One of the pleasures of writing for online journals is to read the quick responses to what you have written. They provoke you to further thought.
Some who have commented on my articles in Eureka Street have asked why I do not address such central Catholic questions as abortion and gay marriage, why I do not defend Catholic teaching, and why I so often endorse minority left-wing causes. The implication is that I value my like-minded friends over my faith.
These are fair questions about which I have often thought. My response to them is necessarily personal, not given on behalf of Eureka Street. I hope it may spark further conversation.
In the first place, I am comfortable with the broad lines of Catholic teaching on areas such as sexuality, respect for life at its beginnings and its end, and the importance for society of the traditional form of marriage. Although I am critical of the detailed conclusions that some draw from this teaching and of the alienating language in which it is often presented, its consistent focus on respect for human dignity in all aspects of human life informs my own understanding.
That is where I stand. If people reject me because I have these views, I don't much care. Nor do I preen myself if people applaud me for them. Both rejection and applause are shallow responses. There is more to life than being a groupie. My publishing hero is Dorothy Day who lost half the circulation of the Catholic Worker with an editorial in which she argued that Catholics should not support Franco's armed uprising against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and lost another third when she condemned the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
My critics are right to say that in Eureka Street I write often on some issues but neglect others. There are many reasons for this selectivity. In the first place I know more about some things than others, more about refugees and church history, for example, than about moral theology and science. I am happy to leave many subjects to the better informed.
More important, though, I stay away from some topics because I cannot reasonably hope to evoke from my readers the response that I wish. When writing for Eureka Street, which is written in a public language for a public audience, I want to find a perspective and arguments on particular issues that will encourage readers to move beyond their initial judgments, to reflect on these issues, and then to reach their own conclusions. But in trying to do this I, like any writer, am at the mercy of my readers. I must consider not only what I want to say, but also what the reader will hear.
In my judgment, any article in Eureka Street that simply expounds or defends Catholic faith in Catholic theological language will leave too many readers fixed in the judgments with which they come to it. They are likely to barrack for it or against it without reflecting on the issues it raises. Such articles work well in magazines written for a Catholic audience open to such language, and I do write occasionally on such topics there.
But for a public magazine, articles concerned with religious faith work best when they explain the logic of faith and practice in a public language, or when an exploration of Christian faith illuminates issues that are of interest in the broader society. These are the kinds of article we publish most often.
It is particularly difficult for a Catholic priest to make space for reflection when writing about church authority, sexuality or gender, as on topics like abortion, gay marriage or women's ordination. Many readers instinctively assume that the writer is a dutiful hack of an authoritarian church, who is buying into issues on which no man, particularly a celibate one, will have anything pertinent to say. Such instinctive perceptions, even though unfair, crowd out any space for reflection, and make writing on these issues something best left to others.
I am happy to write for a magazine that carries many articles about minority groups whose dignity as human beings is not respected. To insist on the dignity of those most disregarded in our society is a thoroughly Catholic thing to do. Those who endorse Catholic teaching on sexuality and on the value of human life should rejoice when they see such insistence. Human dignity is seamless, and conversation about any aspect of it opens out to other aspects.
I don't care much for being called predictably reformist and progressive. Such labels don't help conversation. They often insinuate that the world is divided into secular lefties who don't take sin seriously and Catholic conservatives who do. But it is precisely because I have a realistic understanding of human sinfulness and of the impact of greed on society that I attend to the ways in which people are marginalised and that I plead for a better society. If to do all that is to be reformist and progressive, it is also a thoroughly Catholic thing to do.
Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.