Before we consider these questions, some context is needed. Despite its size and influence, Australian Catholicism is presently facing the profoundest crisis in its 230-year history.  Jesuit Michael Kelly recently wrote that Australian Catholicism ‘is in tatters; its credibility is zero’ (La Croix, 9 October 2017). The clearest sign of this is the sexual abuse scandal. Church leaders, who hectored people about sexual sin for decades, have been exposed as hypocrites following institutional cover-ups of sexual crimes against vulnerable children. Patrick Parkinson correctly commented that ‘the levels of abuse in the Catholic Church are strikingly out of proportion with any other church – and ... this is an international pattern’ (Parkinson, 2013).

While sexual abuse has been devastating for victims and families, the consequences have been far more widespread. An American study shows that the scandal has led to significant declines in Catholic affiliation. While some Catholics remain nominal adherents, many have severed all connection with the church. The study also shows that the scandal has had a significant impact on monetary contributions, particularly where predatory priests have been operative, with a decline in financial support to the church of about 1.3 %. In the United States, for instance, the loss is greater than the cost of sexual abuse lawsuits, which already amounts to US$4 billion (Bottan and Perez-Truglia, 2015). There is evidence of similar trends in Australia.

This scandal has brought Catholicism’s crisis to a head, but the underlying problems of leadership failure and an inability to articulate belief in terms that make contemporary sense have been brewing for decades. I covered this in my 1991 book No Set Agenda, which is subtitled Australia’s Catholic Church faces an uncertain future – quite an understatement nowadays. The 2016 Census shows that these underlying problems are now statistically impacting the church. The numbers of self-reporting Catholics have dropped sharply. In the 1996 Census, Catholics made up twenty-seven per cent of the population; in 2011, 25.3%; in 2016, 22.6%. A similar fall has occurred in the United States; from 23.9% of the population in 2007 to 20.8% in 2014 (Washington Post, 2 September 2015). Participation rates have also been dropping since the late 1960s. In the 1950s participation in the life of the church was much higher; about three-quarters of self-identifying Catholics attended Mass on a weekly basis. Prior to the 1950s, the average weekly Mass attendance was between twenty and thirty per cent of Catholics.

After Vatican Council II (1962–65) many enthusiastically embraced the conciliar renewal program, and a sense of rejuvenation swept across Catholicism. From the late 1960s onwards participation began to drop, not because of the so-called ‘liberal’ reforms of Vatican II, as reactionary Catholics maintain, but precisely the opposite: the failure of church leadership to respond to the contemporary world, which, in the twentieth century, underwent a tectonic shift involving a radical change in the role and status of women, gender diversity, and the ascendency of science and technology. Vatican II opened up the church to these transformations. But the restorationist/sectarian agenda of Popes John Paul II (1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (2005–13) turned Catholicism inwards again.

The first sign of alienation was the negative reaction to Paul VI’s condemnation of artificial contraception in the 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae. This was intensified by John Paul II, who introduced an agenda that reflected his own subjective and idiosyncratic vision of Catholicism. His twenty-seven-year-long papacy, followed by that of Benedict XVI, alienated many Catholics.

Pope John Paul II (photograph by Rob Croes, Wikimedia Commons)The bishops appointed by these popes reflected the papal agenda and local Catholics increasingly felt, as I argued in No Set Agenda, ‘leaderless and bereft’ as the church lost many of its ‘lay and priestly leadership cadre, the people who ... [were] essential for it to move into the future’. Many pastoral priests left ministry, while frustrated lay leaders severed affiliation or drifted away. As a result, from the highs of the 1950s, by 1990 only nineteen per cent of Australian Catholics attended Mass regularly. Practice rates continued to plummet; twenty-six years later, in 2016, Mass attendances were eight to ten per cent of Catholics, with overseas-born Catholics saving Mass attendance figures from collapse. A breakdown of the 2016 figures shows that forty-three per cent of attendees were born overseas, sixty-two per cent were women, thirty-six per cent had university degrees, and thirty-four per cent were aged over seventy. Particularly worrying is the loss of young people: only nine per cent of fifteen to twenty-nine-year-olds were regular attendees.

Peter Wilkinson has shown that by 2006 there were ‘an estimated 900,000 “ex-Catholics” in Australia’ who no longer identified with the church. The same is true of the United States where the second largest religious ‘group’ after Catholics is ex-Catholics – twenty-three million of them.

Another challenge is the decline in the number of locally born priests. Nowadays, Catholic men are simply unwilling to undertake a lifelong celibate commitment. According to 2017–18 Official Directory of the Catholic Church in Australia, there are 1904 diocesan and 1043 religious order priests. There are 1385 parishes across twenty-eight dioceses and six other ecclesiastical circumscriptions for a Catholic population of 5,291,834.

However, these statistics are misleading. First, only a little over half of these priests are actually working in parishes; most of the rest are retired, with some involved in administrative or specialised ministries. Second, the church still has a largish group of priests ordained between the late 1960s and early 1970s. These hardworking priests have carried the burden of parish ministry for the last five decades. Their average age in 2017 was between sixty-eight and seventy- five. Most are still working, many caring for two or more parishes. By 2022 almost all will be retired or dead; then an acute shortage will hit.

Priests are not being replaced because there have been so few candidates for priesthood in last forty years. Eric Hodgens, who has crunched the Melbourne numbers, says that the archdiocese ‘ordained fifteen [priests] a year from the 1950s to the 1970s. It needs to be ordaining nine or ten a year to provide anything like adequate priestly ministry today. But for thirty-five years the number has been more like two or three’ (Hodgens, 2011). The few Australian-born men being ordained are often very clerical in attitude, closed to contemporary culture and aligned to the John Paul and Benedict papacies.

For twenty years, bishops have been importing foreign priests to fill the shortfall. In dioceses such as Perth, Bunbury, Darwin, and Broken Bay, they comprise more than fifty per cent of priests. Wilkinson predicts that by 2020 more than fifty per cent of all priests ministering in Australian parishes will be foreign-born. Almost two- thirds of them are from India, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Africa (especially Nigeria). David Ransom, Vicar General of Broken Bay Diocese, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that ‘most dioceses wouldn’t survive’ without these priests.

While many of these priests have adapted well to Australia, there are still serious cultural problems surrounding this priestly influx. Because many come from patriarchal and tribal societies and are hierarchically clerical in their training, there are often tensions regarding their attitude to parishioners, especially women, linked to a failure to recognise gender equality.

Underlying the influx of foreign priests is a false assumption that there are no Australian-born married and experienced women and men willing and able to volunteer for ministry. There is absolutely no theological reason why viri probati (older, self-supporting, married men with the requisite qualifications) cannot be ordained. Pope Francis has already said that if bishops’ conferences approached him asking for married priests, he would consider their request sympathetically, but Australian bishops seem reluctant. There are also many pastorally experienced women already trained for ministry; opening-up all ministerial roles to them cannot be ignored any longer.

This brings us to Australia’s twenty-eight diocesan bishops. (There are also five Eastern Rite bishops and eight auxiliary or assistant bishops.) Many appointed in the John Paul and Benedict papacies under the influence of Cardinal George Pell in Rome are institutional men of limited ability. They might be fine as administrators, but they lack the ability to assume leadership roles or to inspire faith communities, especially in challenging times. A small, ambitious cohort of them looks to Rome for the latest wind change. Defensively, many of them claim that any contentious issue is ‘beyond their competence’ or ‘not appropriate at this time’. They seem stymied, despite the fact that Pope Francis has significantly lessened Rome’s micro-management. The viri probati issue is a case in point.

The bishops don’t understand that Pope Francis – following Vatican II – is trying to shift Catholicism in a more pastorally responsive direction. Francis sees the church as a kind of ‘field hospital’ serving the contemporary world. Unlike his predecessor, he has no truck with Saint Augustine’s disjunction between the city of God and the secular city, a theory Augustine despairingly developed after the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. For Francis, God is to be found in the reality of the world and especially among the poor.

Talking of bishops: the role of George Pell in Australian Catholicism can’t be ignored. His public persona has shaped the way Australians view Catholicism. He is seen, incorrectly, as ‘the leader of the Australian church’ and has cast himself as chief representative of ‘orthodoxy’. His uncompromising ‘boots and all’ style has portrayed Catholicism as a reactionary, inflexible, uncompromising institution. He has overshadowed those who tried to present a more nuanced, informed, theologically accurate version of Catholicism, especially in the media.

In summary, Australian Catholicism is a ‘hollowed-out’ institution with declining membership, mediocre leadership, and a seventeenth-century governance structure that is hopelessly inadequate in pluralist societies. This leaves the hierarchy struggling to come to terms with modernity. Yet this very shaky institution is the foundation for a vast ministerial enterprise in education, health, aged care, and social welfare that is largely funded by government.

George Pell (Conecta Abogados via Flickr)

 

The crisis of Australian Catholicism raises several important questions for both church and state. Is the sheer size of the church’s ministry sustainable? What does Catholicism offer that is different to other comparable systems? How do you integrate Catholic ideals and ethos with the fact that many working in Catholic institutions do not share these commitments? And the lurking church–state question remains: is it appropriate for government to fund what Catholicism explicitly sees as ministry?

First: is the situation sustainable? This depends on a number of variables of which the most important is that the church continues to offer Catholicism’s unique alternative. The number of non-Catholics wanting to enrol their children in Catholic schools indicates that people see something different, even preferable, in what the church offers. In other areas of ministry, the church must continue to commit itself to those most in need in society, guided by principles of social justice and equity, if it is to conform to the teaching of Jesus and the Catholic tradition of community service. A linked issue is the need to develop a large enough cadre of laypeople trained in theology, committed to service, and having the spiritual maturity to assume leadership positions in ministry, while the number of practising Catholics decreases.

Second: what is this ‘alternative’ that Catholicism claims to offer? Essentially, Catholicism brings a different way of seeing the world, through what sociologist–theologian Andrew Greeley calls the ‘Catholic imagination’, by which he means an almost unconscious way of intuiting and viewing the world, a way of filtering and arranging reality, a set of conscious and unconscious assumptions that guide attitudes and action, a prism through which the world is envisioned and understood. Greeley says that people aren’t Catholic because of doctrine or creeds, but because they have this peculiar sensibility that is passed on through education, formation, and mixing with others who share similar perceptions. Context here is far more important than content.

This imaginative filter expresses itself through a complex set of beliefs, values, and emphases. It involves a committed search for a transcendent meaning in life; a sense of the deep symbolism of the natural world; the centrality of forgiveness even of enemies; the primacy of conscience; an inclusive, open, generous, non-sectarian approach to community that draws in rather than rules out; and a sense of belonging to a great spiritual, ministerial, cultural, worship, belief tradition. This is an embracing, permeating faith that is the opposite of sectarianism and fundamentalism.

Sure, it involves creedal formulas and articulated beliefs, but essentially it is a specific way of viewing reality and living life. It is, as former New South Wales Premier Kristina Keneally eloquently said, ‘as central to my identity as my gender’. It implies an inclusive and embracing faith; it abhors a self-enclosed, sectarian circle of ‘true believers’. It is precisely this vision that some Australian bishops fail to communicate, as has been vividly illustrated in the recent marriage equality debate.

A Catholic imagination is analogical, it perceives connections and similarities between our everyday experience of ourselves, others, and the world around us, and an intangible reality that transcends us. It perceives what George Steiner calls ‘presences’. This refers to the intangible personal reality that stands behind ‘experiences of the otherness of nature and the wilderness, of beauty, goodness, truth, love and integrity’. It is the sense that beyond all that is best in human experience there stands ‘a confirming and supporting other presence at the outer edge of consciousness which can sometimes be intuited by the attentive and perceptive person, but can never be wholly assimilated’ (Collins, 2004). It is in these liminal experiences that we apprehend the presence of something deeper and transcendent, something which Christians call ‘God’.

Third: How is this Catholic vision integrated with ministry? To answer this question we need to make a seemingly semantic, but important distinction between two theological words – mission and ministry. The distinguished Australian theologian John N. Collins has shown that in the New Testament the word ‘ministry’ refers explicitly to the work of those called to a public leadership role in the church which is recognised by the community. So, leaders in a Catholic school, hospital, or other work are called to ministerial leadership. Other staff are invited to share in mission, a more generic word meaning something like participating in and supporting the ethos of the organisation.

Clearly, many working in Catholic institutions share little or nothing of the vision outlined above. For them what they do is a job which they try to do well, but that’s that. A sceptical senior doctor working in a Catholic hospital does her clinical work with care and professionalism, and a religiously non-affiliated science teacher in a Catholic school is devoted to his students, but neither see herself as being part of the mission of the church.

The challenge facing ministerial leaders in these institutions is to try to give people like these some sense of the purpose and ethos of the institution. Nowadays, every organisation and corporation has a ‘mission statement’ – they’ve borrowed the word from theology! For Catholic organisations, ‘mission’ has explicitly theological connotations and means, as Susan Sullivan has written, ‘actively placing Catholic identity and ethos at the heart of governance and leadership practices, the manner in which services are delivered [including] ... culture and relationships’ (Sullivan, 2016).

Here, we also need to clarify what mission is not. It is not converting people. It is not about excluding non-Catholics in any way, or preaching Catholicism to those served. It is not about imposing Catholic morals or doctrines. It is about caring for the whole person, a sense of inclusion, a welcoming community, and a particular concern for the powerless, the poor, and the marginalised. Significantly, it is often non-Catholic staff who are most dedicated to the mission, whether it be in teaching, health care, aged care, or social service.

With the decreasing number of priests and religious sisters to lead and staff Catholic institutions, it is now the laity that is called to leadership in ministry. Often this is achieved by maintaining the ‘charism’ of the particular religious order that first founded the ministry. The Greek word χάρισμα (‘charisma’) means ‘gift’ or ‘ethos’, essentially the spirit of the founding order. These charisms are really just particular expressions of a more generalised sense of Catholic identity.

It was said of Jesus, even by his critics, that ‘his teaching made a deep impression on them because he spoke with authority’ (Mark 1:21), by which they meant that there was consistency between who he was, what he did, and what he said. He was believable not because he used titles, or was a member of the religious establishment, but because of the integrity of his personality. Ideally, this is the kind of spirituality that those in ministerial leadership in the church should try to emulate by enshrining and modelling in themselves the values that should permeate their communities. This is no easy task, but it is what genuine leadership is about. They are trying to inspire their staff to see their employment as more than a job. This requires considerable skill and faces serious obstacles.

Within this context, I will now examine some of the specific issues facing Catholic ministry in Australia.

St. Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne (photograph by Douglas Paul Perkins, Wikimedia Commons)

 

In 2016 there were 764,000 students in 1,731 Catholic schools, which amounts to 20.2% of all enrolments. These schools employ just over 72,600 staff. In Catholic schools the key ministerial leaders, those who articulate in their governance, actions, and words the catholicity of the institution, include the principal, vice-principal, mission director, chaplain, religious education coordinators, and pastoral care leaders. The challenge is that most students in Catholic schools come from homes that are either weakly affiliated or unaffiliated with the church. Only a tiny proportion come from committed Catholic families.

Many teachers in Catholic schools are themselves either non-Catholic or weakly affiliated Catholics. Another emerging problem is that there is a shortage of trained religious education (RE) teachers, which means that many take on RE as a second string. This is not an easy subject to teach; inspirational RE teachers require both experience and maturity. They also need to be reasonably well qualified theologically. Religious education can thus become a kind of nebulous ‘personal formation’ subject without solid theological and historical content.

There is also an increasing number of non-Catholic students in Catholic schools. In Sydney Archdiocese, for instance, twenty-five per cent of students are non-Catholic. In South Australia, forty-four per cent of students are non-Catholic. Nationally, 72.5% of students are Catholic, 14.9% come from other Christian churches, 2.6% are non-Christian, and 7.8% are non-religious.

Non-Catholic parents send their children to Catholic schools for various reasons: for some it is a trade-off of religious education, which they don’t really want, for a private school education, good discipline, and modern facilities. Others are from the aspirational working class, or young professionals seeking a values-based education with the Catholic emphasis on social justice and a tolerant, inclusive community.

Given the background of the student body, what approach should ministerial leaders in Catholic schools take? One option they should not take is to reduce catholicity to a kind of generic ‘comparative religion’ course resulting in a mishmash in which one religion is as good as another, leaving students with an array of half-understood religious ‘choices’. This approach assumes that the development of a Catholic imagination is jettisoned, replaced by a kind of spiritualised religion that remains intra-psychic, narcissistic, and ultimately banal.

Another approach is to be upfront and say that Catholic schools operate within the context of the Catholic–Christian tradition and that they take that seriously. ‘Those who work in the Catholic school are more than employees,’ Canberra–Goulburn Catholic Education Office says unequivocally. ‘They minister in the name of the Church and the Gospel’ and they provide ‘as far as possible the Catholic religious perspective’. Teachers in Catholic schools accept this when employed, as do parents when they enrol their children.

However, some question this somewhat aloof approach. They think that more is achieved by using the original charism of the religious order which founded the school, especially if it is strongly linked to Christ-like values of love, compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness. Rather than focusing on a kind of exclusive ‘Catholic identity’, they highlight a more open approach and gradually form teachers and students in that ethos. Certainly, staff, students, and parents know that they are taking on the ‘whole package’ when they join the school; this includes participation in religious education, liturgy, retreat days, and Catholic values and spirituality. That said, these are expressed in a welcoming, embracing, and accepting way; no one has Catholicism forced on them. There is anecdotal evidence that this is a more effective way of operating than an upfront approach. In the end, the catholicity of the school really depends on ministerial leaders; they set the tone and challenge the staff and students to participate in the school’s mission.

There is some recent evidence that enrolment in Catholic schools is declining: from 20.61% of all students in Australia in 2013 to 20.25% in 2016. What growth there is mirrors population increase rather than market share. This decline in numbers may well increase because of the Gonski 2.0 funding formula, which many argue unfairly targets Catholic parochial schools and overfunds already well-endowed independent schools. The My School website shows a wide variation in government funding of Catholic schools – up to about seventy per cent of recurrent costs, with the balance coming from student fees and other sources. In contrast, ninety-four per cent of public school funding comes mainly from state governments.

Staff and students of St Joseph's Catholic School, Mackay, ca. 1880 (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, Wikimedia Commons)

 

While every entity is manageable when effective leadership and good governance are present, schools are somewhat less complex than hospitals and aged care facilities with their large numbers of medical, nursing, and domestic staff, part and full-time contractors, visiting doctors and specialists, and volunteers. Most Catholic hospitals are now part of larger organisations such as Mercy Health, St Vincent’s Health Australia, or Calvary Health Care, with an overall coordinating body, Canberra-based Catholic Health Australia (CHA).

CHA focuses its ministerial emphasis on the ‘wholistic healing ministry’ of Jesus, meaning that he cured and integrated the whole person, not just the physical illness or disease. He linked healing with forgiveness and reintegration into society. This is expressed in contemporary terms by US theologian John Shea as ‘integral humanism’, by which he means that the ministry of Catholic hospitals is to add ‘the missing spiritual and theological component’ in health care which he links to ‘the flourishing of what secular humanism is most concerned about – physical, social and mental life’ (Shea, 2000).

Susan Sullivan says that there needs to be ongoing formation of staff in this vision, including care for the poor and vulnerable, an appreciation of people’s work so that their gifts and talents flourish and ‘a way of understanding and being present to suffering ... that supports courage, meaning and a belief in the afterlife’, a sense of the interdependence of all life, and ‘a commitment to fostering and strengthening hope’.

Given the sheer complexity of the health and aged care systems, maintaining the priority of a sense of ministry and mission is difficult. As well as their professional expertise, executive leaders, trustees, and board members all need to be imbued with a focus on the Catholic mission of the hospital. CHA has articulated a set of expectations for these senior people. They are challenged to develop a personal spirituality and sense of vocation, to be knowledgeable in the history, theology, social teachings, and moral standards of Catholicism, and to understand the pastoral dimension of ministry and collaborate with the church and its leaders. CHA has published a series of pamphlets to assist in developing a sense of mission in hospitals and aged care.

However, trustees and boards are usually run by people whose interests are predominately financial. Health care practitioners and managers are understandably focused on professional health issues, rather than faith identity. The result is that Catholic health and aged care face a particularly difficult challenge; they could easily become secular institutions with external Catholic trappings. At times, it is difficult to discern the difference between a Catholic hospital and a state-run hospital.

The question of leadership is again central here. Because advanced qualifications are required for senior leadership in health care, it is hard to find people with a sense of ministerial leadership and the requisite professional qualifications.

Catholic social services are rooted in Jesus’s preferential choice for the poor and in the strong Catholic tradition of social teaching. They are also rooted in Australian history. From the 1830s onwards Catholic ministries extended well beyond providing worship and basic education. Probably the earliest social workers and nurses in Sydney were five Irish Sisters of Charity who arrived in Sydney in December 1838. They immediately began visiting the Parramatta Female Factory, teaching the children of convict women, visiting hospitals, and caring for the sick in their homes. They ventured to Darlinghurst Gaol and opened a small hospital in Potts Point in 1857, the forerunner of Darlinghurst’s St Vincent’s Hospital. The first rectress, Sister Alicia de Lacy, ‘was probably the only trained nurse in Sydney at that time’, according to Anne-Marie Whitaker (Whitaker, 2007).

The church now maintains fifty-two welfare organisations across a range of services: homelessness, refugees, marriage counselling, drug, alcohol, gambling, family violence, foster care, disability, and employment services. Many are diocesan-based (Catholic Care); others are outgrowths of the work of religious orders or parishes.

Catholic Social Services Australia (CSSA) is the overall national body; Jesuit Frank Brennan is CEO. CSSA works as a voice for the poor and as an advocate for Catholic service providers with government. It also provides resources for ongoing formation of staff and guidance in best practice. Brennan emphasises that social exclusion is structural and requires political solutions, but that ‘poor and marginal people ... are finding it increasingly difficult to affect the policies of major political parties’. He is critical of politicians and the media ‘systematically misrepresent[ing] the most vulnerable and poorest in our society as people who deserve their plight’.

The services provided by these Catholic ministries are non-discriminatory. The philosophy is simply that when people are in need they are served. In terms of employment, all that is asked is sympathy with the Catholic social justice aims of the organisation. There is a preference for the leaders to be informed Catholics, but not all are. The major commitment is to expose leaders and staff to contemporary Catholic social teaching, especially as articulated by Pope Francis. Catholic social services are very dependent on the ninety per cent of funding that comes from government.

The St Vincent de Paul Society (‘Vinnies’) is also a major player in Catholic social services. Founded by Frédéric Ozanam in 1833 in Paris, it is an independent lay organisation that remains structurally separate from the clerical hierarchy and usually doesn’t accept government subsidies. Right from the start, Ozanam laid down a comprehensive vision for Vinnies: ‘You must not be content,’ he said, ‘with tiding the poor over the poverty crisis. Study their condition and the injustices which brought about such poverty, with the aim of a long-term improvement.’  While not part of CSSA, the two organ- isations work together and share many common goals.

Vinnies also challenges the structural factors that create poverty. ‘We live,’ Vinnies CEO Dr John Falzon says, ‘in a transactional world. It has become ... second nature for us to believe that ... any investment of money or time or energy should be carefully chosen on the basis of what you get in return.’  This contradicts the sheer generosity that Jesus articulates: ‘Give to everyone who asks from you,’ he says, ‘love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return’ (Luke 6:30,35). However, the Society’s membership is ageing, and recruitment is drying up.

Sisters of Charity Nightingale Ward, 1953 (photograph by Max Dupain, courtesy State Library of NSW)

 

One result of a transactional culture is that, increasingly, government funding is dependent on a fee-for-service basis. Governments are moving from block grants to service organisations to fund their specific priorities, to grants linked to outcomes predetermined by political and other priorities

Lacking the finance to make their own decisions, cash-strapped religious institutions are tempted to follow government prioritised money trails. The danger is that they might lose their sense of being ministries and pervert the faith-based service they should be offering.

Also, the recent entry of for-profit service providers into health, aged care, and social services not only challenges the traditional role that the churches play in providing these services, but also transforms these ministries into businesses with profit rather than compassion as the bottom line. In this context, church organisations become just another provider paid on a fee-for-service basis. As Brennan points out, social policy has been ‘dumbed down’ and has become a ‘side-bar to economic policy’. The result is that those – like the church – who want ‘to fill the gaps which other providers leave untouched’ lack ‘the discretionary income to allocate [resources] to the poorest of the poor’.

Catholic providers need to stand aside from this type of government funding if it is not in accordance with the fundamental mission of their founding charism. However, transactionalism is a two-way street: church ministries should also use their influence with government – which is considerable – to advocate for better social programs modelled on their long-term experience of providing well targeted social welfare.

Another challenge for Catholic social services, as well as health and aged care, is corporatisation. This refers to religious organisations converting their ministries into what civil law calls ‘limited liability companies’. These entities were originally established to deal with government funding. They are governed by trustees and administered by boards made up of secular and religiously committed professionals skilled in finance and business and appointed by the original ministerial organisation. The Salvation Army and Uniting Care have moved along these lines. A Catholic example is Vinnies in Victoria where Vincent Care, formed originally to deal with government funding, has taken over homeless shelters and some services traditionally serviced by local parish groups.

One criticism of corporatisation is that ministerial organisations originally staffed by committed volunteers, tend to become professionalised along social-work lines and the volunteers are marginalised. Ministerial identity sometimes takes second place. The danger is that these services become secularised, not-for-profits, run on purely economic and professional lines and only loosely related to their parent churches or bodies.

The positive aspect of corporatisation is the introduction of the expertise of those who can contribute to policy development, as well as bringing-in people with leadership experience and ability. Clearly, there is a danger of ‘managerialism’ causing ministries to become bureaucratic. In the end, some form of balance between volunteerism and corporatisation is needed.

Also, there is a growing backlash against neo-liberal, trickle-down economic policies that exclude whole swathes of people. The only reason neo-liberalism has survived is because since the 1970s it has been the only show in town and it has been adopted by mainstream political parties. But we are, as Pope Francis said, ‘not living an era of change, but a change of era ... The situations that we live today therefore bring new challenges ... go forth to the streets and the crossroads: all who you find, call out to them, no one is excluded. Wherever you are, never build walls or borders, but meeting squares and field hospitals’ (National Catholic Reporter, 10 November 2015).

While this is incomprehensible rhetoric to neo-liberals, it is still the fundamental task of Catholic schools, social services, health, and aged care: to seek the poor and marginalised, not government priorities determined by political realities and self-interested lobby groups.

St Vincent de Paul Op Shop, Brisbane (Flickr)

 

These days we are witnessing the radical declericalisation of ministry. With the withdrawal of religious orders, wide areas of ministerial leadership are opening up to committed laity, especially women. While a small group are already theologically and pastorally qualified, resources need to be directed to increasing the number of committed and qualified laypeople available for ministerial leadership.

Nevertheless some, like Archbishop Paul-André Durocher of Gatineau, Canada, think that, where government is already providing services like education and health care, the church should service unmet community needs and evangelise by preaching the Gospel. Perhaps this is partly a response to formerly Catholic Quebec’s unequivocal embrace of secularism. I disagree with Durocher. I think that the church’s Australian ministries are already genuine forms of pre-evangelisation; their involvement with society’s needs makes sure that faith is not irrelevant to life, or relegated to the private sphere.

The idea of pre-evangelisation was developed by the Philippines-based theologian, Alfonso Nebreda, who says that the purpose of ministry is not conversion, but a demonstration of the relevance of faith and a way of breaking down the attitude of indifference and hostility to religion prevalent in Western societies. Nebreda sees the church’s participation in a whole range of services as a demonstration of commitment to the wider community and as a sign that, as the New Testament Letter of James says ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’ (James 2:17).

Australians have a much more flexible notion of church–state relations than Americans, who take Thomas Jefferson’s ‘wall of eternal separation’ very seriously. Because of the strong Protestant Dissenter element in the antebellum United States, any form of established church was anathema. Non-establishment is embedded in the First Amendment of the US Constitution: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’

Later Supreme Court interpretations of Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ led to a particular understanding of separation. Interpretation nowadays says the government cannot favour any religion, nor can it assist religion in any way, regardless of the reason, even to the extent of denying Federal Emergency Management Agency relief funds to three Texas churches badly damaged by Hurricane Harvey in September 2017, although in January 2018 FEMA reached a compromise with the churches. ‘Indiscriminate establishment’ of religion is also excluded.

While separation is axiomatic in the United States, Australia does not interpret Section 116 of our Constitution as an absolute separation of church and state. The Section states that ‘The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.’ Section 116 defines what the federal government cannot do, rather than what it can do. While it is verbally more expansive than the First Amendment, it has been traditionally interpreted to mean that there is no established church in Australia and that free exercise of religion is guaranteed, and no more.

In fact, the Anglican Church was probably quasi-established in Australia from 1824 when the archdeaconry of NSW was linked to the Diocese of Calcutta. This lasted until the Church Act of 1836. As a result, the power of the Anglican Church was diminished, and salaries for Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, and later Wesleyan, Baptist, and Jewish clergy were paid, and assistance for building churches was provided, from colonial coffers. Most primary schools were run by the churches, with teachers’ salaries generally paid by government. This lasted until the secular education acts of the 1870s and 1880s when the toxic sectarianism of the churches and anti-religious secularism of educational reformers led to the defunding of all church schools and the cessation of state stipends for clergy.

For the next seven decades, there was little or no funding available for the ministry of the churches, which still freely provided much of the community’s basic social welfare, health, and aged care. The Catholic Church ran and paid for its own schools, voluntarily staffed by religious orders and paid for by Catholic parents through school fees.

After World War II, the Catholic population increased, due mainly to immigration, and Catholic schools came under enormous pressure with growing numbers of students, large classes (eighty students in one room was common), poor facilities, and zero funding from government. There was a growing call for ‘state aid’ for Catholic schools, but state and federal governments of both parties were afraid of the political backlash that might result if they funded church schools.

An incident that highlighted the crisis was the mid-July 1962 Goulburn school ‘strike’. Goulburn was strongly Catholic – thirty-six per cent of the population – and there was a widespread sense of injustice in the local Catholic community. The strike occurred when the New South Wales educational authorities threatened to close Our Lady of Mercy primary school over a shortage of toilets. A protest meeting, initiated by the laity, resulted in the closure of six Catholic schools in Goulburn and the removal of children to local state schools. The strike’s value was symbolic and from 1963 onwards state aid was gradually introduced. The wide-scale funding of Catholic and independent schools from the mid-1960s led directly to a separation of church and state legal challenge.

It came in the form of the Defence of Government Schools (DOGS) High Court case of 1981. The Victorian attorney-general, representing a diverse group of plaintiffs, claimed that money granted to non-state schools for recurrent expenditure violated Section 116 of the Constitution. The DOGS arguments were based on Jefferson’s ‘wall’ and depended on decisions of the US Supreme Court prohibiting any direct government support for religious institutions. Except for Lionel Murphy, the justices disagreed and decided that Section 116 simply prohibits the establishment of any religion, but that it doesn’t prohibit government support for non-state schools. Tony Blackshield commented that ‘the majority view reflects the Court’s consistent tendency to interpret such provisions narrowly’. This has become the accepted legal orthodoxy in Australia and Catholic schools, and other ministries continue to be funded by government with few parallels elsewhere in the world.

 Saints Peter and Paul's Old Cathedral, Gouburn (photograph by Robert Cutts, Flickr)

 

While Australians are more relaxed about church–state relations than Americans, it is still remarkable that in a country that prides itself on secularism, pluralism, and multiculturalism, the state is funding the churches to do much of the work that government nowadays claims as its responsibility. It is ironic that the system works rather well in a country that Reverend James Denney, a late-nineteenth century Presbyterian, once described as ‘the most godless place under heaven’. Australian governments rarely take a heavy- handed approach, and churches usually conform to government guidelines. However, problems are arising for church ministries as governments pursue neo-liberal economic policies and society becomes more transactional, marginalising the poor who cannot pay.

No Western democratic government is more aggressively secular than the French. Conceived in the anti-Catholicism of the Revolution and legislated in the 1905 anti-clerical law separating church and state, the doctrine of laïcité, the exiling of religion completely from the public sphere, has become a kind of secular dogma in France. What it illustrates is that secularism, despite its appeals to rationalism, can be as bigoted as any fundamentalism.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the transcendence of self is at the core of religious belief and that nowadays Western culture, having abandoned its Christian roots, lives with a flat conception of human existence. By that he means that many people today believe that the only kind of transformation possible is this-worldly; they believe that there is nothing of significance outside human life and are suspicious of claims about spiritual transcendence. He calls this the ‘malaise of immanence’. ‘In a sense,’ Taylor says, ‘we could sum up the malaise of immanence in the words of the famous song by Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?”’ (Taylor, 2007).

With the retreat of religion from public life and the decline in religious practice, the suggestion is that our Western societies have become secularised. The key issue here is the much-debated meaning of the word ‘secular’. Taylor says that secularism is a flexible reality with three principal forms of expression. The first implies that state and church are completely separated in the French laïcité sense and that religion is totally relegated to the private sphere. Another form is when religion becomes a minority commitment, even though the state still supports an established church, as in the Church of England. A third version is when there is no established church, but religion is not banished from the public sphere and there is freedom to believe or not to believe. This is typical of Australia.

A basic assumption of secularisation is that as society modernises citizens will become increasingly irreligious and belief will fade away. However, as sociologists like Jürgen Habermas have pointed out, even traditionally secular societies like Australia are really post-secular ones, ‘in which religion maintains a public influence and relevance’. As he sees it, post-secular society must develop a tolerance even of ‘worldviews that we consider wrong and ... habits that we do not like’. In other words, we must learn to live with dissonance and accept a form of pluralism that includes religious tolerance. Habermas also points out that transnational and multicultural Catholicism ‘is adapting better to the globalising trend than are the Protestant churches’. (Habermas, 2008)

Charles Taylor (Wikimedia Commons)Clearly, post-secular Australia is best described by Taylor’s third option as a pluralist society. Pluralism implies choice, whereas a strict laïcité implies that secularism is the only way of operating in the public sphere. It is the antithesis of choice. So, anyone demanding Taylor’s first model of laïcité secularism for Australia, like the Secular Party of Australia, is really demanding a contraction of pluralism.

What Australia has evolved is a unique way of operating that encourages pluralism in a range of service deliveries. Government funding of the churches and religious communities to carry much of the work of service guarantees genuine pluralism. If everyone went to state schools or all social service and health care was delivered by government, it might look like equality, but much of Australia’s vibrancy could well be lost. Service delivery might also become drowned in bureaucratic inertia. In the Australian polity, the state’s role is to maintain a peaceful and tolerant pluralism. Mature religions cooperate with this and don’t imagine that they are the sole repositories of truth.

Catholicism confronts profoundly serious issues regarding its ministry in Australia. The church has become a hollowed shell with an ageing and shrinking membership. There are fewer Catholics trained and able to assume ministerial leadership roles in the vast service structure that Australian Catholicism supports. The church has also become extraordinarily dependent on government funding, and the way in which this is now tied to specific tasks.

The most worrying aspect is the leadership vacuum in the Australian church. Because of the acute shortage of local priests, the gene pool for bishops is contracting. This problem will only be tackled if the church is willing to undertake structural change and expand its ordained leadership to both men and women, while jettisoning outdated notions like celibacy.

Australian pluralism needs Catholicism to offer its alternative ministries to save us from a monochrome secularism, or worse, from militant laïcité. We still draw on the principles of love, social justice, forgiveness, goodness, truth, and integrity in Western culture that find their source and inspiration in Christianity. In 2008 Geraldine Doogue asked: ‘What would Australia feel like without an active ... Catholic Church? Consider the vacuum caused by the surrender of a hopeful Church, together with its ritual life, its routine generosity, its largeness of spirit, its roadmap for a soul’s journey through life ... Imagine the profound gap that would leave’ (Collins, 2008).

The aspect of Australian culture I most value is our practical ability to live and let live. For much of our history we have avoided the ravages of ideology and negotiated our way to a peaceful pluralism in which God and Caesar work together for the betterment of our fellow citizens and the enrichment of our culture. The challenge ahead for church and state is to maintain that moderation and practicality and to avoid extremism of all sorts.

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Paul Collins acknowledges and thanks the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust and Australian Book Review for the Fellowship that made this work possible.

Australian Book Review thanks RAFT, which has funded this $7,500 Fellowship. It is the third Fellowship funded by RAFT.

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References

ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics), Fact Sheet, Schools Australia, 2 February 2017.

ABS, Media Release, ‘Census reveals: we’re a fast changing nation’, 27 June 2017.

ACCIR (Australian Catholic Council for Industrial Relations). Preliminary employment figures for Catholic institutions figures in 2017 are 229,986 people. However, Dr Bob Dixon who is working on these statistics says the total is ‘about 240,000 people’ (Lecture, 26 April 2017).

Bottan, Nicholas L. and Ricardo Perez-Truglia, ‘Losing my religion: The effects of religious scandals on religious participation and charitable giving’, Journal of Public Economics, 129 (2015).

Collins, Paul, No Set Agenda. Australia’s Catholic Church faces an uncertain future, David Lovell Publishing, 1991.

Collins, Paul, Between the Rock and a Hard Place: Being Catholic today, ABC Books, 2004.

Collins, Paul, Believers: Does Australian Catholicism have a future?, UNSW Press, 2008.

Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, Fall 2008.

Parkinson, Patrick, ‘Restoring Faith: Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church’, ABC Religion and Ethics website, October 25, 2013.

Parkinson, Patrick, ‘Restoring Faith: Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church’, ABC Religion and Ethics website, October 25, 2013.Parkinson, Patrick, ‘Restoring Faith: Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church’, ABC Religion and Ethics website, October 25, 2013.

Shea, John, Spirituality and Health Care: Reaching toward a holistic future, The Parkridge Center, 2000.

Sullivan, Susan, ‘Formation for mission – is that me you’re talking to?’, Health Matters, Spring 2016.

SVP (St Vincent de Paul Society): National Overview, 2016.

Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Harvard University Press, 2007.

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