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Some advice for Pope Benedict…
Dear Friends,
Tom McMahon has entitled his commentary today "Two Different Worlds". He's talking about the two different mindsets he has operated in — one as a cleric and the other in "the real world" since he entered a different sort of priesthood ministering to people in a different way.
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Elaine and Adel Ghali |
What he's writing about dovetails beautifully with some thoughts that have been on my own mind since attending a wedding yesterday and reflecting on what we (the Church) are endeavouring to communicate through this enormous World Youth Day endeavour which is set to unfold in a little over a week's time. I found the wedding yesterday fascinating. It was the wedding of the youngest son of Elaine and Adel Ghali. I interviewed Adel a few week's ago for Catholica (See: 001_conv_070608 ) and Elaine is my wife, Amanda's, closest friend and her former manager.
This was a wedding with a very earthy spirituality. I don't mean that in some hippy, or alternative life-style context of that word but in many senses I would classify this as close to "middle of the road" contemporary Catholicism as you'd find anywhere in Australia today. As Adel disclosed in the interview, his original roots are in the Egyptian Catholic Church. I know Elaine and Adel won't mind me saying this as it is the sort of thing they'd say to me themselves. Their's is not a heavily intellectual sort of spirituality like what I engage in. Their faith is important to them both albeit that Adel has a more straight-down-the-line, orthodox outlook whereas Elaine has been exploring far and wide in her spirituality. The spiritual outlooks of Elaine and Adel are very different, almost like chalk and cheese but the one thing I find with both of them is that their spirituality is totally unpretentious and brutally honest. In many ways their marriage represents the cultural diversity of our nation and they've had their battles bringing up their two sons. Their sons, Daniel and Tristan, are in many ways representative of what must be somewhere near the norm in contemporary young adult culture in Australia today — and the wedding yesterday I thought reflected that really well … both the liturgical ceremony and the reception afterwards. This is the "real world" that most Australians today inhabit. I love it albeit that the weird lifestyle that Amanda and I inhabit is a long way removed from it in the sort of hours we work, the constant "living on the edge" that seems to be part and parcel of creative endeavour, and the constant intellectual analysis that tends to go with creative endeavour as a songwriter or or journalist/commentator.
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Fr Paul Roberts |
The celebrant at the wedding was Fr Paul Roberts, who also celebrated the wedding of Amanda and myself 18 months ago. It was interesting chatting to him last night. He's recently taken on an old parish close in to the city of Parramatta that has been facing a bit of a tough trot. He's finding he's really got his work cut out for him with a large population where English is the second language in the home and a significant proportion of his congregation who cannot speak English at all. It has a big migrant population of recent arrivals and they are people on struggle street as they establish a new home for themselves in a new land. It's totally different to the affluent, upwardly mobile and very vibrant parish he took over a decade earlier and built up to be one of the most exciting Catholic communities possibly in all of Australia. Paul Roberts is a fascinating priest to watch in action. Leave aside for a moment all the formal parts of liturgy. Paul has the ability to "tune in" or "lock in" to where his audience is at. He was a superb celebrant at our wedding but yesterday, with a completely different congregation, many of the younger one's were probably unchurched he started out with the jokes and light banter but very quickly brought everyone to what I am sure would have been perceived as a very prayerful and "sacred" place. This was "pastoral ministry" at its very best. It was "liturgy" that spoke to people where they are at in their lives. This is not "holy mumbo jumbo" but what I would describe as a very "earthy" spirituality — Australian "earthy" — ministering to people where they are at in their life journeys. It's not a spirituality driven by "rules", or "social conformism", nor is it highly intellectual. It's a spirituality seeking to touch that native sense of the sacred that every person carries within them: "Somebody created me, let's call that somebody 'God' for short. There are times in my life when I ought to stop and thank God for my life, for my family and friends, and I need to get away from my everyday struggles and spend time listening to this Being who created me and who loves me like my own father and mother love me." sums up the sort of mindspace Paul Roberts creates, or is appealing to. This is spirituality for ordinary people who, unlike myself or Amanda who work with "God stuff" 24 hours a day seven days a week, they're busy establishing a family, managing businesses and in the case of many young people establishing their adult relationships, working out their career direction, "seeing and trying to understand their world".
Let me bring all this back to the headline at the top of this page — and the stuff Tom McMahon is addressing in his commentary today…
Our Church has a massive communication problem today. It has "lost traction" to use a term that people like myself use in communications — the "message isn't getting through". Now while I know Pope Benedict is at least aware of our work here at Catholica I'm pretty sure he doesn't have time to read much of what is written here. What I do know is that in the lead up to his visit to Australia increasing attention is being paid to what is written in Catholica by people who advise him and who have been preparing briefs that might be useful to him, and the other Church authorities who are interested in the welfare of the Church in this country "down under" including some of our own bishops around the nation. What I'd like to suggest is that the audience we were with yesterday are probably somewhere pretty close to the mean of the audience the Church in Australia needs to be communicating to. There were a small proportion of very orthodox Catholics there. At the conclusion of the wedding I noticed a small but significant contingent who made their way up to the Blessed Sacrament sanctuary to pray privately. I suspect the largest proportion there might have been part of what we refer to as the 86% — those who have largely given up participating or listening to much of what the Church has to say about anything today. And there would have been a proportion there, like Amanda and myself, like the Ghali's who still participate but we do not see ourselves as part of any remnant and, if anything, we have enormous sympathy with our own children and the 86% who have become pretty cheesed off with the Catholic establishment that has been setting the agenda for so long.
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The happy couple, Tristan and Lauren Ghali, in the sanctuary of the oldest Catholic Church on mainland Australia on their wedding day |
I submit to Pope Benedict through those who might be advising him and who happen to read this — the challenge you face today is to make Jesus Christ relevant again in the mainstream of Australian society. I think you, Pope Benedict, are correct about one thing. I think there is a desire to respect our heritage — our musical and liturgical heritage as well as that huge repository of human and Divine wisdom that has been discerned over centuries and which the institutional Church represents to some people as some kind of "library of human and Divine wisdom". Yesterday's wedding was celebrated in the oldest original Catholic Church built on mainland Australia —St Matthew's Church at Windsor situated just beside the RAAF airport Richmond where Pope Benedict will be landing next week. I submit the choice of that Church by the young people whose wedding we celebrated yesterday speaks to something of that desire to respect our heritage. At the same time I also submit that the Australian people, perhaps more than any other people on God's earth have what we call beautiful "inbuilt bullshit detectors". We can smell hypocrites and ungenuine people from about 100 chains away.
While the Australian Catholic population, I am sure, would share with you the desire to respect our heritage, including things said and sung in Latin and languages we no longer use in everyday conversation, they will not tolerate attempts to take us back to the sort of mindview of the meaning of life that characterised the lives of our grandparents and great grandparents who lived in very different social circumstances to ourselves. We do respect our history, and the legacy and languages of our forebears but, at the same time, we do not believe they had "all the answers" or that their "ways of looking at, and thinking about, the world" were superior to the insights that we have today. We do enjoy our technology, and our relative affluence compared to our forebears. We do also enjoy the more intelligent insights that have been opened up to us today through the toil of our parents and grandparents which enabled us to access high quality education which encouraged us to think for ourselves and evaluate independently what all authority figures say to us — whether they are secular or spiritual "authority figures". Our priests and bishops, even yourself as Pope, do not earn credibility simply through your titles and the costumes you wear. The respect the community extends to its leaders today is primarily earned through the credibility of the governnance our leaders demonstrate and in their ability to listen to those whom they lead and to respond to the real needs of the people at large.
Could I suggest to our own bishops, to those others who also might have the ear of Pope Benedict in this lead-up to his visit to the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit, on behalf of the community that has formed around Catholica Australia, one strong suggestion that I hope you "take on board" during your visit to our nation? In this country now our bishops have assembled a superb collection of research data which has not been released to the general public or the media. Over two decades now that research data will show to you very clearly which bishops and which priests are the most effective communicators and servants of God's people. This research data compiled by the Pastoral Projects Office of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the National Church Life Survey (an ecumenical initiative to which the Catholic Church contributes both data and funding) will show if priests and bishops who want to take us back to the Latin Mass and pre-Vatican II thinking do have the ability to re-evangelise the Church or it will show if bishops and priests who adopt a more pastoral approach are more successful in retaining the attention of, and responding to, the needs of their flocks. We would urge you, Your Holiness, in establishing a leadership direction for the Catholic Church in this nation to pay close attention to what the PPO and NCLS research suggests to you in the pastoral policies you establish, and encourage, for the Church in our nation.
Tom McMahon's commentary on the meaning of Sacraments in our new age of technology looks at the different perspectives from which Catholicism is viewed in a way which compliments what I have endeavoured to write above. <Read Tom's commentary>
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