Feature Article

Count them in, count them out

The Pope, thousands of young Catholics and people from all over the world arrive in Sydney next week to celebrate World Youth Day. They will find an Australian Church which transformed the lives of people who all too often then abandoned it

Looking back over the centuries that the Catholic Church has been in Australia, we see no plethora of martyred Catholics; we see few theologians or philosophers of any recognised universal import; and, at the time of writing this piece, we have had no canonised saints. True, there have been issues that have agitated the Catholic populace over a period of 200 years, but this has been a short and mostly gentle history. Indeed, if there is one thing that stands out about the Australian Church it is the way it has been so clearly defined by race and rite: the first Irish, the second Roman.

Brought out from the green fields and soft climate of Ireland to the unforgiving Terra Australis Incognita, the Irish, in order to survive, needed their Church to bring them together. And it was that coming together that led to a profound change in the Catholic community's fortunes, changing it from being the faith of the convicts and labourers to now being the nominal faith of the upper class. Coming together meant the introduction and development of Catholic schools.

The early Catholic Church in Australia understood that the only means by which the lot of the faithful could be improved was through the provision of institutions that could educate young men and women to take their place in society a few rungs higher than the previous generation. As such, religious orders, such as the Presentation Sisters, the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers (all Irish-sponsored), were at the forefront of what was at one level the education of children in the faith but at another level was a struggle against the then ruling class, with its Protestantism and its privilege.

Slowly but surely, the products of the Catholic school system would take their place within the respective societies and colonial governments that pre-dated the Commonwealth of Australia. Political battles raged on, and parties such as the Australian Labor Party were formed, consisting strongly of Catholic elements, drawing their members in large part from the working and blue-collar union class.

So marked was this progress that by the close of the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Catholic Church, for all its educational efforts and political manoeuvrings, had been rewarded with political figures such as: New South Wales Premier Jack Lang, Prime Minister James Scullin, Attorney-General Frank Brennan, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, and Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell. By the close of the Second World War, this group would be joined by the "lapsed" Prime Minister John Curtin and his successor, Prime Minister Ben Chifley. The longstanding Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Patrick Mannix, is credited not only with giving Irish nationalism an intellectual face, but also as being the principal architect of many of the careers of the politicians listed.

Politics and the Church were easy bedfellows, for the cause was distinct: social justice through social advancement. What had begun as a despised and ridiculed faith slowly developed into a significant religion; significant in terms of proportion of population, and because of this, increased political clout. By the end of the Second World War, the Catholic Church stood as a major player in the ever-changing social and political milieu of Australia.

By the Sixties, Catholic schools in Australia would generally be considered as good as, if not better than, many of the Protestant public schools. Graduates of these schools would go on to university, and become part of the modern Australian "establishment". By the close of the twentieth century, Catholics would rise to positions of political and social prominence, winning for themselves the sobriquet "Catholic mafia".

Yet today, despite the eminent presence of the Catholic Church's social institutions in contemporary Australia, each weekend an average of only 13 per cent of the nation's Catholic population go to Mass. The Australian religious commentator Paul Collins, when highlighting this statistic, also mentioned how Pope Benedict XVI in July 2005 was quoted as having said that Australia is a "Godless" nation and that: "the mainstream Churches appear moribund. This is so in Australia, above all." Strong words from a Pope who will soon arrive in the largest city in Australia to celebrate World Youth Day.

So what has caused this exodus from the Church? An Australian study released in February 2007, entitled "Catholics Who Have Stopped Attending Mass", revealed that there has been a significant decline in the attendance rate of Catholics in Australia of 50 years of age or younger. Of this cohort the lowest numbers of Massgoers are: 20-24-year-olds (7 per cent), 25-29-year-olds (6 per cent) and 30-34-year-olds (8 per cent). The same study also found that the major reasons for not attending Mass were: a disagreement with the Church on sexual issues; disillusionment with the Church because of clerical sexual abuse; and a need to keep Sunday as a "free" day for the family. Yet far and above any of these reasons for not going to church was the belief among those surveyed that attendance at Mass in their minds was not a definition of "committed" Catholic.

This finding was corroborated by another Australian study, by Dr Luke Saker FMS who, in a survey of Catholic university students in Australia enrolled on a course to become teachers in Catholic schools (2006), found that only 1 per cent of the students surveyed believed that attending Mass on a Sunday was obligatory for a Catholic.

It may well be that those who comprise the Catholic populace and are 50 years of age or younger are now part of a multicultural generation, a vastly different social milieu from the Australian society of their parents and grandparents. Australian multiculturalism has torn away at the notion of an Absolute Truth, and a Church that teaches from this premise. Further still, and following from multiculturalism, it could also be that the younger generations perceive themselves as being Australian, rather than Irish-Australian, and for this reason the force aligning them to the Church has waned. Another prime factor could be that the irreverence and anti-authoritarian streak in the Australian character - cannot accept a Church too often perceived as being overly serious and "infallible". Australians are universally recognised as an easygoing people and as such, as a general rule, they don't take kindly to too many rules. God, to many Australians, is a "good bloke" who will "take me as I am, for he made me as I am".

Another reason for empty churches could well be that for younger Australians, Sunday is  a day committed to sport. Sunday liturgies constantly compete with a child's sporting fixture, or a live telecast - and even though some parents, particularly in the child's younger years, dutifully go to the earliest liturgy on a Sunday, in due course many parents cease to attend church altogether. The child becomes a sportsman or -woman, and the faith becomes something for them to decide, later on.

Yet none of these reasons is strong enough, in truth, to tear a person away from their church on Sunday, if in their heart they fully believe that they have an obligation to the Church they were baptised in, as she also has to them. Perhaps the real reason that the Church is dying in Australia is that the Catholic Church may not have arrived at all in Australia. What Australia may have imported was primarily a class and nationalist struggle, with a Church preaching from the pulpit and administering sacraments in order to keep those involved in the struggle progressing further. Once the class struggle was over, once Paradise Lost became Paradise Regained, the Church could have merely lost her relevance. For this reason the astonishing findings that a large proportion, perhaps even the great majority, of Australians believe that Mass attendance does not make the Catholic  can be understood.

In such circumstances the major problem that the Catholic Church has in Australia is not one of dogma nor of married or celibate clergy nor of teachings about human sexuality but one of Catholic identity; what is it, and how can it be inculturated, specifically within an Australian context? The Catholic Church in Australia has neither a long history from which to rediscover its roots, nor a strong appreciation of the Second Vatican Council. When on an international scale, countries with nearly 2,000 years of church tradition were being shaken to the core by the Council - perhaps for Australia, it was just too much, too soon. Today, there is a strong but minority group of regular church attendees in Australia, who comprise the spinal cord of the Church, but who also seem culturally characteristic of the Catholic Church in nations in which she is the minority, rather than in Australia, where she enjoys nominally at least, by the last census, a majority status.

In any event, when Pope Benedict XVI touches down in Sydney after his long flight, he needs to prepare himself for the fact that many of the happy faces he will see will not be Australian. The great majority of Australia's Catholics may not even choose to watch him on television, if there is a sporting event televised at the same time, or if the weather is good. The message he preaches must in some way constructively address the very real danger in Australia of Cardinal George Pell becoming a mere scarlet-clad curator of the world's largest museum - a nation of empty churches, within the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.