Paul Collins

Paul Collins’ recent commentary, “The Real Crisis of Australian Catholicism”, raises some contradictory challenges for the future of the Catholic Church in Australia. (more…)

It is patently obvious that Australian Catholicism is in crisis. The usual analysis is that this has been caused by the appalling mishandling and cover-up of child sexual abuse and the subsequent investigations of the Royal Commission. However, this is only a partial explanation. Catholicism’s problems have a much longer history and go much deeper. They won’t be solved merely by the application of the recommendations of the Commission. A much more radical root and branch reform is needed.  (more…)

Religious fundamentalism is having an increasing influence on democratic societies, most obviously in the US, but also here in Australia. The so-called ‘religious freedom’ debate has re-ignited the culture wars that originate in fundamentalist demands to maintain a kind of ‘purity’ of doctrine. Previously in Australia church and state had worked out a modus vivendi, a way of operating in which each respected the other’s sphere. A fundamentalist approach to religious freedom endangers that and it is having a truly baleful influence in our society. (more…)

Recently we’ve seen a slew of articles in the media, both informed and otherwise, on the question of the seal of confession. Already a couple of Australian governments have acted to enforce mandatory reporting on priests when sexual abuse of children is mentioned in confession. Federal Attorney General Christian Porter told his state and territory counterparts in early-June that his government is working toward developing a consistent approach for all jurisdictions. In passing, Porter correctly pointed out that legally the seal of confession was never absolute under Australian law, but was generally respected. What is also clear is that the Australian bishops aren’t going to accept mandatory reporting of confessional material. We seem to be plunging into a church-state conflict with priests heading-off to jail. (more…)

President Harry S. Truman promised that ‘the buck stops here’. Well, last Friday afternoon Rome time, the Chilean bishops—all thirty-four of them—decided to stop the buck-passing and ‘face the music’, that is confront the consequences of their pretty-much complete failure to deal with the sexual abuse crisis. They all offered to resign. What are the implications for the Australian bishops? (more…)

It is patently obvious that Australian Catholicism is in crisis. The usual analysis is that this has been caused by the appalling mishandling and cover-up of child sexual abuse and the subsequent investigations of the Royal Commission. However, this is only a partial explanation. Catholicism’s problems have a much longer history and go much deeper. They won’t be solved merely by the application of the recommendations of the Commission. A much more radical root and branch reform is needed.  (more…)

We now have the recommendations of the Royal Commission (RC) to the Catholic Church. Many of them request the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) to take specific issues to the Vatican requesting that they be implemented. The question immediately arises: how will the Vatican react? What will Rome do? What I’ve tried to do here is foresee something of that reaction. (more…)

I’m not looking forward to the report of the Royal Commission. As a still-practising Catholic with a minor public profile, I am very ashamed of what the Commission has revealed about my church. But, despite its excellent work, I still think it has been a mixed blessing. (more…)

I am disturbed by your identification of your personal views on marriage equality with those of the Catholic Church… The saddest thing is that you have linked Catholicism with some of the most reactionary and unattractive political forces in the entire country. (more…)

 

There’s one thing you have to concede to Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane: he can unerringly sniff the direction of the wind in the Vatican; mind you, he’s a frequent visitor to Rome. He’s spotted that Pope Francis is big on synods or gatherings of bishops, clergy and laity to set policy for the church, so he told his diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Leader (17 August 2016) that he’s persuaded the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to hold a national synod of the Australian Catholic Church in 2020.

Unlike the Anglican and Protestant churches, Australian Catholicism is not big on synods. The last one was in 1937 and the three before that (1885, 1895 and 1905) were only attended by bishops, senior priests and theologians. The present bishops are not really enthusiastic about a synod either. The danger is you get people together and you never know what might come-up. (more…)

 

The papacy only gained complete power over the appointment of bishops in the mid-19^th century; it’s that recent. Previously many different systems operated, but the key issue was that the local church had a major say in who was appointed bishop, even if it was only the local lord or king. Nowadays episcopal appointments result from a closed, opaque process in which all power is held by the Vatican and hardly any by the local church. The result: some very poor appointments. (more…)

The Via di Santa Prassede is a back lane close to the imposing Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Pope Francis’ favourite church in Rome. But there is a very significant historical building just nearby: the basilica of Santa Prassede in the laneway that takes its name from the church. It was built by a much hated pope, Paschal I (817-824). It would be good for Francis, in light of his decision to create a commission to study the possibility of women deacons, to pop into Santa Prassede next time he’s in the area. He’d find it very enlightening. (more…)

If I had a say in who were made saints there are three people I’d immediately nominate, and two of them are not Catholics! My first choice would be Dorothy Day and, thank God, she has begun the slow process to sainthood. The other two are John Wesley (1707-88) and Charles Wesley (1703-91), the founders of Methodism.

A truly Christian man, John Wesley set out in 1738 to evangelize ordinary working people who were largely abandoned by the established church. For fifty years he travelled all over England on horseback, riding up to 5000 miles annually, preaching thousands of sermons, often three a day, to enormous crowds. When churches were closed to him, he preached, like Jesus, in the fields. His brother Charles was the greatest hymn writer in the English language. We still use many of his hymns today.

One of his finest is Christ the Lord is Risen Today. The hymn originally had eleven stanzas, but was without the ‘Alleluias’ we use. The verse I love most reads:

Lives again our glorious king,

Where, O death is now thy sting?

Dying once, he all doth save,

Where thy victory, O grave?

For me this expresses the core of Christianity, the total victory of life over death. ‘Where, O death is now thy sting?…Where thy victory, O grave?’ The Preface for the Requiem Mass expresses it succinctly, ‘Lord for your faithful people life is changed, not ended.’ As a priest I found it easy to preach on Good Friday for the events of Jesus’ death are so dramatic and within our range of experience: a good man killed because it suited the politico-religious establishment. We know about political prisoners, torture and murder.

But the Resurrection is different. Here we deal with something beyond our experience, and I never found it easy to preach on Easter Sunday. As I often do I turned to Gerard Manley Hopkins. He has a poem That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.

This complex sonnet was written in July 1888, just eleven months before he died aged 45. Depressed by his surroundings in Dublin, he goes out on a blustery, midsummer day and recaptures his love of nature. He describes the cloudscapes calling them ‘heaven-roysters’. He feels ‘the bright wind boisterous’ which dries the mud from ‘yestertempest’.

Then he remembers Heraclitus with his vision of nature as a constant fire, a ceaseless conflict of opposites, flux and change; nothing is permanent and the only certainty is death. In this context humankind is ‘in an enormous dark / drowned’ as ‘million-fuelèd, / nature’s bonfire burns on.’ ‘Death blots back out,’ he says and ‘vastness blurs and time / beats level.’ His initial joy seems overcome by death.

But then he stops himself. ‘Enough! The Resurrection…Away grief’s gasping / joyless days, dejection.’ He realizes that it is the way of nature that everything must die, as Christ died on the cross in order to be transformed by resurrection. Death is the process through which all creation passes. ‘Flesh fade and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire leave but ash.’

But in the resurrection all is transformed:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

The image of a diamond suggests something that fire can’t destroy. The diamond’s structure is hard, permanent and lasting. And that, Hopkins says, is what we are. Since he (Christ) ‘was what I am’, so ‘this Jack, joke, poor potsherd’ can become what Christ is – truly alive. This is his hope.

I think that hope is more significant than faith and love. Hope is rooted in imagination, in the ability to grasp other possibilities, to conceive of other options. It helps us escape a monochrome, paranoid world. While we all have imagination, we need the artist to give it expression. As Shakespeare says in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

And as imagination bodes forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

That is what Charles Wesley does. In simple and evocative language he gives the resurrection ‘a local habitation and a name.’ ‘Where, O death is now thy sting? Life triumphs over death.

 

 

 

 

 

I was talking recently about the Synod with a very experienced parish priest. He said that if the bishops thought we were all waiting with bated breath for their decision regarding the divorced remarried receiving Communion, then they really do live in cloud cuckoo-land. Nowadays divorced Catholics don’t just hang around waiting for a bevy of bishops to decide. They follow their consciences and do what they think is right, especially if they have talked to a sensible, pastoral priest. Sure, many have understandably walked away from the church, but many have stayed having made their own decisions about going to Communion – the internal forum solution.

So really it’s irrelevant what the Synod decided. Even on the gay issue sensible Catholics already understand that talk about people being ‘intrinsically disordered’ is not only utterly insensitive; it is also ‘intrinsically’ un-Christ-like and evangelically ‘disordered’!

But that doesn’t mean the Synod was a failure. It was a success because it recovered something of the church’s Catholicity. Genuine Catholicism implies a universal, multi-ethnic, non-sectarian church, a community of many parts and differing views. My major criticism of the two popes before Francis is that they were essentially ‘uncatholic’; they promoted a narrow, ‘pure’, sectarian church, the antithesis of Catholicity. That’s why they loved outfits like the Neo-Catechuminate and Opus Dei; they are sectarian in structure and intention.

But the bishop of Rome, as Francis likes to be called, encouraged the synod to be genuinely Catholic and, unlike his predecessors, called on participants to express views that differed from his own. For the first time since Paul VI revived the Synod in 1965, this gathering was actually free. Bishops could speak their minds and weren’t constantly second-guessing the pope.

Perversely, it was the conservatives at the Synod who openly disagreed with the line Francis took who did most to relativise the high papalism that has absorbed the church, lock, stock and barrel since the Counter-Reformation and that reached it apogee in John Paul II. We had the wonderful spectacle of conservatives indulging in ‘cafeteria Catholicism’, i.e. picking and choosing which doctrines and popes they were going to follow and which they weren’t. For instance many preferred John Paul II’s dogmatism to the pastoral emphasis of Francis, claiming that the presumed indissolubility of marriage was more important than Jesus’ unequivocal teaching on mercy, love and forgivness.

Another positive was that the Synod toyed with localism and the idea that one size doesn’t fit all. Being Catholic in sub-Saharan Africa is different to being Catholic in the Middle East, or Asia, or Australia. The spirituality, faith experience, liturgical expressions, moral dilemmas and religious culture of each region is different. So decisions about these issues need to be devolved and the local church needs to assume much more responsibility for its own life. This immediately relativises the Vatican and returns the bishop of Rome to his much more traditional role: that of being the guarantee and heart of the church’s communion and the touchstone of its orthodoxy.

So the great thing about the Synod was not what it decided, but that it happened and participants took the first tentative steps in the direction of realizing Vatican II’s doctrine of collegiality.

But the Synod also revealed some profound weaknesses in contemporary Catholicism. First, the church’s leadership cadre was revealed, at best, as second rate. This is the result of a bench of bishops chosen by John Paul II and Benedict XVI who saw themselves as the church incorporated and bishops as branch managers. Anyone with initiative, imagination, emotional intelligence, or leadership ability was excluded from the episcopate.

Bishops also have lost the sense that they too sit in the cathedra Petri, the chair of Peter as the third century church father Cyprian of Carthage called it. They are the rocks and leaders of the local community and they are called, like the pope, to extend collegiality to their priests and people. For this to happen the local church will have to have a decisive say in their election. The recent practice (it only goes back to the late-nineteenth century) of Rome appointing all bishops has to be jettisoned and power devolved to the local church.

There are two issues the Synod should have tackled, but didn’t: women and contraception. Pope Francis says he wants women to participate at all levels in the church, but he has done little about it. If the church did promote women it would influence equality for women across faiths and in doing so would reduce violence to women and children. The evidence is overwhelming that once women have education, freedom from patriarchal and tribal structures, equality and access to reproductive health services, they make responsible decisions about fertility. This is a real area of weakness for Pope Francis, as the encyclical Laudato si reflects.

The only reason why contraception was sedulously avoided was because the bishops would have to admit that Paul VI was wrong. This is certainly what the vast majority of Catholics in developed countries think, but bishops in the developing world, particularly Africa, see this issue as linked to reproductive health which they caricature as a Western plot to control their populations. So it suits them to side-step it. The African bishops play the same silly game with homosexuality, claiming it is a foreign import and never existed in Africa before. The motive here is to outdo the Muslims.

So for me the Synod was a success and it was the first time since Vatican II that bishops had the opportunity to truly speak their minds.

Paul Collins is a Canberra-based historian, author and broadcaster.  See his webpage at www.paulcollinscatholicwriter.com.au

 

 

The 2014-15 Synod on ThePastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization

 Around Christmas 2013 there was much ado in the Australian Catholic community about the upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Family called by Pope Francis for October 2014 and 2015. In preparation for this synod, for the first time ever, the laity as well as bishops were consulted and asked to respond to a document that covered a range of doctrinal and practical issues concerning family, personal relationships and gender. Many people put a lot of energy into responding to what was a badly formulated questionnaire within the context of a tight timeframe.

I will return to these responses and their impact in a moment. First, some historical context is essential to understand what will probably happen at the synod.

The idea of the synod of bishops arose out of the Vatican II teaching on collegiality. This is the notion that the bishops, under the headship of the bishop of Rome, govern, lead and guide the church. To make that a reality Pope Paul VI unexpectedly introduced the idea of a synod of bishops at the beginning of the last session of Vatican II (September, 1965). He did it in a motu proprio, that is in a document issued ‘by his own authority’. In other words it was a papal, not a conciliar decision.

Herein lies the rub: created by the pope, the synod has always been under papal and Roman curial control and its role is, at best, purely advisory.

Desultory attempts were made by Paul VI to make the synod work, but John Paul II turned it into an increasingly ineffective body. He set the synod agenda and issued the document that summarises its conclusions. These documents increasingly represented what Pope Wojtyla thought the bishops should have said, rather than their actual arguments. Theologian Rene Laurentin says that synods labor under ‘an unbelievable accumulation of restrictions’. The cause is ‘the ancient fear … of any organs of a democratic type which might limit papal power.’ As an instrument of collegiality the synod has become a complete dud.

Remember also that 34 years of episcopal appointments passed between the election of John Paul II (1978) and Pope Francis (2013), a whole generation of bishops. The problem is that many of these appointments were of mediocre men who lacked leadership skills or genuine pastoral sensitivity. The selection process excluded priests of independent mind, and increasingly the gene pool of talented priests from which bishops could be selected has contracted. So even if the coming synod was given its head it would be largely populated by bishops afraid of taking the initiative and lacking the intellectual and emotional ability to assume leadership.

It’s in this historical context that Pope Francis has called the synod on the family. He began by seemingly cleaning out the timeserving prelates who populated the synod secretariat and appointing the able papal diplomat, Lorenzo Baldisseri, to head the office. Even allowing for the badly designed questionnaire, at first everything seemed to go swimmingly.

But then last month came the Instrumentum Laboris (IL), the working document that forms the basis of the synod’s discussions. This document reflects nothing of the published and known responses of the laity to the 2013 questionnaire. It reflects an idealised, almost pre-Vatican II vision of family. Certainly IL recognizes that there are problems, pressures, ‘difficult pastoral situations’ (e.g. de facto unions, divorce and remarriage and even ‘unions of persons of the same sex’). But it roots all these problems in a ‘crisis of faith’ and blames ‘external pressures’ and ‘various modern ideologies’ for the difficulties that families face. Or, IL claims, the ‘catechesis’ (method of teaching) has been ‘defective’ as, for instance, in the teaching on contraception. No consideration is given to the fact that rather than defective catechesis, the teaching on contraception has not been theologically ‘received’ by the married laity and therefore lacks doctrinal validity.

IL even makes a distinction between lay feedback, which it calls ‘observations’ and official ‘detailed responses’ from episcopal conferences and the Roman Curia. I would have thought that the laity knew a little more about families and gender relations than members of an all-male and supposedly celibate ecclesiastical cadre. As an editorial in The National Catholic Reporter (30 July 2014) dryly commented ‘the disparity between those who will be doing the talking and deciding and those who will be talked about is … particularly glaring.’

The most interesting section of IL is the chapter on natural law. Nowadays most people have never heard of ‘natural law’ and those who have find it confusing and problematic. While admitting that natural law rhetoric is largely rejected today, IL still proceeds as if we lived in a non-evolutionary, static world and natural law was eternally normative. It is precisely this assumption that contemporary Catholics reject.

They know that we live in an evolving, changing, inventive universe, not a static one. People have shifted away from generalised notions like natural law when making moral decisions, especially about gender and sexuality and are guided by their consciences when deciding on ethical action. Today we are more concerned about love: do people love each other? It doesn’t matter if they are of the same gender. Instead of looking to generalised principles, the church needs to refer to the experience of the faithful. For Catholics today the experiential is much more important than the theoretical.

So the only proper thing for the bishops to do at the synod in October is to reject IL outright, as did the bishops at Vatican II with the documents prepared by the Roman Curia. But I’m not optimistic that this will happen given the bishops we have today. Australia, for example, will be represented by Melbourne’s Archbishop Denis Hart. I can’t see him doing anything too ‘radical’. But I may be wrong and time will tell.

Paul Collins is a Canberra-based historian, author and broadcaster. See his webpage at www.paulcollinscatholicwriter.co.au