leadership

 

 

What does all this mean for the Church and its religious leaders as we head into an unpredictable future?

 

The Australian Catholic Church is at the crossroads. Retreating into a Tridentine restorationist past is an option but it will end in failure in a mobile, networked, diasporic, multifaith and multipolared world. Historically the Church in Australia has been united by a series of grievances built around its Irish-Rome core. I want to focus the rest of this address  around four major challenges:

There are many facets to the leadership challenge. Firstly, the numbers of diocesan clergy is declining quickly to be replaced partially by Vietnamese, overseas imported and other priests. Clericalism is in its death throes even though some of these younger replacement priests are modelling their priesthood on the clerical, sacristy model. Moreover, more so than in the past, the diocesan priestly remnant is being required to live by themselves in empty but often busy presbyteries, accountable on a day-to-day basis to no one. The history of the Church suggests that celibacy is best lived in community (see Balducelli 1975, also Callum 1980), and so sexual corruption has been less among the religious than the diocesan clergy. So there may be more celibacy dysfunctioning ahead of us, though probably of a different kind.

 

In Australia as, indeed, across the world, the Church has had a mediocre and divided leadership though in the Australian case the division goes back to the days of the Labor split in the mid-1950s. In the 1970s after the Council, the Popes and the bishops failed to address the issue of the identity and function of the clergy, including the celibacy issue, in a world that was changing away from the village model of parish. Two decades later, the Church is paying a terrible price for that failure. In the 1970s, the Pope and the bishops did address the ecumenical issue with some wonderful documents but in the 1990s they failed to follow through with actual decisions e.g. Anglican orders. Some of my Anglican friends now see ecumenical activity as a waste of time while some Catholic leaders are waiting for mainstream Protestantism to fall over completely with small cohorts coming across to Catholicism from time to time.

 

The selection pool for Australian episcopal leadership in the last two decades was made shallow by the little-known and unresearched Urbaniana incident in 1969. During the 1960s, well over a hundred diocesan seminarians from Australia were selected because of their academic ability to complete their priestly training at the Pontifical Urban University whilst residing next door at the Collegio De Propaganda Fide on the Gianicolo in Rome.

 

The collision between the Tridentine climate of the Collegio and the aggiornamento theology of the Urbaniana led to a petition expressing a lack of confidence in the seminary leadership. There was a purge and the reflected disenchantment led to many leaving the seminary or later the priesthood.

 

Today less than 20 per cent are priests, and only one is a bishop, most notably Cardinal George Pell, who thinks that his fellow Rome seminarians are over-tainted with post-conciliar liberal thinking.

 

The Australian Church was built on the foundations of the English Benedictines. Over the years since 1834 and leaving aside auxiliary bishops, 186 men have been in charge of Australia's Latin-rite dioceses for an average of 17.57 years. For the metropolitan archdioceses, 68 archbishops have been in charge for an average of 16.88 years though these averages will decline as the current Vatican directive that a bishop must submit his resignation on his 75th birthday takes further affect. Few bishops, except at the beginning in several dioceses and leaving aside the special cases of Broome and Darwin which began as Aboriginal mission stations, have been appointed from religious orders. In fact, it has been only 20, and a total of 13 for Broome and Darwin. The profile over the years since the 1830s has been almost bereft of bishops from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Broome and Darwin have had seven such bishops, whereas for the other dioceses there have been a mere seven, including three in 2008 (born in Belgium, Italy and Malta), all in rural dioceses of very low migrant density. The current leadership of the Australian Catholic Church is thus very Anglo-Australian.

 

This means, it seems to me, that increasingly religious order priests will become members of the Australian episcopacy.

 

Within the schools, many Catholic teachers are coming close to retiring age, if not already retired after careers that began in the 1970s. As a result, there is a large cohort of younger teachers, now or about to come into the system who are not particularly well trained in the Christian faith nor for Catholic leadership. Yet the future leadership will have to come from them.

 

Hence, the challenge is to build quality leadership for a multicultural Church and for the Catholic educational system, amongst those now in their 20s and 30s. The challenge is great, and I think that there is an opportunity for the larger religious orders working in tandem with the Catholic universities to provide graded and in-depth leadership programs for the priests working in the parishes and for school personnel. As well, the strategy needs to be supported by good mentoring programs by older, experienced religious personnel, perhaps now retired or near retirement.