When local churches are sold or demolished by outside authorities there is always local opposition. It is stronger when the local community does not believe it has been consulted. And the conflict is especially bitter when a village church is sold by a town congregation. A recent book about the struggle to save a Victorian Western District church from decommissioning and alienation illustrates what is at stake.
In Saving St Brigid's Regina Lane tells the story from the point of view of those who fought to save St Brigid's Catholic Church in Crossley for the local community. Its members are descendants of the Irish immigrants who over generations built and supported the church. It has been the heart of their community.
The conflict began with falling church attendances and a decision by the Koroit parish priest to rationalise resources. This involved decommissioning the Crossley church, a decision taken without proper consultation of the Crossley community. This led to representations and abrupt rebuff, appeals to the Bishop, promises not kept, the formation of a Save St Brigid's group, local and national publicity, the placing of the church on the market, and almost miraculously the purchase at market value by the group as a community centre.
Although the book describes in detail the battles to save the church, it is far more than a protest song against the power of the Catholic Church. It is really a passionate celebration of the community built by Irish potato farmers who fled famine in Ireland, and of the church at its centre. Standing on red volcanic soil and looking towards the pines of distant Port Fairy the church evokes a richly peopled land, its ties with Indigenous Australia and with Ireland, and the precious gift its power to connect people is to a more individually focused age.
Above all Lane invites the reader into her own journey. It takes her from a country life lived in the shadow of St Brigid's to the city where she seeks to find her place in a broader world, working in social organisations in Australia and overseas. When she committed herself to save St Brigid's she found herself building personal and community identity out of apparently inadequate materials. At the book's end she is able to own in her own way the values of family and community she had earlier found constricting.
She gives herself so generously in her writing that her book becomes a love story, touching all the moments of self-doubt, of ecstasy, of despair, of friendship, of the transfiguration of faces and places, and of exacting ordinariness that are the grammar of love.
For a Catholic reader the charm and sadness of the book lie in the fact that she could enter imaginatively the heart of Catholic life only by rejecting the values she saw in the Catholic Church she had to deal with. So why did it have to come to this?
Simply, the protagonists on each side of the dispute, many of whom I know and respect deeply, had different understandings of church buildings. One side saw them as church property for which the local priest is responsible to administer for the good of stakeholders. These are the Catholics currently involved in parish life.
The other side saw church building as a living centre of the relationships between time and space that shape the community. The community extends far beyond the boundaries of practising Catholics to embrace those for whom the church is part of their identity.
These views of church buildings are complementary, but in conflict were seen as incompatible. It was then easily forgotten that the relationship of churches to the families that compose the local community and their history in the district is fundamental to understanding the church. Their importance is implied in the belief in the communion of saints, a much neglected phrase in the Creed.
In the communion of saints, which links Christians who have lived with those still living, bodily connections are important. The people who have built their local church, prayed in it all their lives and cared for it, matter. Their associations with place and community, through the church hall that was the centre of social life, the stained glass windows that coloured their childhood, matter. The larger stories embodied there, the immigrant groups who formed the first congregation and their relationship to the first Australians, have continuing importance.
Nor is the communion of saints confined to the virtuous and church-going. It comprises all the baptised, and reaches out to many others. It includes the 'church dormant': tribal catholics whose families belonged to a congregation, and who may attend church occasionally for baptisms, marriages, funerals, and major feast days.
Because these concrete relationships to church buildings matter, Catholics in a parish composed of a central church and outlying congregations are not simply individuals in a homogeneous group. When they meet they carry their local connections with them.
Had the importance of place and history been given their proper religious value, the community would have been consulted in depth and the fight would not have become so personal. Perhaps the parish may then have seen the outcome of the struggle — the development of church property as a community centre — as central to its own outreach to the wider community.
But in that case the energies that inspired a community to fight for the church and led to so much self-discovery may not have been released. Ultimately, like Adam's biting the apple, the actions that precipitated the saving of the church may have been a happy fault.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.