from the 2008 Assembly keynote address
THE MULTICULTURAL AUSTRALIAN CHURCH IN A GLOBALIZING MULTIFAITH WORLD
by Professor Desmond Cahill
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:
1. the Leadership challenge
2. the Diversity challenge
3. the Community challenge
4. the Interfaith challenge
4. THE INTERFAITH CHALLENGE
As we have stressed, in Australia we are transitioning to a multifaith society which brings up many challenges. We are witnessing, as a counterbalance to perverted religion, at both a local and global level, the rise of multifaith networks - in Australia, we see this at the grassroots level in Melbourne and, increasingly, in Sydney and across Australia, and at the global level, with the rise of the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP), the Parliament of the World's Religions (PWR) and other regional interfaith networks. Some religious groupings, led by the Focolare, the Columbans and the Divine Word Missionary orders, have been at the forefront of the interfaith movement in Australia with their participation in the activities of the Australian WCRP (World Conference of Religions for Peace) chapter, now known as Religions for Peace Australia. The Australian Catholic University has also made it a priority with the establishment of its interfaith centre. Other religious orders have been strangely absent from the interfaith movement though some have sponsored one-off events.
WCRP, operating in 70 countries and closely aligned with the United Nations, is the world's largest interfaith organization (
www.religionsforpeace.org).
The other major and oldest interfaith organization is the Parliament of the World's Religions which began in 1893 when the first formal dialogue between Eastern and Western religious leaders took place in Chicago. Though successful, it would be one hundred years before it was held again and in Chicago. It has been held every five years in Chicago (1993), Cape Town (1999), Barcelona (2004) and now Melbourne in December 2009.
First, in reflecting on the interfaith challenge, there is a more fundamental issue to be addressed. Our Australian context is now more religiously competitive. Ultimately each one of us has to justify our faith in the religious marketplace of our own conscience. Why do I believe in Catholic Christianity and not in another faith tradition? Why am I a Catholic and not a Muslim? A Catholic and not a Buddhist? Notwithstanding the post-modern disregard for objectivity and truth, they are important questions. Tony Coady, Professor of Philosophy at Melbourne University, has expressed that our envelopment in the truth of the triune God and the Catholic tradition is rooted in our quest for truth and objectivity.
This is not in any triumphalistic manner, but, as he beautifully expresses it, "philosophy has taught me two things: the tremendous importance of truth and objectivity as ideals, but also that the world is immensely complex so uncertainty and modesty about the truth is very important, too." (Zwartz 2006: 13).
In the interface with the other world religions, the two key issues are the triune God and reincarnation. For me personally, as a Catholic Christian, my concept of the monotheistic God as triune is a fuller and richer explanation of the Godhead in all its mysterious unknowability and infinite diversity. The other Abrahamic religions with which we have so much in common are not mistaken in their concept of God as much as their concept is limited.
The Catholic School and its Interfaith Context
In 2006, I participated in a religion and peace seminar in Osaka. At the end, the executive director of the Shinto Shrine, member of a very famous religious family in Japan, approached me and asked me to find a legal guardian for his son currently attending a well-known Catholic College here in Australia. Hence, the question: how does a Catholic College educate the son of a Shinto priest, especially in terms of religious education? How does the Catholic system educate religiously the many non-Christian students in its schools, especially in its inner-suburban schools, as more of such students enter our schools with the increased migration from China and India?
The point I wish to make is this: our religious education guidelines and texts need to provide a more intellectually rigorous foundation based upon a reformulated apologetics that is far removed from Dr. Rumble and Bishop Fulton Sheen who were responding to the needs of a different age. The Catholic Studies text does a fair job with addressing the triune God issue but it is poor in addressing the reincarnation issue in comparison to the Christian belief in the resurrection and the uniqueness of the individual life of each human person rather than a cycle of lives.
However, ultimately, the answer is in the life of Jesus who, as history's greatest figure in contrast to the other great religious figures of history, is much more appealing and magnetic. Our greatest product is Jesus, given as God's bargain to history, the ethnic Jesus, the transcultural Christ and the multicultural body of Christ.
The presence of students from faiths other than Christian
The notion of a Catholic school as a Catholic interfaith centre may be paradoxical if it contains students from various non-Christian faiths. But it is no more paradoxical than the hyphenated notions of the triune-God, the God-man and the Virgin-Mother. It aligns with my notion of a greater smorgasbord of Catholic schools. More importantly, it aligns with the call to evangelization and missionization that are at the heart of Christianity.
Here, we touch not only on the area of Catholic policy but also of public policy. There may be an argument for exclusivism based on the notion that Catholic schools should be wholly Catholic. It is protectionist and does not square with the missionization obligation of the Church. The great breakthrough of "Gaudium et Spes" was that the Church is at the service of the world in faith, and if we do not choose to open our doors or to limit our places when there are places, then we do a disservice to the mission of Jesus. There may be an argument on public policy grounds that the government is funding Catholics to attend Catholic schools though this obviates traditional Catholic thinking that every parent has the right to send their child to the school of their choice.
In my view, the Catholic system should take as many students from faith backgrounds other than Christian as we can without damaging school cohesion or its Catholic character. They must be required to participate in the normal religious education classes though not necessarily any liturgical event. The school should allow, if not facilitate, classes in theparticular faith, perhaps after school on the premise that the Church demands to take an R.I. class in government schools.
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We are challenged in living in a multicultural and multifaith world. Ten days after the S11 terrorist attacks, 10,000 people of all faith communities and people of goodwill came together at Melbourne Park for a multi-faith gathering. Seven faith communities drew on their spiritual heritages to reflect on the events of September 11th, 2001:
- the Buddhist community, to the deep-throated gong of a bell sounding the passing of life, asked us to close our eyes and become bodies of light, praying for this disaster not to worsen and for all to be enlightened that the enemy and those who harm us can be our best teachers and that we consider the Karmic causes and origins of the hatred that drove the terrorists
- to the sound of the ram's horn, the oldest known musical instrument, in the year 5762 of its calendar, the Jewish community asked us to reflect on the Talmud saying, "Those who share in the grief of the community will share in its redemption" to which they invited all to respond with "Amen"
- the Hindus focussed on the aphorism that 'experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you', lighting the candle of love for peace and prosperity for the world and for the departed souls, and praying "may there be peace in the heavenly regions" in line with the great Hindu principle of ahimsa, non injury, that "it is the principle of the pure of heart never to injure others, even when they themselves have been fatefully injured" and with the advice that "an eye for an eye, and soon everyone will be blind"
- the Sikhs were consumed by its horror, and in our despair they cried out, "O God, the world is going up in flames; save it; by whatever means, deliver it. O God, who can save it?"
- the Muslim imam, focussing on "the convulsion of the days", in sending their community's condolences to the USA people, prayed for peace and harmony in the whole world and reminded all, "O all mankind, fear your Lord".
- the Bahais prayed, "O my God, O my God, unite the hearts of thy servants; help them to serve thee; leave them not to themselves", enjoining us that "the thought of hatred must be destroyed by the more powerful thought of love"
- and lastly, the Christian singer sang of "beautiful brokenness', the beautiful brokenness of the cross followed by the resurrectional transformation, and the reader recited the Beatitudes, "Blessed are they who mourn; they shall be comforted; blessed are the merciful; they shall have mercy shown them", imploring through the voice of the Nazareth carpenter, "we want justice, not vengeance".
In the contemporary world, none of the religions constitutes a majority. And there cannot be peace in the world unless there is peace between the religions. As David Tracy (1995) has written, "In the new Europe as elsewhere, there is a new form of spiritual journey, new for Christianity and far all the traditions in this late twentieth century. The new search is likely to become that of more and more religious persons in this late twentieth century.
The new search is likely to become that of more and more religious persons: stay faithful to your own tradition; go more and more deeply into its particularities; defend and clarify its identity. At the same time, wander, Ulysses like, willingly, even eagerly, among other great traditions and ways; try to learn something of their beauty and truth; concentrate on their otherness and difference in the new route to communicability". Inter-religious dialogue and education is an unfolding process. However, behind and beyond my rhetoric the risks are real. In today's world, religious and pastoral leadership is being broadened beyond that of religious authority. And at times, it may be necessary for that leadership to take action against that authority as Paul did against Peter. We are called to support religious moderation and resist religious extremism, nothing more and nothing less. As Hans Kung, now back in favour, has said, what is needed is "religiosity with a foundation but without fundamentalism; religiosity with religious identity, but without exclusivity; religiosity with certainty of truth, but without fanaticism" (Kung 1996: 283).
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