Following the recent elections two very different institutions, a church and a political party, are now setting out on what they hope will be a bright new future. The Catholic Church has a new leader in Pope Leo XIV after the death of Pope Francis, while the Liberal Party of Australia has chosen Sussan Ley after its recent heavy election defeat.
It is helpful to compare the two. They have more in common than light-hearted references to the Liberal ‘conclave’ to select their new leader might suggest. For all their differences the situations they find themselves in contain similar elements. They are both under pressure to survive and prosper in this country.
The church’s problems are well-known, while the Liberals have just been on the wrong end of a landslide defeat. Church attendance is in decline and the Liberals lost votes and a huge number of seats. Both are facing the existential question of tradition versus reform. Both have a membership which is too old and too male. They each have a so-called ‘woman problem’. The average age and gender of a Liberal Party member is said to be a man in their 70s, while the so-called average Australian voter is a 37- year- old woman. That rings a bell. The average Catholic in the pews is also too old. While the pews contain plenty of women, senior leadership and ministry positions are held by men. Pope Leo was elected by a conclave of men from among themselves.
What to do? The Liberals had the option of electing their first woman leader in federal politics. They could quickly change the face of the party in that way. That is something, though it doesn’t address structural problems with members and voters. The church didn’t even have that option under its current rules.
The basic issue for each institution is its attitude to society. Do they really like modern society and wish to learn from it, or do they try to insist on shaping society in their own image? They can do both, while engaging in dialogue, but many of their powerbrokers want to primarily emphasise the latter.
The arguments and divisions within each institution are remarkably similar. Strikingly they are advanced by prominent senior Catholics within the Liberal party, Fred Chaney and Tony Abbott.
Fred Chaney, former Deputy Leader of the party, leading advocate for Reconciliation and Indigenous rights and uncle of the current federal Independent Member for Curtin (WA), Kate Chaney, has also been prominent within the church. He advocates party reform and adaptation. He echoes debates within the church when he talks about the Liberals.
'The initial stumbling block for the church is welcoming women into the diaconate. Traditional Catholic leaders regard it as contrary to tradition. Furthermore, traditional Catholics, including Popes, believe in complementarity of the sexes and equality of dignity rather than equal rights in governance and ministry. Such views underpin the dogged resistance to the advancement of women within the church.'
His views were reported as follows. “He says that he knows families, like his, that were multi-generational Liberal bastions, but today would not even consider voting for the party.
“The problem is that the Liberals don’t like Australia as it is. Australia is not the problem; it is the Liberals themselves.”
All this could be applied to many conservatives within the church.
Tony Abbott, former Liberal Prime Minister, leading right-winger and extremely close to the Sydney leadership of the church, takes entirely the opposite view. He advocates resisting change, which he identifies with the left, and doubling down on traditional cultural values. He promotes the adversarial approach of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and shares conservative values with former National leader and Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, who is an Anglican. Abbott is quoted as saying about Australian society that, “There has been a war on our culture for the best part of 50 years. The long march of the left through the institutions is essentially a war against Anglo-Celtic culture…we need to resist the attack on our culture.” Conservative church leaders share these views.
Further comparisons be made.
Sussan Ley agrees that the Liberals must reclaim the support of Australian women, whose support for the party is demonstrably much weaker than among men. Pope Francis and the new Pope Leo have identified the same problem.
The initial stumbling block within the party is the resistance to instituting quotas for women MPs. They have worked as a practical step to raise the percentage of women Labor MPs to above 50%, but conservative Liberals argue that quotas are unacceptable because they offend against their ‘merit’ principle. At least in principle the party has no objection to gender equality.
The initial stumbling block for the church is welcoming women into the diaconate. Traditional Catholic leaders regard it as contrary to tradition. Furthermore, traditional Catholics, including Popes, believe in complementarity of the sexes and equality of dignity rather than equal rights in governance and ministry. Such views underpin the dogged resistance to the advancement of women within the church.
The international growth of the church in Africa and Asia counteracts the decline of the Church in the West. That helps to stymie immediate reform driven by the West but may not be a long-term answer to the church’s problems. Within the Liberal Party, Peter Dutton’s so-called suburban strategy was meant to bypass the traditional heartland and to appeal in part to the multicultural communities in the western suburbs of the capital cities. That clearly didn’t work.
The two institutions will survive, but they may not thrive if they fail to engage positively with modern society on matters of gender equality and sexuality. Many Catholics can see similar dynamics at work in each institution.
John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.