“After that, we more or less returned to the previous state, but it was not worse,” he said. “What has changed? Not much.” The emergence of Islamist groups, from


the Muslim Brotherhood to the hardline Salafists, presents the most obvious threat to the minority, both men added. “There are dif- ferences among these Islamist groups … but all agree about wanting to establish a state based on sharia,” Naguib said. Protesting youths wanted democracy, but “unfortunately the others have loud voices and strong fists”. Attacks on churches have increased this year, with at least 26 killed and several hundred injured, Naguib pointed out. Away from the headlines, they added, Egypt is still using the same old methods to discrim- inate against Christians, such as insisting on informal “reconciliation meetings” to resolve disputes between Muslims and Christians. “They do not refer to the law, to justice or the courts,” said Naguib, and the result almost always favours the Muslims. Egyptian political analyst Amr Elshobaki agreed, saying his research showed local officials said they often did not arrest Islamists after church attacks out of fear of a Muslim backlash.


T


he Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo, Antoine Audo, gave a bleak assess- ment of the outlook in Syria. “If there is a change of regime, it’s the end of


Christianity in Syria,” he said. “They say only authoritarian regimes protect the minorities. Look at Syria, and see how the patriarchs fear any destabilisation of the regime. There is no alternative.”


Searching for historical parallels, Mark


Movsesian, director of the Center for Law and Religion at St John’s University, New York,


recalled the nineteenth-century


Tanzimat reforms which sought to modernise the Ottoman Empire. The introduction of full religious liberty and equality for all citizens sparked a violent anti-Christian backlash. He said: “the lesson is that even salutary reforms can have disastrous consequences for vulner- able communities.” Two bishops from the Maghreb saw reasons


for hope. The Archbishop of Tunis, Maroun Lahham, said some Islamists in Tunisia wanted sharia as the sole legal system, but “young Arabs, especially Tunisians, do not seem to be too enthralled by this Islamist ideal”. The former Bishop of Algiers, Henri Teissier, noted that Algeria has been stressing its Muslim heritage in recent years, a trend that would seem to work against any new or strengthened secularism. But it has also quietly tolerated a growing community of Muslim converts to evangelical Protestantism because they appealed to their right of religious free- dom, as the Arab Spring protesters do. “As a Christian, I must hope,” said Lazarist priest Fr Milad Sidky Zakhary of the Catholic Institute of Religious Sciences in Alexandria, in conclusion. “We’ve lived in this situation since the seventh century and maybe we’ve grown used to living with it. ”


■Tom Heneghan is religion editor for Reuters.


CHRISTOPHER JAMISON


‘The men started to realise that the engaging young women were future nuns’


“I always wondered where nuns came from,” said a thoughtful young man during a workshop at Invocation, the national discernment festival held the other weekend in Birmingham. Several young men in the workshop had only ever met old nuns and several of the young women had only met old priests. No ageist complaints accepted: for the under-twenties, old means over 50. Both genders were delighted to discover that youthful members of the opposite sex were considering a religious vocation. The men started to realise that the engaging young women in the group were future sisters, nuns and all manner of consecrated women. The women mirrored this experience; it came as a shock to them to realise that among these eligible young men were future priests. The situation reminded me of the Transport for London poster that shows a crowd of ordinary people on a bus with the caption: “It’s easy to spot our ticket inspectors – they look just like you.” An ordinary person with an


extraordinary vocation is one way to describe a person who lives a consecrated or priestly life. Yet religious vocation is sometimes understood as a mirror image of that – namely, a priest or Religious is an extraordinary person with an ordinary vocation. How has this come about? The tendency in the last decades


of the twentieth century was to downplay the extraordinary nature of religious vocation in order to emphasise the universal call to holiness. An oversimplification of that universal call implied that, since any Christian way of life is holy, you must be a very extraordinary person if you choose to be a Religious or a priest. After all, why give up marriage, career and independence if you don’t need to? In turn, many Religious and some


priests stopped living in extraordinary buildings, wearing extraordinary clothes and doing extraordinary work, choosing instead to live in simple houses, wear plain dress and enter the secular workforce. The rightness or wrongness of those choices is not at issue here. The issue


is that all this has given the impression that they are extraordinary people doing ordinary things. That impression is misleading. We


have somehow to restore the insight that priestly and religious life is an extraordinary vocation that comes to ordinary people. We need to move vocations promotion from recruitment to discernment. If you are looking for extraordinary people whom Christ is calling to do ordinary things then you are in recruitment mode: how can we find these extraordinary people and what can we do to recruit them? If you are looking for ordinary people to do extraordinary things, then you are in discernment mode: how can we help ordinary Catholics to discern the call of Christ in their lives and what can we do to support specific vocations? We have to create an ecclesial


culture shift. This shift was summarised in 1997 by the statement of the Holy See, “New Vocations for a New Europe” (In Verbo Tuo), which called on us to create “a culture of vocation”. Contemporary youth culture values freedom before all else and recruitment threatens that freedom. By contrast, discernment offers help in answering the question, “what kind of person do you really want to be?”, and enhances freedom. What this means in practice emerged at the annual conference of Catholic head teachers of the Birmingham Archdiocese. Last year, they were challenged to see the call of Christ as the centre not only of religious education and assemblies, but also of the academic curriculum itself. In the intervening months, several schools have risen to that challenge with great skill. At this year’s conference, held just


before Invocation, a secondary head described framing work on astrophysics with a meditation on Psalm 8, setting the unit within the context of God calling us into existence. A primary head described her school with 10 per cent Catholics and a majority of Muslim pupils. She is reframing the curriculum within the question, “Who has God called me to be?” When we have a discernment


opportunity within easy reach of every Catholic in this country, then we will have created a culture of vocation and the result will be more vocations of every kind.


■Christopher Jamison OSB is director of the National Office for Vocation of the Catholic Church in England and Wales. For information on Invocation, visit http:// invocation2011.wordpress.com


2 July 2011 | THE TABLET | 11


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