Treatises on reforming societies or organisations perceived as stale is usually peremptory and prescriptive. Even the titles are abrupt. The nineteenth century Russian radical thinker and activist Nikolai Chernyshevsky laconically entitled his influential novel ‘What to Do’. It was less a question than a declaration. Lenin took over the title in the program he proposed before coming to power in Russia. Later the poet Zinaida Gippius wrote a pamphlet under the same name to encourage Russian emigrés in France to be politically active.
Such tracts usually describe the present situation as dire, and see little worth retaining in the new society. They then outline clearly the steps to be taken to realise it. For the Russian activists the change demanded was revolutionary. For less root and branch reformers it involves elements of radical and of progressive change. The challenge for those who advocate radical change is that they may overlook little noticed aspects of the past which will late prove to have been of critical importance when they are commending and carrying through their prescriptions.
The same challenge faces those who advocate radical change when reflecting on the future shape of the Catholic Church. Three recent books illustrate the point. Paul Collins, who for many years has written lively and radical articles and books about The Catholic Church commending extensive change, has entitled his latest book: Recovering the ‘TRUE CHURCH’: Challenges for Australian Catholicism beyond the Plenary Council. The capitalised words of the title indicate that this is a book that argues for a contested thesis. Something has been lost and must again be found. The symptoms of the loss are the failure of leadership, the sexual abuse crisis, clericalism and the inertia of Bishops.
Collins traces the loss back to the defensive Catholic response to the Reformation, in which it imagined Church as a monarchy. In the face of a secularising culture marked by a loss of depth and of meaning, the Church has little to offer beyond asserting its authority. It fails to engage in the deep religious formation of its members despite the opportunity offered by the coherence between the Gospel and the hunger for justice in secular society.
The Plenary Council is thus hamstrung by conflict between Catholics’ desire for honest conversation about the future of the church and the need of Bishops to assert their own authority and control. Collins supports Pope Francis’ more recent call to Catholics to go out to the boundaries to win people. He sees little hope, however, that a Church structured around Pope, Bishops and Priests will transform itself into small groups of committed Christians with a well structured but not uniform liturgical life. The history of the Church is in large measure a story of failure to live the Gospel of Jesus when its world is dominated by clericalism.
'Australian Catholic Church of the future will need structures fit to purpose. But it will also need a strong, diverse but shared Catholic imagination lived out in small grass roots communities. That will be nurtured by the telling of stories and a shared pride to match the shared shame.'
The stringency of Collins’ judgments is understandable in a man who was driven to resign from his priesthood partly because of his views, but also by envy of the privileged position that his connection with the ABC gave him to win an audience. His critique of the church is not only theoretical but also reflects his personal experience. A more confident church would have kept him in the circle and not marginalised him.
Recovering the ‘TRUE CHURCH’ will be an invaluable companion to those involved in the Pastoral Council. Not because it provides the right answers but because it raises large questions that could easily be shelved. The question with which it left me to me was how it would address the great erosion in Church energy and allegiance made evident over the time of Covid. This has accelerated a process already at work in ageing communities. How will faith survive and discipleship thrive in the Catholic tradition without structures and institutions to nourish them and without people who are committed to stable communities as part of their expression of faith?
Such questions invite us to look more broadly at our past, not with the eye of an inquisitor or a romantic, but with the readiness both to recognise the scandals and missteps of the past and to look compassionately at the partiality, passions, generosity and meanness of a community in which people were struggling to live and yet who built extraordinarily.
Not Forgotten: Australian Catholic Educators 1820-2020 describes what followed from the decision to opt out of the State educational system and to establish a system of Catholic schools for Catholic children. This was perhaps the most significant and formative decision taken by the Australian Catholic Church before federation. Although we can still debate its wisdom, we must also recognise the energy it freed, the sacrifices it demanded and, the extraordinary generosity of struggling Australians in meeting the demands made upon them. It brought thousands of Religious Sisters and Brothers to Australia to open and staff the new schools, and ensured that for the majority of Catholic children their first and formal contact with faith was through women. Although the stories of faith may have been masculine, they were interpreted through a feminine lens. The structure of the church may have been clericalist, but Catholics’ experience of it was more nuanced.
Not Forgotten tells the stories of the foundation and crises of Catholic education over two centuries through brief surveys of the periods under discussion followed by thumbnail sketches of significant educators over the last century and a half. In doing so it necessarily focuses on Religious and clergy — they formed the unpaid and devoted workforce who kept the schools going in times of crisis. Of equal significance, they were those most represented in the written archives of schools, Religious Congregations and parishes.
The book is a family history, mostly told by companions in the Religious Congregations of those mentioned. It complements Ronald Fogarty’s masterly Catholic Education in Australia 1806-1950 in its evocation of the courage of young women sailing to Australia to found schools at the end of railway lines in a strange nation, a strange climate and among strange children, recruiting people from the same remote places to carry on the schools. The book highlights how passionately Catholics wanted a Catholic education for their children. The rural origins of many of the contributors testify, too, to the central part that the schools played in the life of the communities they served.
The Catholic Education system remains a precious resource available to the Catholic Church today. Its solidity is a tribute to the commitment that Catholic parishes and individual Catholics made of their time and of their gifts to sustain it in testing times. It is a central building block in any renewed Catholic Church.
Readers familiar with Edmund Campion’s genial and informed contribution to Australian literary and cultural life will also find in Then and Now: Australian Catholic Experiences the same gems of conciseness, elegance, generosity of spirit and stimulation. In his focus on Australian Catholic life, he is never narrowly Australian or Catholic. Cardinal Newman, Lord Acton and Professor Manning Clark receive attention as do the international questions of clerical celibacy and of the sexual abuse of children. The book represents the musings of a generous mind and heart without borders.
Campion’s reflections on the past will also help Catholics to ask what a faithful community of the future might look like. The key word in his title is ‘experiences’. He looks for and expects to find a diversity of experience. In describing the Australian Church of the past he has an eye for the quirky and for the unexpected depth in experiences we might be tempted to dismiss as odd and unrepresentative.
He pays attention to the richness and limitation of the small and local experiences of Catholic life. With many other older Catholics, for example, he recognises the sentimentality and narrowness of many hymns such as ‘O Mother I could weep for mirth/ joy fills my heart so fast’, but also sees the warmth of the faith they express and the richness of the imaginative world to which they belong. While giving full weight and splendid detail to clerical tyranny he also points to the popular respect earned by bishops and priests as builders and defenders of the community. The church he describes is alive, holds together strong divisions of opinion, is marked by distinctive inherited prejudices, and nurtures a shared faith.
Seen from this perspective the Australian Catholic Church of the future will need structures fit to purpose. But it will also need a strong, diverse but shared Catholic imagination lived out in small grass roots communities. That will be nurtured by the telling of stories and a shared pride to match the shared shame.
Any program of Church reform will have soon to ask Chernyshevsky’s question, What is to be done? It is a dangerous question — he wrote his novel from jail and spent much of his life in exile or imprisonment. Discussion of Church matters is mercifully less perilous today, but the question does invite a radical repiecing of the connections and tradition and energies that constitute Catholic life. To this the Plenary Council will be just the beginning.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Church undergoing repairs at sunset. (Johner Images / Getty Images)