From my earliest years the primary lens through which I developed an appreciation of diverse identities was through my Catholic parish, St Thomas’, Calcutta. Situated in plush Middleton Row and centred upon a property allocated to Archbishop Carew by Governor Vansittart in 1827, the parish premises included a handsome Palladian church and convent school – Loreto House – both of them positioned within this once almost exclusively European enclave and within close proximity to my Jesuit school, St Xavier’s College.
This complex of institutions and buildings was intended to educate Catholic members of the European colonial establishment, who lived in the nearby Georgian villas and mansions of South Calcutta and Fort William. By the time of my birth a steady exodus of such people had begun. To the UK and Canada they went and also to Australasia and Southern Africa, where neo-colonial resistance to modernity had taken on a new lease of life through various race-restrictive immigration policies and, notably, apartheid.
Within Calcutta the nature of the clergy and laity had begun to change. The last European Jesuit archbishop was succeeded by an Anglo-Indian, Trevor Picachy, who later received the red hat. Our own parish clergy, once exclusively Anglo-Irish, followed by Anglophile Belgians, all of them Jesuits and accounting for India having the largest Jesuit province on the globe, began to register the leadership of Anglo-Indians. A measure of how closely this clerical cohort reflected the painfully slow pace of a newly emerging Indian Catholicism is that at one stage our Parish Priest was the brother of the Cardinal and the Mother Superior of the Loreto Order was the sister of the Vicar General.
As with church administration, so also was the congregation. Westernised Anglo-Indians began to take the place of Europeans. While the front pews, with names affixed to them, were technically reserved for the handful of colonials still ‘staying on’, our parish with a nearby club called The Grail, remained the centrepiece of a neo-colonial construction of Catholicism in this vast diocese. The children of Anglo-Indians soon exceeded the European component at both schools and the Latin Mass was sung with gusto by this hybridised cohort, who colonised the Grail Club with cultural and musical tastes drawn from Europe. Just imagine the revolutionary impact upon this stultifying and highly resistant cultural corner of Catholicism by Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity!
In time, the mass of Anglo-Indians, who regarded an indigenised India as a threat to their Western cultural identity, emigrated to the UK and Canada where, unlike Australia and New Zealand at that time, no racial tests applied to sifting applications for emigration primarily based upon appearance and a propensity to portray Western values, whatever these were meant to be. Quaint Aunt Vera had herself photographed in sunlight alongside her shaded White husband to beat this colour-bar. Back at Middleton Row it became at first a novelty and thereafter more commonplace to see women in sari present themselves for Communion at the altar rails.
Meantime, the side aisles, reserved for ‘Native Indians’ and servants and others of subordinate identity in the neo-colonial pecking order, were thrown open to all, and the clergy as well as the faithful began to be drawn in greater numbers from the Indo-Portuguese Goan community to which my parents belonged. Thus displacement and replacement forcibly refurbished a church community that would have died had it not addressed and responded to the inclusive inculturating influences unleashed by Vatican II.
'There are parishes to which Asian Australians flock and in regard to which the Australian Church has managed change extraordinarily well. The question must follow: is that enough?'
The pace of change, melded with tradition, of new Catholic identity formation manifested itself in a novel form of Indian Catholicism in which increasingly diverse and hybridised adherents adopted Indian names and social practices common to the various identities constituting India’s rich, although hitherto suppressed, indigenous spiritual heritage. Thus the Cathedral parish, in the large Chinese quarter of this vast archdiocese and served by Portuguese and, later, Italian Salesians shifted inexorably to a cultural mode that saw Bengali introduced to the Liturgy as the area became settled by refugees from Bangladesh.
Both schools introduced Bengali as a second language, while the teaching of Latin, the traditional language of the Church, was phased out. In time, Goan clergy and parishioners, themselves subject to the influence of modernity and globalisation, became harder to source as vocations from that quarter began to dwindle and the majority of clergy and the episcopate as well as female religious began eventually to emerge from the Southern Indian state of Kerala. In time this too will change.
At school, I became aware that my own gay identity was mirrored in that of several other boys, all of them gifted scholars, as well as an outstanding lay Music Educator, in addition to the diversely-gendered identities evident in several priests and which has always been an occluded aspect of India’s traditionally non-binarial contribution to the world of the aesthetic imagination, ascetic spirituality, and literature.
These exemplary colleagues and mentors brought a much needed alternative presence, hitherto suppressed, that a large Jesuit College traditionally catering to the education of India’s male elite, badly needed. Where does all this lead and what lessons are there in it for Australians living in the twenty-first century with dramatically altering demographic and cultural profiles, while facing many changes among the most prominent of which is the phenomenon of an increasingly laicised post-colonial Church?
And how do we respond to a pontiff who advocates synodality as a solution to addressing the complex challenges of modernity, governance and representation in his diverse constituency, as mirrored in this ethnography of dramatic transitions described here from another corner of Catholicism’s vast global enterprise? Additionally, as an immigrant Church how does Australian Catholicism respond to this?
'Where do they celebrate Mass and occupy an equal place at the Table of the Lord within an overall Australian Catholic project that is often seen as an unwilling part of an inexorably changing globalised Catholic world?'
Critically missing so far from any discussion of Australian synodality is the question of changing Catholic youth identities. And the most essential question here is: where do those influenced by changes that reject them go? How might their diverse Catholic identities be reincorporated?
The answers are partly there. Every Australian diocese and parish already has its particular subcultural identity that inflects its liturgy. Celebration, being the authentic hallmark of a liturgy that reflects identity, must keep pace with a theology that also incorporates the diverse cultural space that the young inhabit. Thus there are parishes to which Asian Australians flock and in regard to which the Australian Church has managed change extraordinarily well. The question must follow: is that enough?
What also of those fifty-per cent of Australians who are women: our mothers, sisters, spouses, heads of household, daughters and female leaders? Who caters for them? Where do they celebrate Mass and occupy an equal place at the Table of the Lord within an overall Australian Catholic project that is often seen as an unwilling part of an inexorably changing globalised Catholic world? Where indeed is there a Catholic Church structure that recognises and affirms the thousands of women and gay men hitherto suppressed and closeted away in niches that preclude us from being a visible presence of Church?
These are the crucial structural and cultural realities that participants must confront when addressing issues of structural reform and synodal governance. It is not as if such accommodations haven’t eventuated in the real world; but if they reflect an under-the-radar Catholicism it is high time our leaders, lay and religious, redressed this anomaly. Not to do so would be to ignore Pope Francis’ urgent call for a Synodal Church that reflects, caters for and remains responsive to a Catholic constituency that cannot be represented other than in terms of celebrating its diversity. To do otherwise is to sink the Church into the very mire of stagnation that provided the original impetus to call the Synod!
Michael Furtado writes about poststructural representations of Catholic identity and their implications for future church practice, governance and synodality. He is a parishioner at St Ignatius’, Toowong.
Main image: Woman standing in front of church in Goa. (Getty Images)