Many Australian priests find themselves alienated from Rome
IN June, Pope Benedict brought to a close the Year of the
Priest he had declared 12 months earlier by inviting every available
priest from the more than 400,000 worldwide to attend a special
gathering in Rome.
For three days a small army of priests bivouacked in
and around the Vatican, attending Masses, testimonials, prayer meetings
and conferences designed to celebrate their vocation and renew their
commitment to serving Christ and his church.
The gathering culminated in a spectacular Mass in St Peter's Square
for an estimated 15,000 priests – the largest Mass ever concelebrated in
that arena.
Speaking of his "joy for the sacrament of the priesthood,"
Benedict oversaw waves of cassocks rising and kneeling in perfect
unison during the celebration.
Never before had there been a display of
clericalism on this scale and to all outward appearances it showed a
priesthood firmly united in fidelity to the Pope and his curia.
The reality, however, is somewhat different.
In the course of their everyday parish work, Catholic priests have to
deal with problems ranging from the mundane to the frustratingly
bureaucratic, to the challenging and often plain bizarre.
Few people
ever truly learn about these aspects of the vocation because priests
largely work outside the public glare.
We surveyed more than 540 of them
in Australia, and interviewed another 50, to shed light on their
activities and their inner thoughts. What we discovered was a world rich
in commitment but also in complaint, disillusionment and dissent.
Many of the priests believe the Vatican exercises far too much
control in the life of the church, expects far too much regimentation
and allows far too little room for local variations in expressions of
the faith.
They believe that Rome fails to understand the nature of
Catholicism in Australia and does not appreciate the challenges facing
priests here.
The attitudes of priests towards Benedict and his predecessor, John
Paul II, are mixed and, occasionally, highly critical.
Many priests
bemoan the lost momentum for church reform that grew out of the 1960s
and the trend towards the restoration of a more centralised,
conservative and rigidly disciplined church over the past 30 years.
A
majority see the need for a Third Vatican Council to build on the
church's engagement with society that was achieved by the Second Vatican
Council.
More generally, in their everyday ministry priests are caught in the
conflict of mediating Vatican directives and official church teachings
to a laity that is more educated, more sceptical of authority and more
willing to think for itself than at any time in the church's history.
Priests must nuance black-and-white moral prescriptions in ways that
make pragmatic sense in the increasingly complex lives of their
parishioners.
They are expected to enforce church rules but also relate pastorally.
They must balance the demands and ideals of the universal church
against needs and realities at the local level. When in Rome, priests
might do as Rome expects its priests to do.
But that certainly doesn't
imply they agree with everything the Vatican says or does or that they
automatically fall into line with its dictates.
The Vatican performs three roles: it is an expression of the unity of
the faithful, the most important source of their leadership (understood
in terms of providing a vision for the whole) and the church's central
system of governance (issuing authoritative rules for its members and
appointing senior personnel, including the bishops of local dioceses).
Almost without exception, priests view the first two roles as essential,
comparing the existence of the Vatican favourably with respect to other
Christian denominations that lack this kind of central focus – most
obviously the Anglican Communion.
The Vatican, said one priest, is like
the "bones" of a living thing, giving form and substance to the entire
organism.
On the governance issue, however, many priests are far less
enthusiastic in their appraisal of the Vatican's performance,
particularly when it comes to its relationship with the church in
Australia.
Two-thirds of priests surveyed felt that the Vatican did not
understand the challenges facing priests today (just under a quarter
thought it did). A greater proportion still felt the Vatican often
failed to understand the nature of the local church in this country.
Well over half felt Vatican directives in recent years had sometimes
restricted the contribution the church could make in Australia while
almost as many thought the Vatican exercised too much control over the
local church.
"The Roman Catholic church I have almost no time for any more," one
West Australian priest said. "No time. I have to tolerate it as a few of
us have to because it's a means to an end, but anything that's unjust
or dishonest about it then I have no hesitation in speaking out about
it."
A NSW priest wrote that he was disturbed by a Roman curia trying to
drag the church back into the past. Describing the contemporary Vatican
as a "bully-boy", he added: "I want no part of it."
Another wrote that
the community "is more important to me than the ecclesiastical system
which, at the higher levels, is completely out of touch and too
dismissive of the mass of Catholics".
A 53-year-old priest from NSW commented that "left alone, a parish
could grow, but belonging to a church hinders rather than nurtures".
A
younger Queensland priest (47) wrote that the only thing he had ever
wanted to be was a priest but "given the state of the church today, I
look forward to the night when I go to sleep and just don't wake up
again. I realise that this is depressive thinking and I do suffer from
that ailment but the state of the church today makes it worse."
Some priests expressed the view that all Catholics should simply
unite behind the Pope and not question Vatican directives, while some
pointed out that the church was not – and was never intended to be – a
democracy.
A perception that the Vatican only listened to those who said
things it wanted to hear was common. "Denial is an issue that confronts
Roman bureaucracy," wrote one priest.
"The local church should be heard
by the Vatican," insisted another, implying that this was not the case.
THE Vatican's most comprehensive intervention in the affairs of the
church in Australia occurred towards the end of 1998.
In November, the
seven metropolitan archbishops of Australia together with the chairman
and secretaries of several national bishops' conference committees held
a series of meetings with Vatican officials who exercised
responsibility for Catholic doctrine, clergy, worship and the
sacraments, bishops, religious orders and education.
A summary of their deliberations, known as the Statement of
Conclusions, was circulated among all the Australian bishops who were in
Rome at the time for the Synod for Oceania.
In a hastily arranged
consultation before a scheduled meeting with Pope John Paul, the
bishops were asked to assent to the document – which all did, though
some reluctantly – and it was made public as an official view of the
state of the Catholic church in Australia and a blueprint for its
immediate future.
The Statement of Conclusions praised many things about the church in
Australia but also claimed to identify weaknesses in it that were the
subject of the document's main concerns.
Chief among these was a
"crisis of faith" existing in Australia, stemming from the "tolerance
characteristic of Australian society".
Priests and laity were warned that individual confession is the "sole
ordinary means" by which one is reconciled with God and the bishops
were told the Third Rite of Reconciliation (also known as communal
confession), which had become popular in Australia, was "illegitimate"
and had to be "eliminated".
After a meeting in Sydney in February 1999, 75 priests and religious
brothers and sisters signed a letter to the bishops rejecting what they
saw as the Vatican's "overwhelming negative estimation of Australian
Catholicism".
In their view the statement passed over complex moral and
social problems that afflicted many Catholic families and ignored the
"deep shame" of clerical sexual abuse.
By re-emphasising the individual nature of sin as distinct from
structural injustice and immorality, the statement would make it
difficult for the church to contribute to critical issues concerning
national reconciliation, particularly between Aboriginal and
non-Aboriginal Australians, the signatories to the letter argued.
They
also said the statement's call to eliminate the general use of communal
confession would be a disaster and close off a "profound and
transforming" experience in the life of the church.
ASKED, 10 years on, whether egalitarianism is the defining strength
of Australian priests, almost half of those surveyed agreed it was,
just over a quarter disagreed and almost the same proportion were
undecided.
The Vatican has given no firm instructions on how Australian priests
should be addressed or attired, yet both are obvious ways in which
priests in other countries publicly affirm their particular identity and
authority.
But "standing out" from the crowd has little appeal among
Australian priests.
"The Catholic Church has had to struggle to be where it's at in
Australia," said one priest.
"And we still have to struggle. We're not a
religious country. We're different."
It is precisely on the issue of
distinctive dress, this priest added, that you can see the difference:
"The Australian clergy dropped the clerical collar very quickly after
Vatican II, whereas in other countries it's still used."
The larger issue – as with the Statement of Conclusions – is the
degree to which priests feel the Vatican understands, and is
sufficiently sensitive towards, the cultural characteristics of
Catholicism in Australia.
One priest was critical of what he saw as a
tendency to inflate "our local identity at the expense of what we are
part of – the universal church – and that our Australian identity is not
more important than our Christian identity".
But most were highly
critical of the way they were perceived by the Vatican.
The hierarchy in
Rome, said another priest, seems at times oblivious to the fact that
Australia is not a "Catholic country" and as a result "a lot of the
realities that they experience are very different from . . . ours".
This is an edited extract from Our Fathers: What Australian Catholic Priests Really Think About Their Lives and Their Church, by Chris McGillion and John O'Carroll. Published March 25, John Garratt Publishing, $29.95.