The Catholic priest who wrote his dissertation on Alpha
We ask Fr Matt Roche-Saunders, a Catholic priest based in Aberystwyth, can Alpha work in the Catholic Church? He’s done the research.
What’s been your experience of Alpha?
Ultimately Alpha in its very essence, as I understand it, is about going out. So from the very first Alpha, it should be for people from outside of your parish. I’m thinking ‘who can I invite from my friends? Who can I invite from my family?’ That is such an important turn of the heart.
Who can I share this with? All of a sudden the heart is made a missionary heart, we don’t just think ‘it’s for me’ but it’s for me for others. That’s key for Catholic parishes, that it would help faithful Catholic people to look out, beyond their own community and to the town they’re in.
So you wrote your dissertation on Alpha - what drove you to do that and what was your journey with it?
I knew good people who I trusted who had decided not to use Alpha because they said it wasn’t Catholic. I knew good people who I trusted who had decided the exact opposite. I thought, ‘these people are good, they’ve obviously come to these different conclusions by some decision, I want to know how they got there.
But I wanted to do it properly, to go through everything Alpha has to say and ask ‘can this sit with our Catholic faith?’ That was the impetus. And is this a tool we can trust? Can we trust it to do what we’re hoping it will do for our people?
My conclusion was, if we understand Alpha as Alpha understands itself, then it’s an excellent tool for evangelisation in the Catholic Church.
If we expect Alpha to be doing something it doesn’t set out to do, i.e. to be a course on catechesis, to cover every box, to be a Catholic course, well it didn’t intend to be that so it can’t be that, so of course, it’s going to fall down.
So you approached your dissertation and this study undecided about Alpha?
Yes, not decided because I had never even been to Alpha. I had just heard stuff, ‘it’s from this tradition’ or ‘it doesn’t say this’ or ‘it does say this and so we can’t use it’.
I never heard them say anything that I could disagree with as a Catholic. What they actually say in the videos I don’t disagree with.
The general direction of that course is Jesus as we understand Him, as our saviour. To couple it with good preaching, good liturgy, and good community life will do the rest.
Can you remember the points that convinced you?
Kerygma
[kəˈrɪɡmə] noun
The preaching or proclamation of the Christian gospel.
So one thing I did look at in the essay was Alpha’s presentation of the kerygma. The idea among some Catholic commentators that I used for the essay suggested that the Catholic kerygma must include a Eucharistic reference, and a reference to the Church, and therefore a reference to Our Lady.
In Alpha, the kerygma is presented as ‘Jesus has saved me, Jesus has risen from the dead for me, Jesus sends the Holy Spirit.’ This idea that there’s a dichotomy between the two things is something that I find really dangerous actually in a Catholic Context, because to suggest that the kerygma isn’t complete until everything has been said is to forget the fact that it is a Catholic thing to say that Jesus has saved me.
Pope Francis has been quoted as saying something like, ‘the first and primary thing that we can say is ‘Jesus has saved me’’. Jesus is my saviour. That’s what we believe! And the fullness of our tradition is that we can just keep on going deeper and deeper into that forever and we’ll never get to the ‘end’ of the kerygma. Absolutely, we want to give a nourishing introduction to Jesus Christ, but ultimately we can have all the ‘peripheral stuff’, but if we’re missing the centre, that Jesus Christ has set me free, then that’s not Catholic at all. To focus on that centre point is really important because then it fans out.
Do you think that the richness of ideas and theology in Catholicism makes it harder to just to hear ‘Jesus has saved me’?
I remember when I was about seventeen, someone asked me in school, ‘so what do Catholics believe?’ And I said, ‘well Catholics believe at the Mass that Jesus body and blood becomes present in the Eucharist.’ And that’s true - I love our Eucharistic faith! But to a person with absolutely no understanding of faith whatsoever, there’s nothing to grasp onto in what I’ve just said. I was so filled up with love for the Eucharist in that moment that, ultimately I didn’t really answer the question!
What do we believe? I heard a talk once in which someone asked, ‘if you had twenty seconds on a stage to say what you believed, which is about the length of time people would give you on a tube, what would you say?’ And I think, generally speaking, from people I can think of from my parish, they would be filled with fear in answering that question. It’s a fear reaction. I think some would respond with ‘well, you’d better ask father that question’. To change fear into joy in our parish in answer to that question would be tremendous.
How does all of this inform how you see your ministry going forward?
I think it’s really important to listen, I’ve learned that from Alpha. To listen is a really crucial element of our ministry. Listen without immediately responding. To allow people to speak their minds. Just to be and to listen to who they are.