A PROTESTANT PERSPECTIVE

Former Justice of the High Court of Australia, The Hon Michael Kirby AC GMC, grew up in a strong Anglican tradition – one that he has described as essentially protestant. Executive Director of The Sydney Institute and columnist with The Australian, Dr Gerard Henderson was educated by the Jesuits at Melbourne’s Xavier College and raised a Catholic. On Tuesday 20 October 2020, Michael Kirby and Gerard Henderson recorded their diverse experiences of faith within the Australian context – all filmed for a Sydney Institute Youtube broadcast.

A PROTESTANT PERSPECTIVE

 MICHAEL KIRBY

I feel that I need to explain, at the outset of this speech, that I hold the perspective of a member of the Anglican denomination of Christianity, adhering to the Protestant tradition within Anglicanism.

This may come as a slightly disturbing, and possibly unpleasant, discovery for some who may hear and read this lecture.  Every person raised in the Protestant tradition of the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church of Australia soon finds, on venturing north, south, west and even east to New Zealand and the Pacific, that there are other perspectives within Anglicanism.  The viewpoint of the Sydney Diocese in by no means universal.  Indeed, within Australia it represents a minority.  Yet, within the world, there are still many who observe the same evangelical and strongly Bible-based traditions.

I am not unaware that, in Melbourne, there are differences between the traditions that live and flourish at Trinity College and those that exist, say, at Ridley College, the other centre in Melbourne that offers training for Anglican priests.  At school in Sydney, my Scripture (special religion) classes were presented by the Reverend Stuart Barton Babbage.  He was then the Dean of Sydney.  He later came to Melbourne to be Dean of Melbourne and the principal of Ridley College.  He was a follower of the evangelical traditions of Sydney, though it must be said in a mild form.  It was he who presented me for confirmation to another mild Sydney Anglican, Bishop Hilliard.

My local church was St Andrew’s Anglican Church, on the corner of Parramatta Road and Concord Road in the western suburbs of Sydney.  The minister was the Reverend Cecil Dillon.  He had been a padre in the Second World War.  He wore the breast ribbons on his surplice to show his service in that conflict.  Above the altar were the Union Jack and the Australian flag, although I believe that the former was in the place of honour.  These were the final days of the British Empire and the Church of England in Australia.  That church claimed adherents amongst 40 per cent of the Australian population.  It was far the largest Christian denomination in this nation and thus the most numerous religious affiliations.  Because of history and section 116 of the Australian Constitution, it was not (as in Britain) established.  It had to compete with other denominations of Christianity and other religions (or unbelief).  Gradually, as the years wore on, it lost out in that competition, most especially to the Roman Catholic Church.

If one is raised in the Sydney Diocese of Anglicanism, one becomes comfortable with the Protestant tradition:

• There is no genuflection and no kissing of priestly rings;
• There is no manual sign of the cross;
• There is no use of incense;
• There are no ceremonial bells;
• There is no ceremony of Angelus;
• There is no wearing of elaborate or “heathen” vestments;
• There are no statues or crucifixes showing Christ dead on the cross;
• The altar is bare and extremely simple;
• The order of service is plain and modest;
• The singing of hymns and participation of the laity are important;
• The sermon is extremely important; and
• The Bible is at the very centre of the Faith.

Remember that one of the causes of the Protestant Reformation was the objection of the reformers to the notion that Church authority and tradition could sustain Christian beliefs and practices.  The Protestant reformers taught that the Faith rested on a much more secure and objective foundation.  The most secure foundation was the Scriptures, accepted as conveying the authentic word of God and a trustworthy instruction concerning the new Covenant, brought by God’s son, Jesus.

If one reflected on the relatively simple, modest, understated traditions of Sydney Anglicanism, one felt that one was being more faithful to the essential simplicities of the life and works of Jesus Himself.  Thus, the Protestant tradition of Anglicanism sees itself as a reflection of Jesus of the manger.  Jesus the tekton (carpenter) – a person of a lower social strata, impoverished[1].  Jesus on the donkey.  Jesus the common prisoner on the Cross.  These simplicities are seen as being in stark contrast to the ornate displays of Roman and Orthodox Christianity.  These opulent ways are commonly regarded as having lost their bearings and forgotten the simple, central messages that Jesus brought to the world.  I shall return later to this concept of context.

As a boy, I was raised in this serious and Bible-based version of Christianity.  I must confess that this is still the place in religion where I feel most comfortable.  I mean no disrespect to those who have followed other traditions.  This is mine.  I adhere to it.  And I will not be shifted from it.  This is a very Protestant view of Christianity.  Like Martin Luther, I hope without self righteousness, I say: Ich kann Nichts anders!  I know no other approach.

Because of the substantially separate streaming of Roman Catholic education in Australia, I did not really meet Roman Catholics until I reached university.  There I formed a good friendship with Murray Gleeson, an alumnus of St Joseph’s Roman Catholic College in Sydney.  He introduced me to his religious teachers and priests.  They seemed very nice people, in their black outfits.  However, I was impervious to his books about the Vatican and his attempts to make me see the truth of the “eternal Church”.  For me, the Anglican Church was the true Catholic

Church of England, and therefore of Australia.  For me, others had been seduced by opulence into possibly heretical opinions, such as the elevation of Mary to what sometimes appeared to approach a kind of goddess.  The belief in the “bodily assumption” of Mary to Heaven, a doctrine unsustained by scripture.  The notion that the wafer and wine, used “in remembrance of me”, were the actual body and blood of Jesus (a cannibalistic idea to many minds).  And the dangerous pretention that the Pope, a fallible human being, could make declarations ex cathedra that were “infallible”, when the whole world knew the history of papal fallibility (including recently).  I tried to convert Murray Gleeson to Protestant truth.  But I was no more successful with him than he with me.  In the end, we accepted a polite stand-off.  So it was also in our society at large.  Gradually, unpleasant sectarian prejudice came to be reduced.

Then, when I served with Murray Gleeson in the Supreme Court of New South Wales, he would occasionally be absent from the state.  I would be sworn by the Governor for the duration, to be Acting Chief Justice of New South Wales.  Whenever this happened, the rector of the Anglican Christ Church St Lawrence in Sydney, Father Austin Day, would pounce.  He would organise a special Service of Thanksgiving.  Sometimes it would be accompanied by a musical performance, say Haydn’s Nelson Mass.  He would ask me to come and “grace” the church with my presence as Acting Chief Justice.  He had no chance of securing the attendance of Murray Gleeson.  Politely, he would drop a hint that I might attend in the Chief Justice’s limousine, accompanied by a police motorcycle escort.  On a couple of occasions, I humoured him in these respects.

Christ Church St Lawrence in Sydney follows the High Church tradition of Anglicanism.  At its door, as Acting Chief Justice, I was welcomed by Bishops wearing unfamiliar headdress, derived from Roman times and traditions.  They processed under a canopy.  The Church was filled with incense that was almost choking.  The whole performance was theatrical, even “over the top”.  But then the familiar liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer could be heard.  I was back again in the beautiful Shakespearean language of Thomas Cranmer.  And at the end of the Service, I knew I had been privileged to participate in a spiritual experience.  It was not exactly my tradition.  Yet plainly the participants were devout and sincere.  I was told that the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Donald Robinson, would attend a Service in the Church at least once a year, despite his evangelical inclinations.  If it was good enough for the Archbishop, I thought, it would be good enough for me.

Father Austin Day was a saintly man.  He was a dear friend of Stuart Barton Babbage.  I would meet him at gatherings of Anglicans at Stuart’s home.  I was struck by the capacity of all participants, whatever their backgrounds, to share in Christian love for one another.  This brought home to me a particular feature of the less authoritarian tradition of Anglicanism that I cherished.  I explained this to an address to the Prayer Book Society at the Church of St Mary, Waverley in Sydney in1998:[2]

I have always seen it as a strength of the Anglican Church that it is a place of many mansions.  There is somewhere in the Church for everyone; and that is how it should be … [T]he Anglican Church is struggling with the issues of whether women can be ordained to the priesthood; and whether the Church should not, in the light of greater knowledge, review the received tradition on homosexuality … It is here that we see at work the wonderful mixture of tradition and continuity (on the one hand) and reform and renewal (on the other).

This was just another way of restating the well known passage that appears at the start of the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer[3]:

It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England, ever since the first compiling of her public Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes, of too much stiffness in refusing, and of too much easiness in admitting, any variation from it.

Still, as befitted the teachings of the Protestant martyrs, who helped to establish the modern Church of England, and gave the politics of its creation a strong intellectual foundation, the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion included one, the Sixth, which insisted on the primacy of Scripture:[4]

Holy scripture contains all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor maybe proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

This Article is “fairly minimalist”[5].  It is talking about what is not essential; not about what is.  It is addressing extraneous teachings, not how to construe the written texts that we call Scripture.  It is an affirmation of primacy; but not a guide to interpretation.

In one of the Collects (that for the joyous Second Sunday in Advent), there is further guidance on the way in which we do well to read Scripture: reflectively, patiently and not with the false pride that attributes to ourselves, mere humans, an immediate capacity to comprehend all of its divine messages.  Whilst Protestantism was founded in the belief that ordinary people should have access to Scripture in their own vernacular languages, the need for caution is emphasised.  This is not a territory for experts alone.  But neither is it one apt to an attitude of hubris:[6]

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning;

Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.  Amen

Sadly, there are those today, including amongst Protestant Christians and others who should know better, who read Scripture with arrogance.  Who believe that, doing so, they can entirely defy the evidence of the natural world and science, now available to us.  In a sense, they are making the same error as those who fought and resisted the Reformation.  They want to adhere to comfortable old ways of understanding.  They resist those who bring a new message of truth and insight.  As someone raised in a Protestant tradition of Anglicanism, a mere layman, I have to remind these pretended evangelists of the core of the Protestant approach to Christianity.  It is a humble and simple core, based upon open mindedness, free inter-congregational dialogue, a search for truth and a connection to the real world beyond tradition, power and superstitious ignorance.

In the battles that are now being waged concerning Scripture and sexuality, it is not surprising to see some in the line-up of power-brokers clinging to old beliefs.  But it is astonishing, and distressing for me, to see them joined by those who claim to be faithful to the Protestant tradition of Scripture-based Christianity.  And this is a nice thing about Protestant Anglicans.  They believe in the virtue of a bracing cold shower from time to time.  In the matter of religion and sexuality, this is what realism and truth require today.

[1] Robert Crotty, Three Revolutions – Drastic Changes In Interpreting the Bible, ATF, Hindmarsh, SA, 2012, 201.

[2]  Speech to the Prayer Book Society, Waverley, Sydney, 1998, cited A.J. Brown Michael Kirby: Paradox/Principles (Federation, 2011), 300.

[3]  Preface to the Book of Common Prayer, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode Ltd. (1662 version).

[4]  Articles of Religion, Book of Common Prayer, Ibid, 682 at 686 (Article VI).

[5]  Peta Sherlock, “Reading Romans as Anglicans: Romans 1:26-27” in N. Wright (ed.) Five Uneasy Pieces – Essays on Scripture and Sexuality (ATF Theology), Adelaide, 2012, 31.

[6]  Book of Common Prayer, Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent. Ibid, 92.

FOLLOWING THE PAPERS ON “GROWING UP CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT” BY MICHAEL KIRBY AND GERARD HENDERSON ON TUESDAY 20 OCTOBER 2020, SYDNEY INSTITUTE CHAIR JACQUELYNNE WILLCOX LEAD A DISCUSSION WITH THE TWO SPEAKERS.

Jacquelynne Willcox: Thank you to both Michael and Gerard for that. So, you both finished your presentations at university. I would like to explore a little bit beyond that. How is it that, when you were entering that great period of tumult in Australia, how did your respective church associations and faith affect your roles in public discussion?

Michael Kirby: I wouldn’t say that, in my case, my church greatly affected my role. Growing up, the Anglican Church was about 40 per cent of Australians. And it was the church that, though not established, was always first at public occasions. The Queen attended, as Gerard has pointed out, Anglican Church or Scottish in Scotland. But, I don’t think the church had a big effect. Of course, the Labor Split did have a big effect. The consequence of that was that the Labor Party was out of office, from 1949 until 1972, an awfully long time. That wasn’t good for Australian political life. But that was one of the consequences of the role of religion in Australian life and the role of the DLP. If you were a Labor supporter at the time, as my father was, you felt very angry about the churches getting involved in the politics of the country.

Jacquelynne Willcox: Gerard, you also stopped your presentation at university. What about you and the discussions and the activism that you were involved in?

Gerard Henderson: I became actively involved in politics. I was with Bob Santamaria’s National Civic Council for about 10 years. We fell out in the end and, in the last decades of his life, we didn’t speak. But people regard me as still as part of that. It was essentially a political movement. It was a political movement of Catholics, but it was a political movement. There wasn’t much Catholicism discussed.

I mentioned Pius XII as the last Catholic Pope. I was not a great fan of Vatican II, but not because of the religious matters. At the time, the Catholic Church threw out all its liturgy, all its traditions – they disappeared. I remember, before he became a bishop, Eric Darcy once said that, after Vatican II, to find the tabernacle in a Catholic Church you had to create a royal commission. I didn’t like that very much.

So, gradually, I drifted away. I’ve always had this view about the Catholic Church, and Michael might disagree with me on this, but it’s got its traditions, it’s got its teaching, it’s got its dogma, but no one is forced to belong to it. You can always walk away. If you don’t like the church’s teaching on this or that – just leave it. I sort of parted on a friendly basis. I don’t have any problem with the Church, and I’d be regarded as a cultural Catholic. Moreover, I was never particularly a religious person. I liked the traditions, and when the traditions went, I wasn’t going to turn up to something that looked like the Anglican Church in Sydney, which was so low, you couldn’t see it. I wasn’t really interested in that sort of church.

In more recent times, Catholics have brought back some of the traditions. But, I’m not talking about the Catholic Church now, I’m talking about the Catholic Church in the late 1960s, through to the middle or the late 1970s, which is when I started drifting away. I bear no antagonism towards the Catholic Church at all. I’m grateful for the education that I received, which was a very good education. I learned a lot. And I admire the people who taught me, including the Jesuits and the lay people as well. That being so, everyone’s education has some limitations.

So that was my background. We got no political indoctrination at our school at all. In fact, I found out later that there was a nest of Labor people in the school. They all belonged to the Catholic Worker, which was a Catholic magazine in Melbourne, which opposed Santamaria and Daniel Mannix. Catholic Worker people were in the Labor Party. Most of my lay teachers were members of the Catholic Worker.

Dr Frank Knopfelmacher once joked that it shouldn’t be called the Catholic Worker, it should be called the Catholic senior Lecturer, because there weren’t any workers on it, which was true. They were all intelligentsia. They were teachers and lawyers and so on. But there was a Catholic Worker group within our school.

For all that, with neither the Jesuits who would have been with Daniel Mannix and the Democratic Labor Party, nor the lay teachers in the social sciences with the Labor Party, did we receive any indoctrination. I learned what I learnt about political activism from home. At school, I learned a lot of history but I was never ever told how to vote. It might have been different with people who went to schools run by the various orders of brothers. It might have been, or nuns. I don’t know. We didn’t get any indoctrination.

I should make one point about the Labor Split. The Labor Split was called, essentially, because there was a Labour leader called Bert Evatt, who lost the 1954 election which he should have won. He then turned on Labor’s Victorian executive and sacked the whole Victorian executive, after which the party split. My father was a loyal Labor man and he got expelled. It was mainly the Catholics who were expelled, but it wasn’t only them. If Labor had had a different leader, the split wouldn’t have occurred, and my background would have been quite different. But it did occur and changed everything. It would have been different growing up in Sydney where the Labor Split didn’t really take place; it mainly took place in Victoria and Queensland. If I’d grown up and Sydney, I would have had a different background as well.

Jacquelynne Willcox: Would Sydney have produced a Mannix or a Santamaria?

Michael Kirby: I don’t think so. In fact, hearing Gerard speak about his religious and political upbringing is mildly shocking to me, because in the public schools, there was absolutely no discussion of party politics. In church there was no discussion of it. I had a wonderful minister, of course he didn’t call himself a priest, though the Book of Common Prayer called him a priest, at St. Andrew’s Church. And his interest was the war. He’d been a padre in the Second World War. So, when others were talking about sex and abortion and things like that, he would invite people to come and speak at the church. He invited Pastor Niemöller, who was one of the Lutherans who stood up against Hitler. And he spoke to our humble little church in the suburbs of Sydney. That was the sort of religious milieu for me, and it was not an Australian political milieu. Similarly, at school, we didn’t get religion or politics, we got excellent teaching and excellent values, democratic, equal values. I feel a sort of resentment that I didn’t meet any Catholics until I got to university. This was by their own choice. When Governor Bourke had tried to have national schools, as the British had tried to introduce in Ireland, that was opposed by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, and it was opposed in Australia. The countries that have very strong cohesion are New Zealand and the United States where they haven’t had large, separate religious denominational schools. Looking back, I think it wasn’t a good development for Australia.

Gerard Henderson: If you were an Anglican in Melbourne, and you went to Church of England schools like Melbourne Grammar, or Geelong Grammar, you wouldn’t have met any Catholics either. The churches had their own schools. It’s just that the Catholics had more schools than the Anglicans had, but they both had schools.

Michael Kirby: Oh, I know that, but they were private schools. I’m talking about the great Australian experiment in compulsory, free and secular education. Which, over the last 30 or 40 years, we’ve been in the process of defunding, or not properly funding. And that’s an outcome of all of this ancient and often Irish antagonism to the system of public schools.

Gerard Henderson: But that’s essentially because you came out of a majority tradition; as you pointed out, the Anglicans were 40 per cent. And there were other Protestants as well. I came out of a minority tradition across Australia; the Catholics are probably 20 per cent. So, it’s pretty obvious that the group that’s in a minority is going to have a different attitude to the status quo than the group that’s in the majority.

Michael Kirby: Though I came from the majority, I wasn’t fed that at school.

Jacquelynne Willcox: But you might have, because you talked about how the King was your King. And the flags that were in the Church.

Michael Kirby: We didn’t have icons at home, with little statues and so on.

Jacquelynne Willcox: Did you have a portrait of the King?

Michael Kirby: No icons of the King. I subsequently wrote to the British High Commission when I was about 13 and asked for a photograph of the Queen. And they packed it up and sent it very nicely, and I put that in my bedroom at home.

Gerard Henderson: But you can still find today, in Anglican churches, the Union Jack or the Union Flag. At school, we didn’t have the papal flag. We didn’t have any flag.

Michael Kirby: But you have a photograph of the pope, a photograph in the church.

Jacquelynne Willcox: You’ve both talked about Catholics and Anglicans and not knowing each other until you got into university. Gerard, you mentioned Jews, because you had a natural affiliation, being both in the minority. Did you encounter Jews in Sydney?

Michael Kirby: Yes, don’t forget, most Jews went to public schools because they were secular, and they were happy in the public schools. They went to Non-Scripture lessons, as it was called when we went off to our religious classes. I’m not sure whether my high school had a special religious class for Catholics in the school. There weren’t many of them, but there were some. But the Jews would go off to Non-Scripture, and they always did very well academically.

I knew a lot of Jews at school, and they were only two per cent of the population, but they were in public schools. My mother was the core of our Ulsterdom. At the end of her life, when she was dying in Royal Prince Alfred hospital, there was no Anglican priest or minister to be seen. But there was a very nice Catholic priest; his name was Father Brendan Quirk. And he was a friend of a community of Josephite nuns opposite my parents’ home. The nuns asked him, because they’d been friendly with my mother, to go and call on her and he did.

When my mother was actually dying, the very day she died, Father Quirk came in. He said, “I would like to say some prayers with your mother. Would that be all right?” I said, “Well, I’m not sure. That might upset her because her father was from Ulster.” My father was there. And my mother just put her hands in prayer, signalling that she was over that, she had passed beyond that, and she didn’t want that to be denied the opportunity of the prayer of a Christian priest. So, he got out these oils and potions. I assumed they were that extreme unction procedures of the Catholic Church, which we don’t have in Anglicanism. And he did all that. I was worried about Ulster. But my mother had grown up and gave an instruction that we’ve all got to grow up and get over this denominational difference, because the essence of the similarities are so much greater. That, Gerard, is what Vatican II taught.

Jacquelynne Willcox: What about other denominations? What about the Methodists? And now the rise of Pentecostalism that we’re seeing here?

Michael Kirby: Well, I don’t think we really had much to do with Pentecostals.

Gerard Henderson: No, they weren’t around.

Michael Kirby: But Methodists and the Presbyterians and so on, they were around in the public schools.

Gerard Henderson: Well, they were around the private schools too, Geelong College, and Scotch College were Presbyterian. Wesley College in Melbourne was Methodist. Xavier College was Catholic, and the other two – Melbourne Grammar and Geelong Grammar – were Anglican.

Michael Kirby: These were always minorities, you see –

Gerard Henderson: Well they were minorities, but I’m just saying we met these people because we played sport against them. We played football and cricket against them.

Michael Kirby: We met them because they were part of our community.

Gerard Henderson: I’ll make a point about Ulster. The Protestants dominated Ulster. The Catholics were the minority in Ulster.

Michael Kirby: They were in the minority in Ulster, but they were in the majority elsewhere. And their fear was that, left to being just a minority in Ireland, they would suffer disadvantages that they didn’t want to suffer.

Gerard Henderson: They did okay.

Michael Kirby: So let us not go there Gerard. My mother taught me to get over it. Patrick O’Farrell’s book on the Irish in Australia is very interesting. Because he teaches that when the later Irish came out to Australia and tried to sell the hatred of Britain and the dislike of British institutions, and so on, the Irish in Australia were not all that sympathetic or supportive.

Gerard Henderson: That’s true.

Jacquelynne Willcox: We’re talking about the split, the Labor Split. And then we had all the movements coming up in the late 1960s and 1970s, and anti-war and women’s rights and laterally gay rights. Is that where faith got involved in your respective involvement in those causes?

Michael Kirby: Well, so far as gay rights are concerned, you know, this is something where there was a unity ticket between the Catholic Church and the Sydney Anglicans. Recently, Archbishop Fisher of the Catholic Church and Archbishop Davies of the Anglican Church at New College, engaged in a dialogue. They fell over themselves in agreement about everything. That really tested me. But I kept remembering Martin Luther, sort of expressing my view that this was an erroneous interpretation of the Bible. And they should just respond with the kindness and love which is the essential message. This is the problem with denominationalism. That you get so bound up in your own loyalties, which are sort of clan loyalties, that you forget the central message of Christianity, which is one of love and reconciliation and peace and kindness to each other. That doesn’t figure big in either the Ulster or the Republican sentiment in Ireland.

Jacquelynne Willcox: And you’re experiences then Gerard, on the fringes of those discussions?

Gerard Henderson: I never got involved in religious differences. There were Catholic organisations on the campus in Melbourne, but I never got involved. There was a Newman Society. I had trouble understanding what some of them were talking about.  I was interested history, I wasn’t interested in theology. As I said, my view was, if you didn’t want to belong, you could always leave. I always find it odd that people want to change the Catholic Church. You don’t have to belong. If I don’t like something, I just walk away. I don’t try and change it, by and large.

Michael Kirby: That’s hard if it’s associated with your parents, and with their faith and your loyalty to them. You just can’t easily walk away from your church. And if you think it is in error, you should speak out. For example, I think the Anglican Sydney diocese and all the Baptist simplicities of it, is taking a very narrow, literalist interpretation. I think my job is to try and convince them of their error. It may be presumptuous, and it may be foolish, and it may be a waste of time. But that’s why people struggle with it. They love their church and they don’t want it to go away from them.

Gerard Henderson: You’re a kind of Protestant version of Murray Gleeson 60 years ago.

Michael Kirby: I suppose that’s true. But I’m not actually trying to convert anybody, I’m just trying to put the rational viewpoint. I think, nowadays, most people embrace the rational viewpoint about women’s rights and gay rights.

Jacquelynne Willcox: You might talk about being from, for want of a better term, a mixed religious affiliation in the family. You’ve got a history of Protestants and Catholics. And you mentioned in your personal life, your partner is not in any way religious.

Michael Kirby: He’s against it.

Jacquelynne Willcox: But Gerard, you married a Catholic. And was that important in your early relationship with Anne?

Gerard Henderson: I thought she was a pretty sort, actually. It didn’t really matter. But we mainly met Catholic women, I guess. Although Anne and I really met in a bookshop. It was a Catholic bookshop, that was selling school texts, but it wasn’t a religious bookshop. Early on, there was a concept of mixed marriages. That was a marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic. They were allowed in the church, but they were kind of frowned upon. George Pell’s father was a Protestant, his mother was a Catholic. In Ballarat, they weren’t allowed to marry at the altar; they had to marry at the side of the altar, because only Catholics could marry at the altar. That probably survived until the 1970s, but it doesn’t apply anymore. So there were concepts about that, but I wasn’t particularly interested in all those Church teachings.

Jacquelynne Willcox: And what about Sundays, you talked about going to the nearest church, which was the Methodist Church. Did you feel the need to go to church every Sunday?

Michael Kirby: When I was growing up, as when Gerard was growing up, going to church was much more regular than it is now in Australia. I would go, and the Methodist experience was quite brief. Then I went to the local Anglican Church, and I loved the liturgy. It really is very beautiful. It is, I understand, a sort of English translation of the Catholic Missal of that time, but done by Cranmer – who was not only a saintly man, and brave and strong, but he was a great writer. It’s very, very beautiful. So I started to sing in the choir. But I used to faint. In the end, the Minister said, “Well, Michael, you have a beautiful voice, but please, I don’t think we can carry you out of church again. So just have your private devotions.”

Jacquelynne Willcox: The fainting choir boy, I love it. Gerard, was Sunday a big day for you? You talked about how you couldn’t play sport on Sunday, or drink.

Gerard Henderson: Well in the Camberwell local government area. Not all areas were like that. But I grew up in the Camberwell local government area in Balwyn. And that was the case. We didn’t follow it. But there wasn’t any organised sport in Camberwell at that time. You couldn’t rent out an oval and play a football game on a Sunday.

Michael Kirby: I don’t think there was anything like that in Sydney. Though Concord in Sydney was like your suburb in Melbourne. No pubs, no hotels.

Gerard Henderson: So we just used go to Mass on Sunday.

Jacquelynne Willcox: Did you go to confession? 

Gerard Henderson: Not seriously. As I said, I don’t like talking about myself. I used to make up a few sins and get absolved. It was all pretty easy, you made up a few sins, and left to say three Hail Marys.

Michael Kirby: That’s something my mother warned me about Catholics – they think they can just go along to a human being and get absolved. Whereas we know it’s not as easy as that, we have to make our confession to all others – and it’ll be up to Him. And God was Him, to decide whether or not we would be absolved.

Jacquelynne Willcox: And as a young lawyer, and then as a judge, did you find the ritual of the church very similar to some of the ritual that is in court.

Michael Kirby: The dress, and a lot of the Englishness of the judiciary is partly inherited from the English Church, and that in turn was inherited from the Catholic Church. It’s very ritual oriented. But I have a feeling, and I hope I wasn’t wrong, that my church was a kind church. Very English, and kind. Now I get a feeling that it’s not so kind. And both the Catholic and Anglican churches are very against transgender people. I don’t know a lot about transgender but those I know have a hard life and they don’t deserve unkindness and unscientific approaches to their existence.

Gerard Henderson: Having said that, I would say that the Catholic Church of my generation was also a kind church. If you look at what the nuns in particular were doing in the hospitals and in teaching poor kids. HIV AIDS patients are often looked after in Catholic hospitals and institutions. George Pell used to go and visit some of the AIDS centres in Melbourne, and no one knew about it. So, whilst there was one attitude to doctrine, it did not hold in the pastoral field. Malcolm Muggeridge once said about the Christian churches in general in relation to India. He said, when he went around India, there were all these orphanages and other places run by various Christian churches, but he never found one run one run by the Humanist Society or the Rationalist Society. Christians were doing all the caring and Catholics were doing a lot of the Christian heavy lifting. We should not overlook that. If you’re down and out in the gutter, you’re probably more likely to be picked up by a Christian believer than you are by someone who’s not.

Michael Kirby: Well, there’s a lot of truth in that. The only problem is, if you’re one of those who has been left in the gutter, like a gay person, or an injecting drug user, or a sex worker or others in the categories that are not smiled upon then life is quite difficult for you. It’s particularly painful and that’s the sort of conflict and problem. But I’m second to none in paying tribute to the Sisters of Charity at St Vincent’s Hospital and equivalents around Australia. They were wonderful when the AIDS epidemic came along, no doubt now with COVID-19.

Jacquelynne Willcox: The two other big issues that have dominated both your lives would be Republicanism and Monarchinsim. Was religion, a part of that? Your views?

Gerard Henderson: I expect it was because, as I said, we didn’t look to the Queen, we looked to the Pope and our various saints and martyrs were not English. I came up in a family that was very positive about what was then called England, which now I guess we call Britain. I’m a great admirer of British society. I was then and I am now. But I never thought of myself as British and I would prefer Australia to be republican with a republican Head of State. That’s less likely now than it was 20 years ago. It did have an impact. Because we grew up in a different environment. We didn’t have the attitude towards the King in Michael’s case when he first grew up – with the Queen in my case, when I first grew up. We didn’t have that attitude that others, for whom the Queen was the head of the Church, had and for understandable reasons. So, I think it affected it. But there are plenty of Catholics around who are monarchists, like Tony Abbott.

Michael Kirby: Well, in the Anglican Church, of course, you pray for the Queen’s majesty, you pray for all the members of the Royal Family. And I don’t think they do that in the Catholic Church.

Gerard Henderson: No, we wouldn’t do that. We used to pray for the conversion of what was called Russia, I guess, the Soviet Union. We prayed for that. And I think in the end we got we there.

Jacquelynne Willcox: The power of prayer.

Michael Kirby: I joined that prayer.

Gerard Henderson: Although I think the Orthodox benefited most, rather than the Catholics, but there you go. I mean, that’s another division, the Orthodox and Rome division that goes back even beyond the Protestant Reformation. We should have another talk.

Jacquelynne Willcox: We should have another talk too about communism, and the fear of communism, and how it affected by your religious associations.

Gerard Henderson: Well, that was important.

Jacquelynne Willcox: I think we’ve run out of time, and we want to thank both our speakers.