One of the wisest figures in Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace is the Russian General Mikhail Kutuzov. His successful strategy, defended against impatient peers, was summed up in the phrase ‘Time and Patience’. It proved successful against Napoleon, and its influence, without Kutuzov’s respect for soldiers’ lives, can be seen in the Russian resistance to Hitler’s army and perhaps ominously in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Stripped of its military associations the phrase might link and illuminate two apparently disparate events in coming days: the Catholic Plenary Council and NAIDOC Week. The weeks are moments in the life of communities that are in for the long haul. The larger challenges that they face will endure long after the week is over.
NAIDOC Week began in protest. Before the 1920s Indigenous Australians claimed that it was inappropriate to celebrate Australia Day on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, an event which marked the beginning of their dispossession. They began to organise in order to demand recognition by other Australians of their right to participate in society as equal members. They faced opposition both in their initial and their larger goals. Institutional racism, exclusion of Indigenous communities from the decisions that shape their lives and the challenge of passing on a rich culture to younger generations do not disappear in a day. To hang in has required time and patience.
The Plenary Council has been four years in the making. The Catholic Church in Australia also faces long term challenges. It is declining in numbers, both its culture and its self-confidence have been assailed by sexual abuse of children and its continuing effects, its structures of governance have been weakened by restrictions in the part that lay Catholics and especially women can play, and it also experiences difficulty in passing on its culture to younger generations. These are long term challenges that the Council must address but will endure long after it.
If NAIDOC and of the Australian Catholic Church are to achieve their goals time and patience will be required. Yet both weeks show signs of justifiable impatience. This year the theme of NAIDOC Week is Get Up! Stand Up! Show Up! Its tone is urgent, expressing frustration at the resistance to change but also the recognition that new possibilities have opened. Last year the theme was Heal Country, which echoed both a broader demand in Australia for respect for the natural environment and specific outrage at the destruction of the Juukan Caves. Impatience is understandable.
'A sense of marginalisation leads easily to discouragement and dissipation of energy. That must be met by preserving and nourishing culture. Both Indigenous and Catholic communities face this challenge.'
The Plenary Council has aroused many responses. Enthusiasm in its early stages that invited local participation, annoyance at the restrictions placed on membership of the Council and the topics that it will discuss, and frustration of articulate lay groups that proposed a strong agenda for the Council. Many Catholics have hovered between hope that the Council will build a platform for new vitality and fear that nothing will come of it.
NAIDOC and the Council meeting are also similar in that they represent communities grappling with a sense of marginalisation. For NAIDOC that marginalisation is a continuing reality. It has been historically enforced by laws that were discriminatory and racially based. It is perpetuated by bias in administration that leads Indigenous children and adults to be disproportionately represented in prison, and Indigenous communities not to be consulted in the decisions that concern them.
Although the Catholic Church is not really marginalised in the way that Indigenous Australians are, many Catholics feel it to be edged out. The sense is based in a history that includes memories of persecution abroad and of discrimination against a small immigrant community. The contemporary sense of marginalisation reflects the more recent change from a situation in which Catholics were relatively cohesive and had a strong political influence, to the present reality of a smaller group with many different national and cultural origins, of damage to its public reputation by crimes of sexual abuse of children, and of dissonance between many of its ethical positions and those of the wider society. These changes leave it with no cohesive and persuasive public voice.
A sense of marginalisation leads easily to discouragement and dissipation of energy. That must be met by preserving and nourishing culture. Both Indigenous and Catholic communities face this challenge.
Among Indigenous Australians the forces eroding culture come out of dispossession, discrimination and the weakening of communities. Government policies have not helped because they do not strengthen communities but often shame and weaken individuals, and hinder the growth of young people into proud young people who will inherit the opportunity to build their lives and to contribute to society. Connection with land, with family and with meaningful work are eroded. Culture is intangible, but it rests on the transmission of a tradition that binds relationships to people and to the world. That transmission comes through strong families and communities. These are long in the building.
In the Catholic Church culture is also threatened by the same emphasis in Australian society on individual choice and interests. It is reflected particularly in the failure to nurture faith and attachment to the Catholic community in young people. Although the Catholic education system has been effective in promoting a loose sense of Catholic identity and in promoting such Gospel values as care for the disadvantaged and a passion for social justice, these values are a single part part of a wider set of practices and relationships that constitute the Catholic culture. They need to be nurtured in active Catholic communities.
The building of the relationships involved in tradition and the culture built around it is a long-term project of the kind to which NAIDOC and the Catholic Church have long been committed. Dedicated weeks and Councils are important in gathering support for and furthering that project. But their effectiveness will lie in the energy they generate within people to hang in for the long haul.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: A general view during the 2017 NAIDOC March on July 7, 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. The march was organised to call for a day of mourning and to bring to light the disadvantages and inequality faced by indigenous people. (Darrian Traynor/Getty Images)