It is our pleasure today to bring you a comprehensive update to, The Wilkinson Report, examining the serious crisis the Catholic Church is facing in Australia in providing the sacraments and pastoral care to its core constituency of baptised Catholics. We present both the update in full, an overview and summary directly on this page, as well as our own editorial comment on what we believe needs to happen if the crisis in Australian Catholicism is to be addressed effectively.

The looming disaster of not enough priests...

Click on the image above or HERE to read the full update: "Catholic Parish Ministry in Australia: The Crisis Deepens". The ORIGINAL REPORT can be downloaded or viewed online HERE.

The Report was commissioned by Catholics for Ministry and the publication of the Report was funded by Women and The Australian Church

The Wilkinson Report author: Peter Wilkinson, DMiss.(PUG), BEd. is a missiologist and former Columban missionary priest. He has worked as Director of the Clearing House on Migration Issues (CHOMI) at the Ecumenical Migration Centre, Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, and Guest Lecturer in Missiology at Yarra Theological Union. He is married and now retired. Earlier this week, the ABC published a half hour interview with Dr Wilkinson on its religious affairs program website, Compass. Recorded in October last year the interview provides further background information.

Click on the image above or HERE to watch the interview with Dr Wilkinson on the Compass website.

On 1st March last year we published a report commissioned by Catholics for Ministry, funded by Women and the Australian Church, and compiled by Peter J Wilkinson that provided one of the most comprehensive statistical analyses of the staffing and participation crisis facing the Catholic Church in Australia that has ever been undertaken. It drew a large amount of interest and ended up in our top ten most read commentaries last year.

Today it is our pleasure to be able to bring to you Dr Peter Wilkinson's update to that report. This update not only contains updated statistics collected in the last twelve months but a number of sections providing data, analysis and commentary have been significantly expanded (the section on Catholic education in particular) and a new section has been added on the Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans. These are the section headings:

• Introduction
• Dioceses & Bishops
• Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans (NEW)
• Catholic Population
• Parishes
• Priests
• Seminarians
• Permanent Deacons
• Religious Sisters
• Lay Pastoral Associates/Pastoral Workers
• Religious Brothers
• Mass Attendance
• Parish Schools
• Summary Statistical Table: Territorial Dioceses, July 2009, 2010, 2011 (2011 Stats added)
• Bibliography

The Wilkinson Report Update Conclusion...

The Report finishes with the following Conclusion which we present here in full:

The official data for the year to July 2011 indicates that little progress was made in dealing with the parish ministry crisis confronting the Catholic Church in Australia. Rather, the evidence suggests that the crisis has deepened.

While it can be said that some areas of ministry have held steady, there are qualifications. The number of priests engaged in parish ministry did not show significant change, but only because the religious institutes assigned more priests to parishes, because more priests were recruited from overseas, and because many retired priests are included in the listings. The uplift in seminarian numbers is also due, not to increased local vocations, but largely to seminarians recruited from overseas.

There has been little change in the ratios of Catholics to priests and parishes, parish numbers held steady, amalgamations were fewer, there was only a slight fall in the number of permanent deacons, lay pastoral associates and pastoral workers, one new parish primary school was opened, and an additional 5500 students were enrolled in Catholic schools.

However, in other areas there was significant slippage. The forced removal of Bishop William Morris from the Toowoomba Diocese dealt a serious blow to the credibility and reputation of church leadership, both within Australia and worldwide. The failure of the canonical system to afford him natural justice and due process revealed a church out of touch with contemporary Western standards of justice, and at odds with the best of Australian values. The underlying injustice of this affair will remain a running sore every bit as disastrous as the way church authorities handled the crimes of clerical sexual abuse. Both have impinged directly and adversely on parish ministry.

During the year another 67 parishes lost their full-time resident priest, and an extra 72 parishes have had to share their priest with at least one other parish. Over 30 percent of all parishes are now without a full-time resident priest who is not shared with another parish. There are also 95 parishes without an assigned priest. During the year more parishes in almost every diocese became reliant on priests sourced from overseas. Local vocations to the priesthood remained low and may even have decreased. In 2011 there were just 80 local diocesan seminarians for all 28 territorial dioceses.

Australia's bishops continue to maintain their reluctance to hold synods, despite Vatican II calling for them to flourish and the Holy See recommending them 'when a crisis emerges which requires urgent and significant pastoral, administrative or disciplinary change'. It has to be assumed that most of the bishops have no desire to involve their clergy, religious or laity in the co-responsible discerning, planning and decision making for their diocese. Perhaps, when the majority of the current group, now over 65 years, is replaced within the next 5 years, the next generation will adopt a more co-responsible form of leadership.

While the ACBC will not address some issues which it considers 'outside its competence' there are other critical matters which it can and must address, including structural reforms. The present structures deprive the laity of their rightful place in shaping mission and ministry. It must review the sustainability and effectiveness of recruiting priests and seminarians from outside Australia, and it has to arrive at a better understanding of why so many Catholics have turned their backs on the sacraments and their faith, and no longer identify as Catholic.

Catholic schools and their teachers, who now play an increasingly important role in the Church's mission and ministry, have a unique opportunity to re-focus on the disadvantaged and the poor. It should be seized with courage and faith.

The results of the 2011 National Count of Mass Attendance will shortly be available. Should they reveal a further deterioration, this would signal an imminent 'meltdown' of parish ministry, and the failure of current strategies and policies. Wise leaders would plan for that contingency and prepare to consider other options. The eminent economist John Maynard Keynes is reputed to have said: 'When the facts change, I change my mind. What, sir, do you do?' The essence of his observation is that when we find ourselves in a new situation, our ideas must be flexible to respond to it.

The Church in Australia has the benefit of the grace and wisdom of the Holy Spirit working to guide and direct it in its new situation. The task for the People of God is to discern what the Spirit is saying and to respond.

Catholica editorial response...

The real impediment to the Catholic Church redressing its "crisis" in Austalia...

This update from Dr Wilkinson is a hugely valuable study and commentary on the crisis — or crises — facing institutional Catholicism in Australia. The irony, and tragedy, is that Australia is one of the few countries in the world where Catholicism ought not be in any crisis, let alone a series of crises. Thanks to far-sighted leadership by a previous generation of bishops combined with Lady Luck, fortuitous good fortune in earlier political developments and the goodwill of the wider Australian community in welcoming the contribution the Catholic Church makes to the welfare of this nation and contributing billions of public funds to endeavours like Catholic education, Catholic healthcare and Catholic aged care as well as Catholic social welfare services. Probably no other national Church in the democratic world enjoys what we now have here in Australia. The Church in our country no longer depends for the vast bulk of its income on the Sunday collection plate, the vast bulk of its income comes from the public purse.

Yet it is in "crisis". Over 86% of the baptised have ceased participating, and if you include the cohort now larger than those who actually attend Sunday Mass who no longer even call themselves "Catholic"* the figure is now over 90%. [*This is a new figure Peter Wilkinson has included in his research. The cohort who, although baptised, no longer identify as "Catholic" is now larger than the cohort who regularly attend Mass on Sunday in this country.] The Catholic Church in this country should not be in crisis. It has more money than it has ever had access to in its entire two centuries of existence in Australia. It has a larger, more highly paid, more professionally qualified, more theologically qualified workforce than it has ever had in its entire existence — and yet the ordinary people still stream out the exit doors. What has gone wrong?

The bishops of Australia when they returned from the Oceania Synod in 1999 were told that it was because of a "crisis of faith" in this country. What utter balderdash. Or maybe there is a half-truth in that. While many may have not lost faith in God many do seem to have lost faith in their episcopal leadership.

We do not have a "crisis of faith" in the Australian Catholic Church. We certainly have a profound "crisis in leadership". Even our bishops themselves have been divided.

If the institution is to rejuvenate itself it needs to drop all these "make out you are busy endeavours in case Jesus pops down to the factory floor" — like the Year of New Evangelization and the Year of Grace — and sort out the rot at the top. We need an eccelesial leader in this country who can genuinely unite all the bishops and unite all the people. Someone who can articulate a vision that will be embraced by all the faithful not just some remnant elements in the faithful who believe they alone know the mind of God.

The re-evangelization of the Catholic people of Australia cannot begin until that happens. George Pell has to go — and urgently. Rome has to find him some position as Apostolic Nuncio to the penguins and rabbits of Macquarie Island, or somewhere similarly remote, such as Nuncio to the refugees on Christmas Island, or to the people of the Islands of the Pacific threatened with drowning by the melting of the arctic ice caps.

The Holy See, and we ourselves, need to embark on a "job search" to find a leader who is truly embraced by all of the baptised — one who can re-unite all the bishops and priests, and the baptized at large. A man who can re-articulate the vision of Jesus Christ so that it truly does bring joy and hope into the lives of all not just the self-electing few.

Does Rome have the courage to embrace such a radical course as this?

The instruction Jesus Christ gave his disciples at the end of his earthly journey was not to go out and build a "smaller, purer Church" but to go out and "bring the 'Good News' to all people". Catholicism is not a religion for some self-electing elite or remnant who believe they alone are "the saved" or "the favoured". It has to embrace the hopes, aspirations, joys and sorrows of all of God's people!

LINKS:
Full Text of The Wilkinson Report (Original Report March 2011):
www.catholica.com.au/editorial/CatholicParishMinistry.pdf
Full Text of the update to The Wilkinson Report (April 2012):
www.catholica.com.au/editorial/CatholicParishMinistry_Apr2012Update.pdf
Compass interview with Dr Peter Wilkinson on the ABC website (October 2011 published Apr 2012):
www.abc.net.au/compass/video.htm?src=/tv/geo/compass/xml/20120401.xml&item=2
Catholics for Ministry website:
www.catholicsforministry.com.au
Women And The Australian Church website:
www.watac.net

Brian Coyne, Editor and Publisher, 04 Apr 2012

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