A Sunday reflection

No, not a sermon - perish the thought! Just some stuff I've been thinking about as I explore my family history.

When you fill out a Census form - or join Facebook - you are invited to specify your religious beliefs. For many of us, that's the only time we give any thought to religion. But for our ancestors, religion was the stuff of daily life, a vital part of a person's identity. So today I thought I'd look into the belief systems of our German and Irish forbears, and how they came about.

A very short history of Christianity.
The need for some kind of spiritual or religious belief system seems to be an integral part of human nature. Since the first men and women gathered around a fire, every society on the planet has had its rituals and its gods. Even today most individuals acknowledge some Deity or Higher Power as part of their personal ethos. The belief system of our immediate ancestors was Christianity. Whether they were German Lutherans or Irish Catholics, religious beliefs shaped their lives and the societies in which they lived.

In the year 2000, many of us are not regular churchgoers, and are more likely to be passionate about social issues than religious ones. But until recently, religious belief and worship were part of everyday life, and influenced many life-changing decisions.

Sermon on the Mount - Fra Angelico

Christianity began with Jesus Christ, an orthodox Jew born at Bethlehem in around 4 BC. Jesus lived for most of his life at Nazareth in Galilee, where he worked as a carpenter like his father Joseph. At the age of 26, Jesus was baptised by his cousin John the Baptist. Following a period of spiritual retreat in the desert, he began to teach the word of God and to heal the sick. His essential message is contained in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospels.

To the Roman rulers of Galilee, Jesus and his followers were a potential source of civil discontent. He had a large following, and was openly critical of the Jewish leaders of the day. On a visit to Jerusalem in AD 30, Jesus was arrested and accused of blasphemy by the Jewish establishment. He was handed over to the local Roman Governor, Pontius Pilate, who ordered his execution. He was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem.

Convinced of his resurrection and ascent to Heaven as the Son of God, his followers, notably St. Paul, spread his teachings around the Mediterranean. The Romans, normally tolerant of religious diversity, were irked by Christian refusals to acknowledge the Emperor as a deity, and fed quite a few of them to the lions. Martyrdom added lustre to the new religion, and it continued to spread throughout the Roman Empire, until in 312 the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome.

After Constantine’s death the Roman Empire was divided in two. The eastern Empire, based in Constantinople, remained Christian, but western Europe fell to the invading barbarians. Christianity lost ground, and large areas of Europe had to be re-converted in the 6th century. By 1054 the eastern Christians could no longer accept the authority of Rome, and the Christian church split in two - the Eastern Orthodox church, ruled by a Patriarch, and the Roman Catholic church, led by the Pope. The mediaeval Papacy became increasingly powerful with the rise of the Holy Roman Empire, and the wealth and influence of the church led to increasing laxity and abuses.

Martin Luther

In 1517 a Prussian monk and theologian, Martin Luther, was increasingly dismayed by the corruption and decadence of the Church hierarchy. He felt that they had strayed a long way from the original ideals taught by Jesus Christ. When Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of a Catholic church in Wittenberg, Saxony, he was initiating a religious debate in the accepted way. But his protest was the beginning of a new religious era, and heralded the end of the absolute dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe.

His objections, publicised throughout Germany by the emerging printing industry, played right into the hands of the local heads of State, long frustrated by the absolute power of the Holy Roman Empire – really an arm of the Church – and when Luther began urging local rulers to rebel against the iron-handed authority of Rome, they were much inclined to listen. In 1529, many German principalities and towns signed a document of ‘Protestation’ against the Emperor. Thus the members of the new, reformist Lutheran Church came to be known as Protestants.

Irish church ruins

Lutheran dissidence was soon followed by Calvinism in Switzerland, and the English reformation which had began with Henry VII’s rebellion (for his own reasons) against the Pope. Protestantism was popular with the common people, who had resented the huge wealth of the Roman establishment. Europe was quickly divided into the Protestant northern countries and the Catholic south, and religious and civil wars followed.

The Reformers purged their churches of Popish practices and returned to the Bible and the teachings of Christ as the word of God. In the atmosphere of religious fervour which followed, excessive zeal and bigotry were almost inevitable, with long-reaching results for many of our ancestors. Fighting for one’s religion, or enduring persecution for it, tends to confirm a belief in the ‘Rightness’ and ‘One Trueness’ of a personal creed. So Catholics and Protestants became implacable foes, each equally hating and fearing the other, a situation which has endured almost to the present day, and has influenced the decisions and shaped the ways of life of both our Catholic and Protestant forbears.

Even today, many of my relatives actively practice their Catholic or Lutheran faith, and strive to live as good Christians, and for many their faith is a source of comfort and sustenance.

There seems to be far more tolerance between Protestants and Catholics now, unlike the bigotry my parents experienced before their marriage. Today our distrust seem more directed towards members of the Muslim faith, due to the activites of a misguided few.

Interior of Lutheran church, Bethany, SA

For my German forbears, their religion had many positive aspects, not the least of which was literacy - since Martin Luther decreed that all children should attend school, so they could read their Bibles and their hymnbooks. Many parties of Germans emigrating to Australia were actually church congregations, including their Pastor, and a church and school were the first buildings they erected on arrival. Family historians have cause to be grateful to the Lutheran pastors, in Germany and Australia, for the meticulous records they kept.

My great-aunt was  a  nun

By contrast, my Irish convict forbears, Thomas and Bridget, were both illiterate, having been born in an Ireland occupied by the British, where the education of poor Catholic children was discouraged. But theirs  had been a Catholic country for centuries, and succeeding generations were quick to take advantage of any schooling available, and become devout members of their Church once more.

I was raised in the Catholic faith, but as a teenager I became disenchanted with many aspects of the Church. Like many since, I was confused and uncertain of the value of religion in my life. For most of us, that's the end of the matter- we continue to observe the values we have learned, while rejecting faith in a Supreme being.

And yet, all the major religions - Catholic, Protestant, Judaism, Muslim, Buddhist and others - have rules that show us how to live in the world, observing the rights of others, striving for goodness within ourselves. Without this foundation, how do we manage to be good citizens and good people? Have we, in rejecting religion, thrown the baby out with the bathwater?