national assembly: Global context

 

 

An issue whose time has come - multiculturalism in the Australian Catholic Church - was broken open for more than 100 leaders of religious congregations when they gathered in Melbourne earlier this year for Catholic Religious Australia's national assembly.   So they might have a better, more factual understanding of what for many was only a vague hunch, Australia's leading Catholic voice on multiculturalism, PROFESSOR DESMOND CAHILL, from Melbourne, presented the leaders with a detailed look at Australia's multicultural Church in a globalizing multi-faith world.

 

In absorbing presentations, he left no-one in any doubt that the face of Australia is changing as globalisation takes hold, leaving the Church in unchartered waters that must be journeyed across.  He contends that the Australian Catholic Church is the most multicultural Catholic Church in the world and suggests that its future will be as an immigrant Church with an Anglo-Irish remnant.

 

Due to the length, detail and importance of Professor Cahill's address, pathways will present the material in the segments over several editions of pathways.  In this segment, Prof. Cahill places Australia in the global context ...

 

 

 

 

Could the Catholic Church in Australia make a treaty with the Aboriginal peoples?

Could we march in pilgrimages of reparation to Australia's own killing fields, erecting permanent monuments just as we have erected shrines and memorials to our soldiers killed on the world's battlefields?

 

 

As he flies over the Middle East and Asia where all the major world faiths have had their origins, he will have the opportunity to reflect upon diversity and take stock of  the multicultural Church he heads.

 

For the first time in history, there are  now more Muslims than Catholics as the Vatican sheepishly admitted several weeks ago; the global Catholic population now numbers 1.16 billion Catholics and there are just under one million religious with a 10 per cent decrease between 2005 and 2006.

 

Christianity's population base has moved from the rich countries of the North to the poor countries of the South, and this trend will never be reversed unless there is an unexpected Christian revival in Europe. Christianity will become centred in the Americas just as it once was centred around the Mediterranean Basin and then in Europe.

 

This is especially true of Catholicism and Anglicanism; both Islam and Hinduism have designs to fill what they perceive as a spiritual vacuum in Europe, compounded by the zero birth rate amongst Europeans as compared to the higher birth rates amongst the Muslim populations.

 

Liberation theology has failed in Latin America, and, as one person has cheekily put it, "The Catholic Church may have opted for the poor, but the poor have opted for the evangelicals". We are seeing the rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity which will continue to make its inroads across the world, especially in Africa and Latin America but also in Asia, including the Philippines (Jenkins 2002).

 

As the Pope flies over Asia, he can reflect on the Church in Europe which he has made a focus of his papacy and in his assumed name.

 

His record in the treatment of Asia and Asian theologians is not overly positive. One great task of the Church in the 21st century will be the philosophical and theological grounding of the Christian message in Confucian humanism, not the patriarchal version propagated by Lee Kuan Yew, but the more democratic version of Mencius (Lee 2007).

 

This also brings up the religious imagery question. In Australia, we are uneasily caught between East and West in our religious imagery and titles. But how might Jesus be presented in a classroom where several faiths are represented? Amaladoss (1999) has related how Indians have searched for appropriate names for Jesus such as guru, great master and teacher, or avatar, God descended in human form to save people from oppression or Ishvara, the Lord who presides over creation and a great yogi or totally self-realized person.

 

"But Christians in India feel that these titles do not really bring out the full significance of Jesus for us or for history" (Amaladoss 1999: 34).  Perhaps it could be the Divine Monk in deference to Buddhist monks or the hyphenated Jesus-Christ as the marginalized person par excellence.

 

As he flies over Indonesia, Islam's largest nation with 238 million people, he can reflect upon Islam, its newfound confidence and the coming dialogue with its religious and academic leaders following the Regensburg address.

 

We are witnessing the rise of the Muslim world as Muslims emerge from their long and sorry history of recent centuries. It is well to remember that, despite representing one sixth of humanity, Muslims are not permanently represented on the Security Council. Islam as a religious system is being rethought, especially in the Muslim diaspora.

 

Here is Australia, as its largest faith community, the Catholic Church has a major responsibility to work with the various Islamic communities in fostering social cohesion by supporting the religious moderates and working with their 30 schools and other Muslim organizations wherever this is feasible.

 

As the Pope passes over the great, teeming cities of Asia, now that more people are living in cities than villages for the first time in history, the future of religion more than ever will be fought out in the global cities of the world.

 

We know from the Gospels that Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem - cities are places both of complexity and corruption. The cities of the world have become the religious market-places where religious salespeople market their faith product in ways both subtle and unsubtle.

 

Our parishes still operate on the village model whereas we need to make them into networked hubs. To use the language of the marketplace, the religious product of Catholicism is not appealing to people, certainly not in the developed world.

 

As he passes near to Bali in the papal plane, where so many Australians lost their lives to religious extremism, he needs to reflect on the religious fundamentalisms or extremisms which are embattled forms of spirituality engaged in conflict with secularist enemies in the Battle for God (Armstrong 2001).

 

This battle is perceived as a grand cosmic war between good and evil - often, both benign and violent forms withdraw under a charismatic leader to create a counterculture in their quest for purity in thought and action based on literalist interpretations of their sacred texts. In this battle we must support the religious moderates - the answer is not in secularism.

 

But I want to suggest ... that in almost all faith communities there are present certain types of fundamentalisms. In Orthodoxy, it is the over-close nexus between religion and culture which on occasions slides into a dangerous ethno-nationalism. In our Church, it is gender fundamentalism. Whilst universal in so many ways, the Church is still operating on the village model of parish and of priesthood. It is still operating on a peasant-based model of sexuality, gender inequality and family formation.

 

As Pope Benedict flies over Australia, he will have four hours, before he lands at Richmond airbase, to think about the country he is coming to, an economically and socially rich and successful country, an interreligiously harmonious nation.

 

There is, of course, the indigenous issue of which Pope Benedict is very aware. As he said on May 18, 2006, in welcoming the new Australian Ambassador to the Holy See, "In regard to the Aboriginal people of your land, there is still much to be achieved".

 

Now that the indigenous peoples of the world are beginning to stand up and demand justice and land rights in a culturally diverse world, they feel ambivalent towards the Church who did help them in their times of woe and grief but who also accompanied willingly the colonizers with the aim to 'civilize and Christianize".

 

Is it not time that the Australian Catholic Church at this time - when John Howard, has been consigned to his historical fate - took the community lead and made a treaty with our Aboriginal peoples?

 

It was heartening to see the Catholic Social Justice Statement for 2006 focus on the Aboriginal issue. But we need to position the issue in a more positive way, celebrating with our indigenous brothers and sisters the great Aboriginal Australian achievement in being the longest continuous religious tradition but making reparation in the spirit of reconciliation for the many massacre sites, those 'places of sickness', that dot this vast and ancient land.

 

It is time to face up to our bloody history of attempted genocide; we need to march in pilgrimages of reparation to these killing fields, erecting permanent monuments just as we have erected shrines and memorials to our soldiers killed on the world's battlefields.

 

As Professor Henry Reynolds says, we need to deal with "the whisper in our hearts". The land belonged to them, and they belonged to the land. And we made them refugees in their own land. They were the first discoverers, the first explorers of Australia; they were the first settlers, the first pioneers of Australia.

 

references:

Cahill, D. (1990) Intermarriage in International Contexts: A Study of Filipino Women Married to Australian, Japanese and Swiss Men (SMC Center, Manila)

Cahill, D. (2004) Missionaries on the Move: A Pastoral Study of the Scalabrinians in Australia and Asia 1952 - 2002 (CMS, New York)

Cahill, D. (2005) The conundrum of globalization. Australian Mosaic 12, 4, 6 - 11.

Cahill, D. (2007) From dagoes to doers: accommodating Australia's Italian migrants by church and state. In A. Paganoni (ed.) Pastoral Care of Italians in Australia: Memory and Prophecy (Connor Court Publishing, Victoria)

Cahill, D., Bouma, G., Dellal, H. & Leahy, M. (2004) Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia (DIMIA with the Australian Multicultural Foundation, Canberra), also available on the AMF website in the research folder.

See also:  national assembly: Our Multi-Cultural Australian Church
and national assembly:  Changing ethnic and religious profile

 

There will be further articles from this address in the next edition of pathways, to be posted early December 2008.

 

Background reading: GRACED BY MIGRATION:  Implementing a national strategy in pastoral care for a multi-cultural Australian Church (2007)

a paper for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference through the Bishops Commission for Pastoral Life and the Australian Catholic Migrant and Refugee Office

 

 

COMMENT AND EXPERIENCES ARE WELCOME.

Should anyone which to comment on these or other pathways items, please email the editor, Penny Edman

or if you have an experience of our multi-cultural Australian Church you would like to share, please contact Penny.