The Catholic Church in Australia: the struggle goes on.

The situation of the Catholic Church in Australia is at least as parlous as in Canada, so any objective account inevitably will be depressing. Better then to begin with a good-news story even if it is but a small part of the total picture.

Same-sex "marriage"

Last August the Marriage Amendment Bill 2004 passed through both houses of the Australian Federal Parliament. The Bill upholds the traditional meaning of marriage as "the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life" and specifically bars recognition in Australia of any same-sex unions solemnised overseas.

A record 16,000 submissions--overwhelmingly in favour of traditional marriage--were received by a Senate committee that had been earlier set up by Opposition parties to stall the legislation in the Upper House. That was followed in early August by a National Marriage Forum in the Great Hall at Parliament House, Canberra, which drew 1,200 delegates.

These undoubtedly swayed the Labour Party (the major opposition party) to support the Liberal-National Party coalition's legislation so that it passed through the Senate--having earlier been passed in the Lower House where the government has the numbers. The prospect of a federal election being called in the second half of 2004 (on October 9 in fact) no doubt focussed some minds.

Much of the credit for bringing about this legislation in the first place must go to the National Civic Council (NCC), founded in 1941 by one of Australia's outstanding Catholic laymen, the late B.A. Santamaria, with the help and encouragement of Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne (who died in 1963).

Since then, the NCC--which is unique in Australia and probably throughout the world--has evolved from a body designed primarily to counteract Communism to an umbrella organisation that defends marriage and family, Judeo-Christian moral values, Australia's national integrity, and orthodoxy within the Catholic Church and Christianity generally. It is by far the best-organised, most comprehensive and influential body in Australia committed to resisting the inroads of secularism in Church and State. It is privately run, self-funded, with no formal links to Church or government.

The NCC, which has its headquarters in Melbourne, has offices in most of Australia's large population centres and an active membership in the thousands across the country. It publishes a wide range of journals and newsletters on politics and economics, social issues, foreign policy, marriage and family, bioethical issues and religion (via the monthly AD2000 which this writer edits). The NCC's Thomas More Centre holds regular Summer and Winter Schools for young people as well as conferences with distinguished speakers from Australia and overseas. It has also moved into book publication and distribution. The organisation enjoys the support of several bishops, including Cardinal George Pell of Sydney and Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne--Australia's two biggest cities.

It was the NCC's pro-family arm, the Australian Family Association (AFA), which first rallied other like-minded family and religious groups to head off moves to legitimise "gay marriage" (given recent developments in Canada and the US) by calling for legislation to be put in place that clearly confirmed the traditional understanding of marriage nationally. The fact that marriage comes under federal jurisdiction made this move possible. Several years ago, a similar AFA initiative closed the door on euthanasia--at least for the time being. In both of these cases, many bishops offered strong public support as they have done with similar AFA instigated campaigns against embryo experimentation and cloning.

The NCC's role is the brightest spot in an otherwise bleak picture that has persisted over the past thirty years as far as the Catholic Church and other Australian mainline religious denominations are concerned. For the same crisis of faith and practice afflicting North America and Western Europe can be found here to a greater or lesser degree.

Similarities with Canada

There are certainly similarities between Canada and Australia in terms of geography and population. Australia has 20 million people in an area slightly less than Canada's, with most of its population concentrated in a few large cities along the coastline. Over two-thirds of the country's interior consists of sparsely populated wasteland or desert. It has a strong British heritage, although the population has been diversified since World War II by millions of immigrants from every corner of the globe.

Australia is one of the most secularised, materialistic, hedonistic nations in the world, with sport its number one religion. In the absence of strong Church leadership, the Catholic community has largely lost its identity and merged into the general population with its prevailing attitude of indifference towards religious matters.

At about 27 percent of the whole, Catholics are the numerically largest religious body and fairly evenly distributed across all the eight states and territories. There are 28 dioceses and 44 active bishops--with Melbourne and its one million Catholics the largest. Two-thirds or more of these bishops could be described as of the liberal or fence-sitting variety, and therein lies much of the problem in confronting secularism from outside and apathy and dissent from within the Church.

On the other hand, over the past ten years several solidly orthodox bishops have been appointed to most of the largest cities. Cardinal George Pell of Sydney is the best-known internationally and regarded by friends and foes alike as the Pope's man Down Under. He is chairman of the Vox Clara Committee, which is supervising the production of a new English translation of the Missal, and has been a member of various Vatican congregations. He has also shown himself to be very adept at handling the media.

Rome's concerns

However, such was Rome's concern about the state of the Faith in Australia that in December 1998, at the time of the bishops' ad limina visit and the Synod of Oceania, special consultations took place between a number of the bishops and heads of the leading Vatican congregations. These meetings resulted in a summary document titled Statement of Conclusions, which was signed by the Australian and Curial representatives and later endorsed by the Conference of Australian Catholic Bishops in May 1999--albeit with reluctance on the part of some.

For the first time since Vatican II, the Church's leadership in Australia collectively accepted the reality of a deepening crisis of faith and the need for strong remedial action--although views differed widely as to what should be done. Areas of serious deficiency, such as Mass attendance and confessions, liturgy, education, priestly vocations, religious life and seminary formation, were pinpointed as needing closer episcopal attention.

However, six years on, as with so many other strongly worded documents, the Statement seems to have sunk without a trace. Those bishops (such as Cardinal Pell) who had been already doing what the Statement called for continued to do so. Those needing to lift their game--most of the bishops--have presided over continuing spiritual decline. For they, along with their bureaucracies and experts, are part of the problem.

The need for more strong, courageous bishops could not be greater--although it is arguably already too late to turn the tide significantly short of a miracle. For example, the Statement called on Australia's bishops to confront the reality of liturgical abuses, referring to "the tendency on the part of some priests and parishes to make their own changes to liturgical texts and structures, whether by omissions, by additions, or by substitutions, occasionally even in central texts such as the Eucharistic Prayer". Bishops needed to "put their energy above all into education, while correcting these abuses individually." There has been little if any evidence of this occurring. The Statement's call to eliminate illicit use of the Third Rite (general absolution) had an early impact, but the practice has resurfaced in some dioceses.

Catholic education

Aside from Liturgy, the most deep-seated problem area remains Catholic education, especially at high school and university levels.

Part of the problem--aside from the pressures of secularisation and dysfunctional family life--has arisen from the extensive government funding of Catholic schools. Since the 1960s, Catholic schools have had most of their running costs (teachers' salaries, etc.) and capital works underwritten by federal and state governments. This has led to a massive expansion of the size and role of Catholic Education Offices, which now process government funds for schools. In turn, they have become the de facto authorities over religious education programs in each diocese.

Most of these programs--aside from a few recent exceptions--are strong on fashionable educational theories (mostly from the US) but light and unreliable on doctrinal content. Today we have at least two religiously illiterate generations of Catholics who have overwhelmingly given up on belief and practice.

Despite (or perhaps because of) up to 13 years of Catholic education, fewer than five percent of school-leavers attend Mass regularly and next to none observe (or even know about) the Church's moral teachings. The current national average weekly attendance of 15 percent (down from 18 percent five years ago and over 50 percent in the 1960s) is largely sustained by elderly Catholics. Before long, this figure will be below 10 percent, as it already is in some dioceses.

The one glimmer of light has been the publication over the past five years of a new series of religious education texts for all grade levels, based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church. These texts are now being used in the Melbourne, Sydney and three other New South Wales dioceses and were an initiative of Cardinal George Pell, when he was Archbishop of Melbourne (1996-2001). Now that he is in Sydney, he has directed their use in that Archdiocese. The impact of these texts remains to be seen, but it was a step in the right direction, at least.

Unfortunately, an alternative and vastly inferior religion curriculum, based on the theories of US dissenter Thomas Groome, has been embraced by a larger number of Australian bishops who should know better.

The 1999 Statement of Conclusions had also asked bishops to be "attentive" to safeguarding the "Catholic identity" of Catholic universities, and to evaluate "the doctrinal soundness of the theological formation given either in departments of theology in Catholic universities or in other theological centres, called 'theological faculties' in Australia." There has been little or no sign of activity in this regard.

Australian Catholic University (ACU), by far the larger of the nation's two Catholic universities, remains a source of concern, given its centrality in the training of teachers for Catholic elementary and high schools. The Statement called for teachers to "be properly formed in the Faith, especially principals and those who teach religion."

However, research over the past five years into the religious beliefs and practices of ACU students has indicated that these have been significantly out of line with Church teachings. (Although, given that ACU is spread across several eastern Australian states, the position varies from campus to campus). Further research has shown that most Catholic schools today regard themselves as a de facto "parallel Church" distinct from the "institutional" Church.

Research indicates that most teachers disregard or reject a wide range of Church teachings, as do the parents of the children they teach. While around 70 percent of Catholic parents send their children to Catholic schools, obviously only a fraction of them practise the faith. Their contact with the Church comes mainly through the school rather than through the parish church. Research has also found that of parents' many reasons for sending their children to Catholic schools, religious ones rate lowest.

Australia's premier researcher into the beliefs and practices of Year 12 students in Catholic schools--the recently deceased Br. Marcellin Flynn--had interviewed thousands of students, teachers and parents over the past 30 years. He found a situation of steady decline over that period in the knowledge and practice of the faith.

Attitude of accommodation

It is hardly surprising that Australia's Catholic community has offered so little resistance to the inroads of secularism, hedonism and materialism. Today, as in North America, its attitudes towards divorce, abortion, "gay rights" and other moral issues are virtually indistinguishable from those of the general population. There is no longer such a thing as a "Catholic vote," and Catholic politicians worthy of the name are a tiny handful.

This situation may be slightly modified--as with the increasing proportion of Hispanics in the US Catholic population--by a growing number of Catholic immigrants from Southeast Asia, India and Sri Lanka, who tend to have more closely knit family structures and higher levels of faith practice. Significantly, a growing proportion of priestly and religious vocations now come from these groups.

Further glimmers of light have come over the past ten years from the reformed seminaries in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, where greater emphasis on orthodoxy and sound spiritual formation has seen significant upturns in recruitment. In turn, priests ordained in recent years have been strikingly more orthodox, loyal to the Magisterium and scrupulous in Liturgy.

However, a large majority of active priests in the forties to sixties age group were formed in the radicalised seminaries from the late 1960s onwards. Many of them do not take kindly to requests from Rome or their bishops to toe the line doctrinally or liturgically. And the fact that priests are in increasingly short supply makes the task of bishops prepared to discipline dissenters or curb liturgical abuses that much more difficult.

In many rural dioceses, parishes are closing, being amalgamated or having lay-led liturgies in place of Masses. Many of these are run by liberal bishops who reject suggestions that priests be recruited from more successful (more orthodox) dioceses or from overseas to make up the shortfall.

One could go on, but it would need a book-length account to cover all the ground, e.g., religious life, where some nuns have turned to New Age, radical feminist or neo-pagan activities. But the picture is no doubt similar--if not worse--in Canada.

As indicated, there are a few hopeful signs around the Church in Australia, but generally speaking it is a case of too little, too late, with time running out if the Church is to survive in any meaningful Catholic form far into this century, other than as a small remnant.

For further information on the state of the Church in Australia, readers might consult the AD2000 website (www.ad2000.com.au), which has copies of articles and reports going back to 1988.

Mr. Gilchrist is the author of several books on Australian history and politics, He is the editor of the Catholic monthly Magazine AD2000 (See Note, CI Sept 2004, p.20)