diversity

 

 

 

What does all this mean for the Church and its religious leaders as we head into an unpredictable future?

 

The Australian Catholic Church is at the crossroads. Retreating into a Tridentine restorationist past is an option but it will end in failure in a mobile, networked, diasporic, multifaith and multipolared world. Historically the Church in Australia has been united by a series of grievances built around its Irish-Rome core. I want to focus the rest of this address around four major challenges:

To be Catholic is to be global. As we have stressed, the Church in Australia currently is seeing greater diversification and greater dispersion of Catholics across the parishes and schools of Australia. To meet this challenge, the report, Graced by Migration, to the bishops recommended the training of deacons and pastoral associates. As the report says, "Ordained deacons would partly alleviate the emerging situation of a shortage of religious personnel to provide much needed support for pastorally overworked migrant chaplains. One archdiocese has successfully deployed a Spanish-speaking deacon ordained overseas who has combined his pastoral responsibilities with his day-to-day work to support his family.  Introducing a diaconate system would entail (i) the detailed outlining of the role and functions of ordained deacons in the Australian context (ii) the identification of those Catholic immigrant communities with a shortage of priests and other religious personnel (iii) the development and implementation of a recruitment process (iv) the implementation of a preservice training program over several years followed by an induction and inservice program and (v) their ordination and appointment supported by a mentoring program"(Graced by Migration 2007). The broader agenda is to harness diversity for the multicultural parish.

 

In the rush to ape the government school system, albeit with a Catholic overlay, and to professionalize the system since gaining State Aid, we have failed to take seriously our diversified student population and develop a smorgasbord of schools. The current diversity in Australian Catholic schools is reflective of the different religious orders and their particular spiritualities and charisms and geographical origins. Hence, the emergence of the Maronite schools has been a welcome development. But we could do more. We could develop mini-Italian bilingual schools or mini-Mandarin bilingual schools within larger secondary colleges. In deference to their hyphenated identities, I think we should encourage our immigrant and refugee children to make two First Communions, one with their school and one with their ethnic community. And how well are Eastern-rite students treated in our schools?

 

The Australian parish is struggling, and it seems to me that the relationship between parish community and Australian Catholic schools, both primary and secondary, has to be rethought and repositioned. We need to experiment. For many Catholic high school graduates, their main experience of Church has been the Catholic school. Perhaps Catholic colleges should think about holding a Mass in the late Sunday afternoon or early evening directed at young people and their families, including their students, both present and past, because they have the necessary personnel, multi-media facilities and musical resources to present a liturgy appealing to young people. It will also assist them in the transition from school to tertiary education and into the world of work. Such Masses might well become Catholic mega-Churches. In other words, the secondary college becomes a quasi-parish.

 

Perhaps, instead of thinking of parish and parish school, we should develop the notion of a parish hub networked electronically between church, school and households. Wewould be able to deliver electronically parish items of news, family liturgies, prayers for special occasions, special websites and chatrooms for the young who use the computer so much better than we older Luddites.

 

The Catholic immigrant groups that have arrived since the 1990s and continue to arrive have their different ecclesiologies and their own religious history which needs to be recognized in a revamped Australian liturgical calendar. It should be completely revised to incorporate the many saints from their religious traditions. The results of a recent study of religious education in the seven Greek Orthodox schools in Australia suggests that the greater the allowance for culture, the better the results (Kyriakopoulou-Baltatzi 2005).

 

The history of Catholic Australia has not been well taught in recent decades in Catholic schools so it is difficult for Catholic students to feel they are part of a continuing tradition and to feel that they have responsibility to transmit that tradition. With their interest in the Anzac saga, young Australians have shown their interest in Australian history can be great. Immigrants to Australia have had no or little opportunity to appreciate the history of Catholic Australia e.g. the Church's struggle to gain financial funding for its schools. Accordingly, it is suggested Catholic Heritage Sunday be instituted on the Sunday prior to Australia Day in January each year. A theme or event or person be selected to illustrate one facet in Australian history and built around a specially developed Sunday liturgy with materials specially produced by experts and backed up with a website for more detailed information.

In retrospect, during the fervour of the post-conciliar period, we too easily cast off popular devotions yet we now see little shrines along our roads and on our highways and outbursts of popular grief for celebrities from Princess Diana to Steve Irwin. I see no reason why not only within our churches but also within our schools, tastefully done, there cannot be shrines and posters to Mary the Refugee Mother or the Holy Family as the Refugee Family or to the heroic saints of the different religious traditions. Increasingly, our students will come from Asian and African Catholic contexts where the faith was born with the blood of martyrs and transmitted in heroic circumstances. We also need to take on board, revamped and modernised, the popular devotions, not only ones such as "The Stations of the Cross" but others such as the Filipino "The Last Five Words of Jesus". Religious processions and festas are part of popular religion for which the Australian Church and its schools need to find a bigger space.

 

Erga Migrantes Caritas Christi, the wonderful 2005 Vatican document examining the pastoral care of immigrants and people on the move, speaks positively of this popular religion when appropriately free of inappropriate elements; it is rich in values and informed by a pedagogy of evangelization.

 

"We must also bear in mind that for many migrants it is a fundamental link with their Church of origin and with their ways of understanding and living the faith. Here it is a question of putting into action an indepth work of evangelization and of enabling the local Catholic community to know and appreciate certain forms of devotion by migrants and thus to understand them. From this union of spirit, a more participated liturgy can also develop, one that is better integrated and spiritually richer" (Erga Migrantes para. 46).

 

The Australian Church must find a bigger space for popular religion. The untranslated book, Se La Processione Va bene ... Religiosita Populare Italiana nel Sud Australia (If the Procession Goes Well ... Popular Italian Religiosity in South Australia) by Anthony Paganoni and Desmond O'Connor has highlighted the public nature of the religious procession and the accompanying festa and why Italians in a country such as Australia lament the privatized nature of religion and its lack of emotion. The religious festa reinforces group identity in a society where the Italian felt dominated and becomes collective therapy to escape from their isolation and their anonymity; it is a blessing of the streets, the streets of their daily lives in big cities or small hamlets just as in the paese (village) long ago the Madonna and the local saints blessed the piazza, the street and their land. It also reflects the desire for a more public manifestation of a people who are more openly expressive of their deeper feelings and faith than most. Immigrants upon disembarking in Australia are not tabulae rasae; essentially they are gifts to the Australian Church and to our schools.