Terry Fewtrell, People Power- Currency of the Times…
http://www.catholica.com.au/editorial/035_edit_150311.php
People power is the currency of the times. Daily we witness governments being shaken by the resolute action of people united in a cause. Strong motivation propels them to exercise a power that was not previously within their grasp. Australian Catholics also find themselves on the cusp of a power and influence they have never previously contemplated but must now seize.
The Catholic Church in Australia is slipping down a precipice that threatens to change it forever. While sexual abuse scandals have shaken it to the core, it is the dramatic fall in the number of priests that is hastening it to a tipping point. The problem is not new. The demographics have been plain for 40 years as the seminaries emptied in the 1970s and few have joined since.
The numbers are now drifting to the point where the critical mass required to service many dioceses, including Canberra Goulburn, is ebbing away. The impact is becoming dramatic for both the remaining priests and the people to whom they minister.
The recent unexpected deaths of two relatively young priests in the archdiocese, along with the significant breakdown in the health of two others, hastens the decline.
Archbishop Mark Coleridge wrings his hands, asks for prayers for vocations and says the faithful will have to get used to fewer masses and travel greater distances. He has also reconvened the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council to “consider these issues systematically and creatively”, saying it is time for more voices to be heard. Let’s hope they will be listened to, not just heard.
There is nothing so far in the archbishop’s approach that suggests he is really prepared to look at these challenges with a fresh, unbiased mind. If there were he would start from the truth that the people know well: that there is no shortage of vocations, there are simply a lot of silly outdated rules that prevent the vocations in the Catholic community from being realised.
Catholics in rural Australia share the no-nonsense approach of those from the bush on other issues. They are prepared to change and adapt to a priest drought just like any other drought. But they also expect the Church to face up to the realities of its situation and not live in a fool’s paradise.
What Australian Catholics have had enough of from their bishops is the refusal to think creatively (and more in the spirit of Vatican II) about priesthood and Church. Canberra’s [Auxiliary Bishop] Pat Power is an honourable stand-out among his peers, as a man who speaks truth, as he did in these columns last year advocating for major Church reform, despite personal cost.
The official refusal to move outside a clerical mindset is a major factor why the Church in Australia risks becoming marginalised as a spiritual force among its people. As a sacramental Church, the inability to minister those sacraments to its followers will be the final step away from community relevance.
The particular significance of the exit of women…
It will come as the culmination of the past 20 years that has seen alarming declines in congregations and mass attendance. Of particular significance in that decline has been the walking away of so many women, not in anger but great sadness, as they grapple with a male-dominated Church seemingly incapable of appreciating or properly affirming the role and rights of women within its structures.
The overall decline has not resulted from angry dispute, rather from a poignant sense of disconnection. In many ways the decline in Catholics participating in their Church is somewhat like the great “walk-offs” of our indigenous people over the years. The Gurindgi and the Cummeragunja people walked off in a dignified way in protest of treatment that they knew was wrong and of which they decided they could have no part. A similar poignancy applies for many Catholics.
Freedom Day banner celebrating the famous strike by Gurindji stockmen from Newcastle Waters and Wave Hill stations in the Northern Territory. For more photos and more detailed information on the Gurindji walk-off visit www.library.uq.edu.au/fryer/1967_referendum/labour.html
The passive laity…
Despite its rebellious Irish roots, to date the responses from the people has been muted and passive.
Through their failure to listen and act, the hierarchy is now inviting a much more assertive response. If the Catholic community wants to have a functioning broad-based Church into the future it needs to act now. It is no longer good enough to keep the head down and say your prayers.
If Catholics really value their Church they must be assertive now in demanding an end to a model of stewardship that compromises the future for short-term career and comfort.
The injustice to an ageing priesthood…
On a personal level it is simply unjust to look the other way to the unreasonable demands that must increasingly be made of a diminishing number of priests. To simply lament the growing burden on priests while turning away from different and appropriate pastoral responses becomes an injustice. Faced with the abdication of responsible leadership by most of the country’s bishops, it is the people who must call it as it is and demand something better.
Only the people can save the Church. This applies across the Australian Church. The priests that remain are, in large measure, exhausted and battle-weary. Many feel isolated and powerless.
More significantly, a fair number of them are disillusioned with the hierarchy. This comes from the persistent refusal of bishops to consider options outside current frameworks of Church and priesthood. It also comes from a pattern of hiding behind edicts from Rome, rather than challenging them.
Many priests sustain themselves with the view that the Church needs them more than they need the Church.
What priests and some bishops seek most is for the people to be more assertive in the demands they make of their bishops. To say to them that they want them to be brave and that they will support them when they are. But only courage will earn the people’s respect.
- Australian Catholics need to be much more assertive in all aspects of Church life.
- They need to challenge authority where it lacks true authenticity.
- They need to question and probe where statements and actions speak more of clerical protectionism than a humble authentic theology.
- And they need to be prepared to withhold their financial contributions when arrogance and ignorant bluster persist.
Time to get active…
This year is significant for Australian bishops as they undertake their five-yearly consultations with Rome on the state of the Australian Church. Recent such visits have earned the Australian hierarchy much criticism as they meekly buckled to intimidation by the Curia, seemingly encouraged by the previous pope. Australian Catholics ought not tolerate a similar self-serving performance this year. Courage will certainly be required and the people must play their part in calling out that courage.
15/03/2011 at 10:12 pm Permalink
Given the size of the world wide church, I suspect like other statistics on larger subjects, economics, and the like, that the statistics on changing church demographics will have different interpretations, and different commentaries can be formed, not at all polarised – their will be a range of views. I can only comment on the St Mary’s – SME changes of recent years more specifically.
The much publicised idea of the more progressive St Mary’s members becoming SME, and more conservative Catholics forming the old church would appear on the surface to be the bell curve, but I for one do not represent any such curve. The racial, age, and particularly class demographics are fascinating – a considerably Irish Catholic – white Australian largely 30s to 70s (and younger kids) becoming SME, whilst the old church has become a much more multinational affair than it ever was in it’s 145 year history. A broad spread of ages, but more in their 20s at the old church, and certainly a broad spread of incomes. I’m happy to be corrected on those observations, particularly as our communities are continually evolving.
The priest issue is an interesting one – particularly in relation to the changing nature of the mass, only the larger weekend masses I think are tending to remain, with other community activities replacing the less popular smaller events where a priest need be present. In a way that’s a good thing – at the old church, it has meant lay people have had to learn to take responsibility and work together without deferring always to a priest, and you see that at SME too with more cluster groups. The “visiting priest” scenario at the old church with an administrator definitely has some positives. Some countries such as Malaysia, I’ve heard, rotate priests after 5 or 6 years at a parish. The questions then in the local church seems how the priests are managed, as much as purely numbers of priests. Perhaps the intention is to not have a full-time priest at the old church, at least for some time, not necessarily due to a shortage of priests. St Mary’s has become part of the central deanery, which is actually a very good thing – linking the church to a smaller group of churches, rather than standing alone. As a church musician, I’m excited about the potential this creates.
The shift of people in Australia away from church? A comment I most hear (particularly from ‘lapsed’ Catholics) is they just find church boring, and look for a priest who is engaging, which we certainly had with Peter and Terry at St Mary’s – and in fact, that’s a huge element of the St Mary’s story of recent decades and the formation of SME. From my part, week after week I talk to visiting musicians at the old church who would come to play and sing there just for the building acoustic and atmosphere alone, even if they found a congregation of 60 at a mass disappointing. The bar for music in Australian suburban churches is often very low – it doesn’t take much in a church as stunning a venue for music as the old St Mary’s to make the music sound considerably better than your average suburban parish, and thus for many people, make St Mary’s a more interesting church to attend than your average parish, and one more good reason for there to a good community there.
I think at some point SME and the old St Mary’s will have more to do with each other, because there are so many stories of individuals that do not fit the ‘statistics’. That is after all a very Catholic approach, and has been Peter’s approach, to focus on the individual journeys of members of our church, a reflection of his own personal, spiritual journey some would say, but an approach that Catholic priests are very good at, and renowned for.
17/03/2011 at 8:27 am Permalink
” A comment I most hear (particularly from ‘lapsed’ Catholics) is they just find church boring”
That’s an interesting one. Why should it be so? Imagine you are a catholic at Mass, anticipating the moment when you will be offered the body of Christ – actually, physically, taking into yourself the substance of God. And you are bored?! The problem is surely not with the church which has, against all odds, offered this incredible sacrament for 2,000 years. The reason must lie with the bored person themselves. There they are at Mass, sitting and standing, participating in rituals they no longer believe in – waiting for something interesting to happen.
18/03/2011 at 6:01 pm Permalink
Hello Contributors,
Terry Fewtrell is doing an Abbott: calling for a people’s revolt against the Vatican fear cripples; old men who fear change because they lack faith. But why join a revolt when you can join the Revolution. A generation walked out decades past, their children have kept on walking and nobody’s talking of going back. While any good person wanting to changing the Stalinists dead controlling the Vatican can try their luck, they best remember the words of Rabbi Jesus: “leave the dead to bury the dead”. The delusional old men of Rome are living in the glory of the Middle Ages when their operation was at the zenith of its power. But their carnival is over. The period in Christian history which began with the Reformation is finished. It began in mass murder, of the Thirty Year War and Inquisition, and ended in even greater mass murder of the twentieth century European death orgies. While I have offered strong constructive criticism of Peter’s people – to correct error, incorrectness and confusion – I complement their courage in faith to “ move on”.
Love Fosco
22/03/2011 at 4:05 pm Permalink
My point about “boredom” did not relate specifically to the issue of the interpretation of the eucharist – my comment on “boredom” was a general comment on Catholics who have been to mass for many years and are expressing how they feel, at the SAME TIME expressing that the eucharist is the body of Christ.
The issue is the amount of repetition in the mass – not an easy issue to address at all, given the beauty and reassuring structure of that communal prayer, tried and tested over the centuries – the mass simply works – the musical settings of the mass can be stunning, and they have formed a crucial part of the development of our Western music – but… the mass can be boring.
Catholics in this sense, crave structure, and I to a large extent, agree with that – I can’t deny that’s part of my heritage and mindset. It is, however, the mass, as most often said in Australia, repetitious and boring. There was an element of that in the old St Mary’s too under Kennedy – in fact even more so at times because they deviated from the set prayers, and their alternate prayers had only one form, however, they did attempt to address this issue, and they did in part, in particular, being more inclusive of the laity, and making the homilies more interesting.
Why was there no process to engage with the St Mary’s priests and community and include them in liturgical reform? That is the million dollar question, and the even bigger question, why has liberal catholicism been apparently sidelined in this process of liturgical reform, and reform within the Catholic church?
Perry hasn’t provided any answers on this, neither have his friends. I don’t think any blog contributor here has. I have provided some additions to the St Mary’s story, but as to these 2 bigger questions I don’t know either. I’ve suggested looking elsewhere other than this website. In fact, SME has another blog site which I find far better because I’m able to engage with SME people on a more personal level.
This blog here at stmaryssouthbrisbane.com is in part a way for SME to use people like Perry, and St.John watsisname and others to advertise “my God, these are the boring legalistic old farts we are trying to get away from”, and you know what, many people reading this blog would agree. Well done Perry and friends with your negative comments on promoting the SME cause.
27/03/2011 at 9:33 pm Permalink
Tim, it may surprise you, but I am happy to promote SMX. I think people should have the courage to follow where their beliefs lead them. It’s a very sensible thing to worship alongside those of the same spiritual beliefs. (I suppose that SMX would not see themselves as ‘worshiping’ anything, so perhaps a communal ‘being in the mystery’ would be the more apt expression there). I think this is a more honest approach than asking people to sweep their differences under the carpet (and just focus, as you say, on the accoustics – or remember the good ol’ times).