CHRISTIANITY TODAY – A TIME OF CRISIS?

In a Zoom meeting for The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 11 August 2021, commentator and long-time ABC presenter Geraldine Doogue joined Andrew West, presenter of the ABC’s Religion Report. Regarded by many who joined the meeting as one of The Sydney Institute’s best discussions, the conversation grappled with identity and meaning for Christians in a modern secular world where regard for many institutions has waned.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY – A TIME OF CRISIS?

GERALDINE DOOGUE

I’ve chosen to take up the Institute’s invitation in a pretty personal way, while hoping that some of the solutions I offer, can be applied broadly…not just to the Catholic Church of Australia, which is my belief system. And I simply don’t think I could approach this question without focussing on the dilemmas/agonies of this vital part of Australian life. Consider  part of what then VC of the Australian Catholic University Professor Greg Craven wrote in the Weekend Australian in 2019, with his inimitable way with words:

Have things ever seemed worse for the Catholic Church in Australia? If it were a boxer, it would look tangled in the ropes, sliding towards the canvas and spitting blood. The past 4 years have been horrendous. Endless, horrifying accounts of historical child abuse. A royal commission relentlessly critiquing failures of bishops and processes. The media baying for yet more blood. How much worse can this get?

May I offer something of a counter to those sentiments. I do seek them out.

When you climb out a black well, you are not the same

You come to in the blue air, with a long, sore scar circling your chest like the shoreline of a deep new sea

Your hands are webbed, inviting you to trust yourself…in water stranger and wilder than you’ve ever known.

Your heart has a kick, your eyes have a different bite, you have emerged from some dark wonder you can’t explain.

You are not the same.

This is the memorable work of the late poet Dorothy Porter, in a poem called “Not The Same”. I believe that offers Catholics some psychological, maybe even spiritual road-map: to TRUST that the Church can indeed emerge. But not on the same terms, no.

It doesn’t suggest, necessarily, great coherence. There’s a lovely statement from one of the great saints, St Teresa of Avila, at the outset of her classic work The Way Of Perfection. She confesses: “Since I don’t know what I am to say, I cannot say it in an orderly way!”

So I’m not alone. And I do take some comfort that far away from considerations of the secular world and its impact, people belonging to a range of institutions from banks to police forces, to political parties to sporting clubs, know that feeling of being gutted by discovering some behaviour, unknown to yourself, but fundamentally shifting your own and the community’s view of the institution to which you have devoted much of your life.

The Church is going through a dark-night-of-the-soul that’s for sure, probably of a different order to other institutions. Many of us knew it as something precious, unique in its draw on us, offering a glimpse of the Divine, certainly broader meaning.

We had that sense that “someone was running it, weren’t they?” That it would keep turning, somehow. That we’d turn up, as lay people, offering our attendance and maybe more. But like our personal circulation system, it would work. Plus, we knew that the Church represented far more than the awful stories dominating the headlines: we KNEW that 700,000 schoolchildren were educated in the Catholic sector, served by around 80,000 staff; with 66 hospitals including 19 public hospitals run by church-related entities: massive hubs of compassion. The St Vincent de Paul Society is the most extensive volunteer welfare network in the country, the Church the largest welfare provider outside government. Just dwell on that a bit.

All that evidence doesn’t necessarily settle me now, as an Australian Catholic. I am consciously considering what is asked of my fellow Catholics in the immediate future. I am consciously asking what is asked of me?

I had a quite powerful if poignant experience at Mass in my local church long ago now, listening to a young highly intelligent Australian-Vietnamese priest, recently ordained. He was transparently devout and super-conscientious. His homily’s emphasis quite surprised me because he very much saw himself as LEADING (his word) as the clear guide, the shepherd I suppose, leading the people in the pews, through the thickets of life towards greater faith. Then there was this moment, which brought tears to my eyes. He said, “I pray every day dear people, that I will be up to the task, that I will resist all temptations and fulfil my mission.” Or something very similar. As if all those priests in the headlines had not started out that same way I reflected.

I could see his total commitment. I was impressed. But I wanted him to say something like, “I will be there to accompany you; I will walk alongside you and hope to never deviate…I hope you’ll walk with me, as we all attempt, together, to discern God’s path for us and our Church here in Australia.” Or something like that.

I had moved to a very different model of both priesthood and Church:  a process still very much underway. Of course, it is entirely derived from the Vatican II Council and the whole notion of a Pilgrim Church.

I heard one man a bit older than me recently, a strong Catholic, say he’d decided language mattered a lot. He’d made a personal decision not to use the word “Father” and to refer to the priests as Pastor, with real respect, but fulfilling a different role in the man’s imagination.

A very good new book Leadership In A Synodal Church, by Anne Benjamin and Charles Burford, has just been released, reflecting on this word “clericalism”, which the Royal Commission identified as a major issue, the culture of clericalism, formality in relationships and an exclusiveness that emphasises the authority of priests over other members of the faithful. One parish priest described it as attitudes of “exception, entitlement and exemption” – definitely not a suite of temperamental styles to suit a secular culture of the twenty-first century.

But, as the authors say, clericalism is far from being the full story of the Church. And the Vatican II documents genuinely emphasised the culture-of-service that was inherent in priesthood, exemplified by the Jesus in the Gospels, if you care to look.

But what I’ve also been considering is what it does ask of us, the laity. Because it means a new laity too. It has to mean a real stepping-up by lay people in a way we’ve not been prepared for or rehearsed.

In trying to sort my way through these last demanding years, I’ve sought out in surprising areas, some sources of hope and energy. I realise it requires both humility and perseverance to be useful, combined with a bit of a systems mindset, combined with compassion of course. NOT PASSIVITY, in other words, not surrender.

I’d like to quote a German writer, the deputy editor of Der Spiegel, Dirk Kurbjeweit, who was in Australia a couple of years back when I read this. He was my guest, speaking about the modern German mood, post their twentieth century cataclysms. I’ve been intrigued for a while, by how the German nation put itself back together again.

According to Dirk Kurbjeweit:

Germans once believed they’d found a savour but then he tried to destroy the world and now their belief in salvation has vanished. The sociologist Helmut Schelsky found there was a “sceptical generation” of Germans who took part in the war when they were very young and who then went onto build up the Federal Republic. They rejected all grand ideas, their state religion became Karl Popper’s “piecemeal social engineering”, the politics of small measures: turn a screw here, carefully open a valve there, make sure not to create too much hope. Merkel’s fundamental approach!

I found that very encouraging, oddly enough. And turned to another group that might surprise you: the world of Judaism and the Jewish people, who truly had to re-create their whole belief and cultural structure in the first century. It was simply impossible to continue. This was long before later pogroms and the Holocaust again forced another re-imagining.

One of the guiding principles of that community’s strength, here and overseas – tested I know – is summarised by that wonderful Rabbi Jonathan Sacks phrase: the invitation to belong before believing. It is very seductive I have found, when used. I have several very good Jewish friends, who are very active in their community. I’ve sought to learn from them more about the way their community’s structured, where the life lies. They’re by choice, a tight cultural group, I realise, whereas the Catholic Church is the original multi-national, sprawling entity, wonderous but challenging.

One of my friends did say it’s often easier to handle crises than settled times. And I know there are different choices in different Jewish traditions. But in several dominant strands in Australia, while rabbis and shule are still the symbolic core and known to be, my observation is that the real locus of energy and commitment is in secular Jewry: benefitting the individuals concerned and the broader collective, which Prof Ian Hickie emphasised so strongly on my programme three weeks ago.

It’s true the Jewish outreach doesn’t seem to penetrate the wider community extensively, the way the Catholic tradition does which is one of our great strengths. But as my Jewish friends say, Jews had to enable their own group to survive because they knew no-one else would do it. So, they simply had to work out what was required. And they suggested to me that the maintenance of doctrine as such was less emphasised or worried about. What pre-occupied them was engagement, explicitly straddled over various age groups.

In fact, rabbis associated with Jewish schools are said to be responsible for “Jewish life”: a title with a subtly broader concept I think compared with the brief for our chaplains.

Groups like the Jewish Committee of Australia or the Council of Jewish Women (let alone other better known ones) who are well-funded and who aim to support activities that embody the values of Judaism, more than more than stated beliefs.

I know that does exist in the Catholic Church but I wonder whether this could be articulated better, especially to younger members: to display a confidence in the values-base and its roots, more than we do. A big driver, evidently, of these Jewish groups is engagement before fund-raising, persuading people that Jewish community vibrancy is in their individual and family interests and the projects chosen are understandable, not abstract, based rather more on action than explicit and stated beliefs. They are also well run and sustainable, to encourage younger, capable people to take part.

Rabbi Sacks distilled this beautifully in his Templeton Prize address, in 2017:

What emerged in Judaism and post Reformation Christianity was the rarest of character-types: the inner-directed personality. Most societies, for most of history, have been either tradition-directed or other-directed. People do what they do either because that’s how they’ve always done it or because that’s what other people do.

Inner-directed types are different. They become the pioneers, the innovators and the survivors. They have an internalised satellite navigation system so they aren’t fazed by uncharted territory. They have a strong sense of duty to others. They try to have secure marriages. They hand on their values to their children. They belong to strong communities. They take daring but carefully calculated risks. When they fall, they have rapid recovery times. They play it long. They are more interested in sustainability than quick profits.

Cultures like that stay young. They defeat the entropy, the loss of energy, that has spelled the decline and fall of every other empire and super-power in history.

And we haven’t even mentioned the Friday night Shabbat dinner, which I think has a touch of genius, as a binder, in the home, anti-loneliness, exposing people to their historical and spiritual base. Shabbat refugees exist too of course, roaming Double Bay!

In fact, the issue of sheer friendship is another area receiving some very good writing from American Catholics I notice. I do agree with some observers that the Church should balance its emphasis on family with one on friendship, that great need in our digital times.

In his terrific Joy of The Gospel, Evangelii Gaudi, his first Apostolic Letter, Pope Francis lamented the widespread loss of a sense of “friendship with Christ”. It permeates that wonderful document which had quite an impact on me when I was asked to moderate a big session on it.

He had this rather cute observation: “There are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter!” He warns against defeatism, against a “grey pragmatism” enveloping daily life. Whereas sometimes I don’t think he sufficiently explores why lay people are just too overwhelmed with the digital life to even think about Easter.

The London Tablet magazine is pretty good on this, in their Parish Practice section, where they offer both philosophy and specifics. Recently they put it this way which I loved: “Respect the busyness of the lives of those in your parish and affirm the many ways in which the busy life is made holy.” One of their good writers, Sr Gemma Simmonds, pleaded for the development of a language that would speak of spirituality in a way that would be accessible to the contemporary world…maybe five minutes of time alone with the will of God, amidst the 24/7 calls.

That sort of guidance will have to come from lay people because there’s no real guidance from the Church. Lay people feel they have to snatch at securing a quiet, contemplative life. We feel we have to preserve a precious core of identity, lest we be rolled over. That wonderful new/old realisation has been emerging of late (and yes, I must concede from a priest writer I think) that when people urgently seek to “find themselves”, the secret to serenity may be to “lose yourself”’: a very old bit of wisdom.

My Jewish friends would say, just do it! Show it can be done. Then the words will come. Young people, they say, want it obvious and they’ll draw their own conclusions, thank-you!

Pope Francis praises the benefits of the parish, despite the struggles it has in this secular world, preventing people from becoming “nomads-without-roots” – another great phrase which evokes that terrible drift which is anti-hope, and which in these times of such acute uncertainty can so easily lead to fear, to demagoguery, the exact reverse of the discernment required for citizens of a democracy, and which was and still could be exceptionally well-served by a robust middle-of-the-road Catholic Church here in Australia.

Yes the hierarchy have to change, shift from a monarchical system. But so do we, the citizens. There’s quite a way to go.