Catholic Religious Australia

from the 2008 Assembly keynote address

THE MULTICULTURAL AUSTRALIAN CHURCH IN A GLOBALIZING MULTIFAITH WORLD

by Professor Desmond Cahill

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:

1. the Leadership challenge

2. the Diversity challenge

3. the Community challenge

4. the Interfaith challenge

3. THE COMMUNITY CHALLENGE

Over the past sixty years, different pastoral models were applied in reaching out pastorally to the immigrants and refugees, especially by religious, both

male and female. These models were:

1.     The Australian territorial parish with a sizeable concentration of one birthplace group, usually Italian, with an Italian speaking priest, usually Australian but sometimes other priests who may have spent some time in Rome. There was a LOTE Mass every Sunday, and many of these Masses have continued to the present day though the congregations are now dwindling in size. These parishes often had the assistance of a nun working as a pastoral associate.

2.     A regional parish with a substantial concentration of one immigrant group living alongside mainstream Australian Catholics and other immigrants, usually located in inner-suburbia but also on the urban periphery, headed by a priest from the immigrant group, sometimes diocesan but usually from a religious order. This parish acted as a magnet for the group in adjacent parishes. Such parishes also were sometimes assisted by a nun. They were never called national parishes but had many of its characteristics.

3.     Later on, team ministries of order priests such as the Scalabrinians for the Italians and Filipinos and the Jesuits for the Poles were formed, living together in a house independent of any parish but serving a whole region or a series of adjacent parishes, co-ordinating their pastoral response across parish boundaries.

4.     An immigrant community centre, located perhaps near a church, especially close to the centre of provincial cities like Newcastle and Wollongong, which would act as a gathering place and a community and welfare centre and reaching out to its immigrants from far and near.

5.     Shrines such as St. Anthony's Shrine in Hawthorn in Melbourne which would have a particular emphasis on catering for the popular religious needs of one ethnic group through devotions to the Madonna and to the local saints of the immigrants back in the home country. Some parish churches such as St. Brendan's in Flemington in Melbourne would play a part-shrine role.

6.     From the very start, flying missions were a feature of the immigrant apostolate with the involvement of the Benedictines, the Capuchins and other religious orders. But it was the Scalabrinians who used the flying missions as a pastoral strategy to reach the most far-flung areas of Australia , including Katharine and Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. Paganoni (2003, 2007) has documented how between 1955 and 2001 the Scalabrinians conducted a total of 1,164 missions and triduums (494 in Victoria, 236 in South Australia, 203 in NSW, 162 in Queensland, 26 in Tasmania, 25 in Western Australia, 20 in the Northern Territory and not excluding three in the A.C.T.), with the peak period being during the 1970s.

However, at the turn of the new millennium, a new model emerged called the multicultural or pluri-ethnic parish, driven by the increasing diversification of the immigrant Church with the Scalabrinians deploying their multilingual priests, speaking Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Tagalog, in a suburban parish and meeting the pastoral needs not only of the Italians but also of more recently arrived Catholic communities. It is a model for the future as the Church becomes more diversified.

These seven pastoral models were supplemented by a whole series of other initiatives such as radio programs, publications of books, newsletters etc. and the formation of lay organizations. The female religious orders from the immigrant countries gave an added dimension to the pastoral response, most particularly through their systematic parish and home visitations, through establishing child care centres in the early decades of settlement, and their care of the Italian elderly from the late 1970s. It was how the Church has played a major role in the integrating of immigrants and refugees into Australian society.

In the new situation that is being faced, some revamping and re-orienting will have to take place. Central to this will be the forming of multicultural religious communities although not without precedence in the Australian Church. This implies to me the development of intercultural competence by all religious personnel not just in dealing with the diversity of the Catholic population but in dealing with the diversity of their own religious community. This requires, firstly, some academic input about migration and people on the move, and, secondly, an experiential exercise in "otherness".

As part of the Australia-wide consultation that took place for Graced by Migration, there was complete unanimity amongst participants in the consultation process and at the subsequent Randwick conference in 2005 on the necessity of pastoral training in this complex area.

Programs in seminaries and houses of formation need to participate in a comprehensive program that covers the following points:

globalization and different population movements;
the history and pattern of Australian immigration;
the changing nature of Australian immigration policy; the psychology and sociology of immigrant and refugee adaptation;
refugees, the refugee journey and the grieving process;
typologies of people on the move (immigrants, refugees and international students);
the parameters of ethnic community formation;
the notions of culture, enculturation, acculturation and inculturation;
core values of ethnic traditions and their differences;
bilingualism and second language learning in adults and children;
communication patterns in bilingual families;
cultural and religious identities;
women and migration;
dynamics of cross-cultural communication;
interpreters, their use and the interpreting profession in Australia;
the cultural and religious background of selected ethnic communities;
public policy and practice ethnic minorities;
the spiritual perspective on immigrant and refugee adaptation;
demographic analysis of Australia's population at national and parish level;
the spiritual and ecclesiological framework of different ethnic communities;
popular religion and devotional practices;
the liturgical and spiritual aspects of the Eastern traditions;
the various models of multicultural pastoral care; sacramental education and immigrants;
pastoral ministry to temporary migrants, especially international students;
parish response to the immigrant and multicultural presence;
the parish school and immigrant families; poverty and migration; intermarriage and pastoral care;
and utilizing the assets and resources of migrants.

In a multicultural and internationalized world, religious trainees need to experience "otherness", especially in a very different cultural context. They need to be taken out of the comfort of their cultural context and learn the experience of living and working in another cultural context. Hence, it is recommended as a strategy that all such trainees complete towards the end of their pastoral training a pastoral internship in a country outside Australia. As one of the world's most transnational organizations, the Church through its religious orders has the capacity to provide meaningful internships in real situations such as overseas parishes or migrant organizations.

return to links page

Top of page