Catholica Australia: Email0074

Thank you all for the wonderful feedback we've been receiving regarding our work. We do appreciate that many continue to be puzzled by the Catholica Australia endeavour. Some are excited but cannot quite work out the agenda. We know some are worried and see it as some plot by liberals and cafeteria catholics who are endeavouring to take over the Church or force anarchistic changes in Church teaching or theology. Others again are puzzled because they are not quite sure if what we're doing is "official", has an "imprimatur", or if it is "approved". Others are not sure about it being a "lay-led" initiative.

The truth is we're, at one and the same time, none of those things and some of those things. Two things we are definitely not interested in though are either taking over the Catholic Church or in somehow subverting it. Our chief objective is what we plainly say it is. To help demonstrate from a lay perspective what the difficulties are that help the institutional Church understand why 85% of her flock have disappeared out the door. Most of us in the core of this endeavour have parented children through to adulthood and our own wisdom has been learned through the pains endured by our own children. We care about all our friends, and our own children, who are among those whose needs are not being met by the institutional Church which belongs to all of us. We have decided to do something about it.

We would have preferred to do it under the umbrella of something more "official" and spent many years seeking the "official support" that might have been required to do that. In the end we gave up in frustration though because it was largely like trying to talk to a brick wall — "non comprehendi" was the response. If you don't want to play by our rules (the one's that have been so comprehensively failing in recent decades) we do not want to know you. You can starve, take yourself to Coventry or hell, for all we care. (Some of us, not just me, actually had to go there too! It is partly a shared collective experience in that department that has brought some of us at the core of this endeavour together. We do have a keen appreciation that much of our endeavour is driven by "a Calvary spirit and understanding" of "Catholic insight". Our prayerfully discerned, collective sense though is that we are on "the Resurrection side" of our Calvary experiences not the "Courtyard of Herod" side.)

Today we are not seeking any financial support from the institutional Church. We will be seeking in the not-too-distant future the moral support of our bishops. Our work will succeed or fail though not on their say-so but on whether we are able to raise the significant amount of financial support we require from private philanthropists in the lay Church. It will also depend on the number of visitors, and the average length of time they stay on our website at each visit. We believe there are sufficient lay people out there with the resources, or the need, who will support this endeavour. A large part of our work at the present moment is in contacting these people with the resources quietly in one-on-one relationship. Our work in reaching out to the needy, and the spiritually famished, will begin in earnest in a few week's time.

In time we hope, and pray, our endeavour will be successful and that we can present it back to the institution as a gift of an evangelisation or re-evangelisation initiative that did work. It wasn't all talk but it did actually succeed in bringing people to again appreciate the deep beauty and wisdom in Catholic thought and theology and, through that, led them back to Jesus Christ.

We do appreciate we are going to attract plenty of critics who believe they have better solutions than ourselves, or who believe they know the Laws better than we do, or they want to demonstrate how much more loyal they are to Jesus, their local bishop, or "the Magisterium" they are than we are. We also expect to encounter opposition from some bishops and priests who want to play little power games. Take out your swords if you care to. Our only weapon is the humble weapon of words fired in a Calvary, and journey to hell and back, crucible. We really do not care about those critics, or those power games, or those constantly protesting their humility, docility and loyalty while speaking with the tongues of vipers behind hands that try to hide their true nature. If they care to load up our word cannons with ammunition we will gladly prime the verbal detonators that cause them to explode in their own faces. Let the critics bay and neigh. Some of us have spent time ourselves on that side of the fence working our knickers into a twist and today we reject those perspectives as to what this entire spiritual quest is about.

At heart one constant question drives this entire endeavour. It is this: "what does God want us to do now?" That is the question that drives me each night as I put together the pages of the website. In different words in each case I also know it is basically the question that drives each of the writers who are preparing the content on this site. It is that same question that drives us in the work presently going on behind the scenes in establishing a formal legal structure that can own this endeavour and provide a channel of accountability back to the philanthropists who will be funding it. It is the question that drives us each day as we develop the network that we require to find those individuals who have been blessed with the resources and who will be able to grasp the "spirit" and "intent" of this endeavour. Some of them have already come forward. If others feel they have to ask "have you got permission" or "what does Bishop So and So think?" we'll know we've probably knocked at the wrong door.

One of the great insights that sustains us comes from that great mind of the 19th Century Church, John Henry Cardinal Newman, who clearly perceived that the Holy Spirit speaks not only through the mind of the Pope but through the collective mind of all of her people. Just as we (the lay Church) all have a responsibility to listen to our spiritual leaders, they also have a mutual responsibility to listen to what the Holy Spirit is saying through their people. We are confident the quiet majority of the Australian ecclesial leadership understand that because of the courageous and reserved leadership they demonstrated in speaking for their people, and which wasn't listened to, at the 1999 Synod of Oceania. The Church is about relationship and the mutual respect and conversation that comes from the maturing of relationship.

In the end, each one of us — pope, cardinals, bishops, parents and lay people — are going to be called to account for the almost catastrophic dis-evangelisation that has characterised the 20th Century. One of the great civilising lessons of Nuremberg and the Twentieth Century is that when the rubber hits the asphalt none of us can look over our shoulders and say "but he made me do it" or "I was only following so and so's orders". We will be asked "but what did you do? What did you think of those orders, policies or teachings?"

If what I write above frightens you this project is probably not for you. Go back to your own places of sanctuary. But I do ask you to ask yourself: are they real places of sanctuary? Are they the real places of sanctuary that can be offered by God alone or are they sandcastles you build for your own emotional security?

Meanwhile, as you think through those questions, welcome to our humble banquet and enjoy the feast...

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