morwood has written two more popular books, Is Jesus God (Crossroads, 2001) and Praying the New Story (2004) In the first book, he asks the necessary questions about fall/redemption theology. Did the first humans cause a major disruption in their relationship to God? Did God really want Jesus to die to fix this broken relationship? In what way was Jesus, the itinerant rabbi of the first century, "God?" What can it mean for contemporary Catholics operating out of a brand new cosmic story when the Vatican says that the church is reliant on Jesus being "an innocent lamb meriting life for us by his blood which he freely shed?' The author believes that contemporary theologians are not undermining Christian life and in fact the "good news" can become "better news." For him there are too few places where serious believers can honestly engage the tradition and wrestle with these and other questions.

In late October, Morwood was in Toronto for a public lecture and a Saturday workshop, before heading to Milwaukee for some workshops at Call to Action. Walking over from his Cabbagetown digs, he stopped by CNTs office for a long conversation. I asked him how he would appraise the state of the Catholic Church today.

"Well when you look at the present pope in the last 10 years and his track record, it's almost a paranoia about protecting the premise that Jesus is the only saviour in the world, so we can't have any plurality. He has silenced our theologians. He gave a very significant talk at the Synod of bishops. On Oct. 6, 2001 he said the biggest danger of our time is the undermining of Jesus. It begins with a denial of the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the sacrificial nature of his death and Jesus self-understanding of himself as God. A year later, he gave a talk where the pope said 'A God who cannot intervene is not the God of the Bible. These are facts of faith.' You say to yourself, how an intelligent man say these things in such an unnuanced way. Then he gave a talk on the 10th anniversary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, where he alludes to the massive criticism levelled by theologians about the use of scripture in the Catechism. He ends up admitting that 'all of this is hypothesis and the scripture scholars disagree among themselves, as if the church can ignore these criticisms and if it disturbs us we don't have to listen to it."

Morwood went on to look at the early history of the church

"When you look at the first 100 years of the church when it splits from Judaism, the church must give itself an identity, much like in the Old Testament. The Jews were God's people, so now in the New Testament, especially through John's Gospel, it becomes 'we now have access to God through Jesus.' Then you get Clement, Ignatius and Irenaeus locking the church into the idea that we are the way to God and Jesus is the mediator, uniquely so, between us and God and it's always an "elsewhere" God. So we keep giving lip service to the foundational understanding that God is everywhere, God is that reality that holds everything. We keep playing this elitist, divisive game. The church is caught. We don't know what to do if we let go of this. There is this great phrase in the Catechism which says, 'The church, which has the mind of Christ, knows that we cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin, without undermining the mystery of Christ.' What do we do with this theological mindset of the church as the way to God? It's church identity, but it is also authority and power I am afraid there won't be any renewal in the church until this theology is brought into the open and critiqued."