Drawing up a list of the major challenges the Church faces...
Friday, 9th March 2007

Dear friends,

It seems to me that whatever the future holds there are likely to be three major changes that will mark the social climate within which the Church of the future conducts its mission. The current edition of National Catholic Reporter contains articles related to two of them. In my own comment today I don't want so much to discuss these matters in detail but to explore with you, the readers of Catholica, the possibility of drawing up some kind of list of major issues or challenges that might mark the way the Church conducts its mission in the future. I'm suggesting, of course, that we might consider this in an optimistic framework which assumes that the institution is able to address the single most significant challenge facing it at the moment — the decline in sacramental participation by its ordinary members.

Such a list might form some kind of basis that helps us focus on the sorts of issues we might most profitably be discussing in the pages of Catholica. It might provide some kind of guide both to our lead commentators as well as contributors to the forums.

The two issues that caught my eye in NCR this week is first the editorial, and the lead article by Joe Feuerherd, on the issues of accountability that are opening up for the institution. The NCR articles this week are principally dealing with financial accountability but in recent days in Catholica, myself and other writers, have made more than passing reference to the changing nature of the sorts of accountability our spiritual leaders will have to adapt to. In Australia the major proportion of Church income today comes from government sources rather than the collection bowl on Sundays. The institution has already faced subtle forms of change in the way it conducts its mission because of the accountability requirements imposed by public funding. I have raised the prospect that our spiritual leaders are going to have to become more accountable to the broad membership of the Church as to how moral law and theological insight is interpreted if the leadership are to retain the confidence of their flock. Perceptions are changing rapidly now and people seem to be coming to the view that God speaks to us through the whole of the human family and the responsibility of our spiritual leaders is a collaborative one of endeavouring to discern what God is saying to us through this diverse channel rather than an older theology where we, and they, believed God seemed to speak through some exclusive "royal telephone" to His Holiness or the assembled bishops alone. Our perception of God is changing and how God intersects with the human family.

Sr Joan Chittister, in her weekly column, raises another interesting point for discussion. This is the changing relationship of religion to the State. I won't steal her thunder but I do highly recommend that all thinking Catholics ought to at least make themselves familiar with the issues she raises this week in her column.

The third issue that I would add to this list of major challenges facing the institution concerns the changing ways in which we interact socially. I suspect that a significant factor in the drop-off in participation at Sunday Mass does not actually come from any negatives to do with Church, it simply comes from the changing nature of our lives socially. We have less reason to move outside our homes today, apart from work — and, in Australia, researchers tell us we're working longer hours than we have ever worked before. When we get home on the weekend we tend to stay there, playing with all our gadgets, or being entertained or informed by information delivered directly into our homes rather than us having to go out and retrieve it from other places in our environment. I honestly believe we are going to be forced to find new ways of encouraging "sacramental participation, communion, and communio". This is going to be very uncomfortable for some who believe our membership of the institution is actually defined by our fronting up to Mass on Sundays. In the future will the institution be able to even provide sufficient priests to ensure Mass can be celebrated universally for all? That question itself may end up being the one that ultimately forces the issues of married clergy but I am suggesting that even with that concession it might not be enough given the changing social and work climate we operate in. Perhaps a question we need to be considering is a completely new understanding of how we "keep holy the Sabbath day" or celebrate the time of Sabbath in our lives.

So here's my three big issues to kick the list off.

• How will the changing rules, and direction, of accountability change our core understanding of being Church or being "the Body of Christ"?
• How will the changing relationship of religion to the secular State change our core understanding of being Church or being "the Body of Christ"?
• How, or will, the changing ways in which we interact as social beings affect our understanding of the nature of participation in forming "the Body of Christ"? How will we live out the Third Commandment?

What other major issues do you think we collectively face in the ways in which we "make Church, be Church, celebrate our Communion as the Body of Christ, and keep alive the remembrance that we are asked to keep central to the core of our collective and individual faith journeys"?

Best wishes for a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world,

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher
Catholica Australia