A fascinating exercise that deserves our support…

Dear friends,

The news overnight that a group of priests, nuns and lay people have written to the Australian Bishops and are now seeking to coordinate a wider petition from the grass roots of the Church in Australia will be fascinating to watch. The principal logistical difficulty the organisers of this petition face are in my view the lack of any significant communication channel that effectively targets the audience they are seeking to motivate. The Church's own internal communication channels today are virtually moribund and not read, even by the vast majority of the dwindling national congregation. In any case they would hardly be likely to provide any publicity for a petition of this kind. The second difficulty I see is trying to stir interest in a congregation that today has largely become disinterested. The exit out of the pews as catastrophic as it has been in general seems to be even worse in what communicators refer to as the "opinion leader" sectors in a community. Those still left fronting up to the sacraments these days tend to be followers rather than leaders.

For a petition like the one proposed in the story we broke last night, its chances of success would be vastly improved were there to exist in this country a strong network of local leaders who were seriously interested in the overall welfare of the institution. My exprience at diocesan and parish level and in lay apostolates over a number of decades is that such leaders are becoming thin on the ground these days. Those in the actual employ of the Church have to constantly watch their p's and q's and are unlikely to be able to provide the sort of leadership that is required for an initiative like this.

An interesting development for the Church in this country though is there seems to be some kind of resurgence going on amongst the leadership in the religious orders. That might be also reflected in the fact that this petition seems to be an initiative of religious and former religious. Recently the former Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes has refashioned itself as Catholic Religious Australia and launched a new website and online newsletter. While that is an encouraging development one suspects that the underlying objective of this new petition is not so much the specific agenda items the petitioners are seeking the bishops to discuss but a broader objective of endeavouring to get the bishops themselves to take a leadership role in the discussion and debate that needs to be happening if the Church in this nation is to be resuscitated and brought back from the dead.

At times I really do wish we had the resources at Catholica Australia to be covering developments within the Church at greater depth. I think there is great scope for an investigative article into the waxing and waining that's been going on in the ranks of the religious orders in recent years. The harsh reality is that what little positive leadership has been available in the institutional church in recent decades has been coming from within the dwindling and aging ranks of the religious orders rather than from anywhere else. Recent public events like the address of Sr Joan Chittister and the visit of Fr Diarmuid O'Murchu back in January, which were both largely events facilitated by the religious orders, do demonstrate that the religious orders continue to play a vital leadership role in the Church particularly in encouraging those sectors within the lay community who understand the power of ideas and who take the core objectives of what this entire religious quest is about seriously.

I think this endeavour which has been largely inspired and coordinated by Frank Purcell and Paul Collins deserves wide support. While the issues which it is seeking to place on the agenda for discussion amongst the bishops are important within themselves, I would urge that the principal reason why I would urge readers of Catholica to support this initiative is that it is designed principally to provide moral support to the majority of the Catholic Bishops in this country. I would argue they have been feeling very isolated in recent times. The Vatican provides them with little moral support, they've been on the frontline copping abuse from the sexual abuse scandals, and we simply have never had a culture in the Church much where it was expected that the ordinary people in the pews gave bishops moral support. What we were expected to give them was obedience and genuflections not feedback, understanding and genuine moral support. I honestly and sincerely believe that in a collective sense we do owe the bishops of Australia a debt of gratitude for the ways in which they endeavoured to take the concerns of ordinary lay people to Rome in 1999 at the time of the Oceania Synod. The way they were treated by the Roman authorities was diabolical and it is little wonder they have largely "gone to ground" since and busied themselves in administrative trivia. This petition is important because it is not some factional power game between the liberals and conservatives in the Church. At its heart, I submit, it is principally an exercise in encouraging both lay people, and the bishops themselves, to have the courage to, as it were, "step up to the microphone" again and lead.

I hope the secular media might latch on to this story as that is about the only effective communication channel that is left today through which the broad grass roots of the Church might be inspired again. <Click HERE to read the news story that this email commentary is referring to>

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

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher