WORDS Michael McVeigh

Social justice is an important part of our faith. But is that always apparent in our liturgies?

It’s 11am on Sunday at St Canice’s Parish in King’s Cross, Sydney. Inside the church, people kneel in silent prayer as the Eucharist is celebrated. From outside there is a slowly growing murmur of voices, broken by the occasional laugh or cry. Canice’s Kitchen is open for the morning.

In this space, we see the two faces of the Catholic Church operating side-by-side. Within the walls of the church, there is the solemn ceremony of the Sunday Mass, where Catholics gather in community to remember the stories of Jesus and to bring themselves into communion with God. Outside, the people on the margins gather for their own form of communion.

This scene raises an important question for Catholics: What is the connection between our Sunday celebration of Mass, and our commitment to social justice? Are they, as it seems, separate entities; or are they connected?

St Canice’s parish priest Fr Steve Sinn SJ compares the way Mass is celebrated in Catholic churches with a formal dinner at home, where everyone is on their best behaviour and wearing their best clothes. It’s a place where the messiness of life is often left at the door. Literally, in the case of his parish.

‘In the liturgy, people want everything to be right. They don’t want someone coming in who is going to disturb it all’, he says.

‘At St Canice’s we do have people actually sleeping on the steps. They’re human beings who are battling to make a go of their lives like everybody else. And the fact that people have to walk past the kitchen on Sunday and see hundreds of people having lunch—and often dogs biting, and people fighting, and people laughing, and noise that becomes part of the liturgy—it means you can’t ignore these people.’

He says the liturgy setting can highlight the gap between our intentions and our actions.

‘I don’t think a liturgy creates social justice as much as it reflects the living of it in people’s lives’, he says. ‘One of the things about the poor is that we don’t want to live with them and share our lives with them. Our lives are totally controlled, but with the poor it’s chaos. We’re out of our depth and we don’t want anything to do with it.’

Gerard Moore has written widely on the links between liturgy and social justice, and agrees that often the emphasis in the Mass has been on the Consecration and on the presence of God. An Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University teaching in worship and systematic theology, Gerard says the liturgy is actually designed to ensure social justice is a central part of how we live.

Just as voices of the people in the kitchen outside the Church invade the silence of Sunday Mass at St Canice’s, there are many instances in the liturgy where, if we listen, we can hear the voices of the marginalised. It’s just that often this meaning has been lost.

Specific lines in the Catholic liturgy have their source in the Scriptures. One of Gerard’s favourites is the ‘Lord have mercy’ prayer, which echoes the words of the Canaanite woman who petitions Jesus to help her sick daughter, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord’.

‘She’s got this multiplicity of things wrong with her—she’s foreign, she’s got a sick daughter which is another sign of sin, and there’s no man around so there’s something wrong there—but Jesus encourages her to speak out.

‘One of our leading prayers echoes this woman’, he says. ‘So who teaches Christians to pray? One of our great prayers comes from the poor and the outcasts. It leads us to think about who are our teachers.’

There are many other examples of prayers and actions in the liturgy that have a strong connection with social justice. Gerard points to what it symbolises when we make the sign of the cross on our bodies.

‘We are saying that we stand with the cross, and that means we’re standing with a man who was condemned as a criminal, who was cast out by his religion, who was pushed aside by his culture, who stood with other criminals, and who was accused but innocent.

‘If we’re going to stand beside someone like that, we have to start seriously thinking about who else we stand beside in our society.’

Gerard says the fact that the same ceremony is used in every church in the world also brings a great sense of egalitarianism to the liturgy.

‘At Pope John Paul II’s funeral, they had the Roman Missal on the altar, the same book I had in my office. So he’s actually buried the same way as my mum’s buried, and as I’ll be buried.

‘It’s saying that, deep down, we’re all just baptised. The social justice in that is that if that’s how God sees us through baptism, then that’s the eyes we should have in the world.’

At St Canice’s, Fr Steve says it’s funerals that tend to bring all the people together far more than any other liturgy.

‘It is the one time when ownership of that space [the church] and the liturgy itself is in the hands of the poor’, he says. ‘They come, they do the prayers, they speak, they remember. And others come too.’

These funerals are about recognising the shared experiences of a community, and celebrating the life of people often forgotten by the rest of the world. The masses have more in common with people sitting around a kitchen table, or in the backyard, than they do with a formal dining setting.

‘One of the things about our liturgies is if we were just dealing with half a dozen people we would probably have it down in the kitchen. We’ve set up these churches to cater for hundreds of people and it impacts on the way you celebrate.’

Fr Steve says that, in the end, the test of a community’s commitment to social justice is not in their liturgy, it’s in how they walk with others outside that liturgy.

‘I’ve always had the belief that the poor are our blessing. These people who are under the radar, who are invisible, if they are the centre of the parish everything will look after itself. If their lives are engaged with practically, with meals—meals are important in bringing people together—then the rest follows. The parish will have a life.’