Catalyst for Renewal

Michael Costigan, Social Justice and the Australian Catholic Bishops, Mulgrave,  johngarratt publishing,2009, isbn:9781920721893, 56 pages with bibliography, $20.

  This is volume 2, number 1 in the series Quarterly Essays on Religion in Australia .

  Those who know Michael will immediately realise that this is going to be a balanced and carefully worded essay. Michael presents an overview of what has been written and activated in the field of social justice in Australia ’s Catholic Church from Polding to 2008. He has been an insider to most of the events, committees and statements from 1987 until his retirement in 2005. Thus he knows who did and said what, who was involved and what was achieved. From reading this essay, a lot was achieved, even if the written documents drew criticism at both ends of an imaginary continuum: from those who desired more forthright statements from the bishops and at the other end, those who considered the social justice statements too forthright. Usually they were referring to the same statement! The essay names participants who worked on the Social Justice Statements and the major enterprises: the statements on wealth, youth and women and their role in the Church. The details demonstrate the involvement of so many people, the planning, respondents to the enquiries, and the readership. The essay gives the lie to the mistaken view that Australia ’s hierarchy have spoken of nothing other than sex-related issues. This is a factual and very balanced presentation.

Max Charlesworth, A Democratic Church. Reforming the Values and Institutions of the Catholic Church, Mulgrave, johngarratt publishing, 2008, isbn: 978 1 920721 60 2, 52 pages, $20.

This is volume I, number 1 in the series Quarterly Essays on Religion in Australia .

 Max Charlesworth has an exemplary history of critical involvement in the Catholic Church both here in Australia and overseas. His argument in this book is that the Catholic Church should seriously take up many of the values of the liberal democracy that we live in here in Australia . He believes that taking up the values the church has a chance of genuine renewal and would be far more relevant in our society. Some of the values he mentions are: personal liberty, freedom of speech, equality of all people, due process in disagreements and disputes, and the welcoming of diverse views. He also addresses the necessity of the Church entering the interfaith field with greater conviction than at present.  Readers will remember that Bishop Geoffrey Robinson in his Sex and Power in the Catholic Church advocated many of the same values, also arguing that their adoption would enhance the appeal of the Church. The book is very easy to read and would be most useful in any discussion group. Like other essays in the series, there is a need for readers to forego their prejudices and think through the ideas presented, and especially consider how much improved the Church would be were the ideas to be adopted.

Eric Hodgens, New Evangelisation in the 21^st Century. Removing the Roadblocks,  Mulgrave, johngarratt publishing, 2008, isbn: 9781920721831, 54pages, $20.

This is volume 1, number 3 in the series Quarterly Essays on Religion in Australia .

Eric Hodgens is a priest, now retired, of the archdiocese of Melbourne . He presents a highly critical view of the Church structures and they way the autonomy of bishops has been undermined (often with the complicity of the bishops themselves) by the Roman curia. The book is very critical of the reign of John Paul 11 as a time when his ideology of fierce antagonism towards Marxism allowed the bishops of South America to support openly incredibly corrupt regimes and when he consciously wound back the better reforms of Vatican 11. He has little favourable to say of the current pope who, he suggests, wants a return to pre-nineteenth century Europe .  The bishops have ignored the sciences to the detriment of the Church and issues such as the number of clergy, social mores, and the appeal of the Church to generations X and Y. This book is a sad indictment of neglect, fear, ignorance and lack of appropriate leadership at many levels of the Church.  As the subtitle says, there is an urgent need to remove the roadblocks if the Popes’ pleas for a new evangelisation is to occur. The roadblocks include: removal of censorship of theological discussion, literal understandings of the gospels, rejection of new scientific knowledge (cosmology, and biology), patriarchy and clericalism. The writer touches a very sore spot when he mentions the disappointment of so many clergy who had such high hopes after Vatican 11 and now feel betrayed and have, like so many lay Catholics, almost given up on hope for a better Church.  This is a very serious essay that needs to be read widely.

Gerard S. Sloyan, Jesus. Word made Flesh,   Minnesota : Liturgical Press, 2008, isbn:978-0-8146-5991-5, $31.95, Johngarratt Publishing.

 This book is one in a series Engaging Theology: Catholic Perspectives.  It is not a particularly easy book to read but it certainly pays the reader tenfold to make the effort. Sloyen writes about Jesus within the religion of Israel , attempting to get to the Jesus who really existed and was upraised by God.  He searches out facts from fantasy, dispels a number of misunderstandings of what scripture presents, arguing that the gospels were written by Jews to convince their particular followers who were living among the gentiles of their profound belief in the godliness of Jesus. As he says, would we today know anything of Jesus were there not people who swore that they had seen him upraised some days after he had been put to death. He dispels a number of myths, things that just ring as untrue, as he strives to find the real Jesus and the things that actually happened. He sets the story from the earliest years of his childhood, youth and adulthood, considers why he suffered as he did and who was to blame. He tells of the writers, Paul, the four evangelists and later writers of letters to their respective communities, of their particular audiences and the impact of the story on those listeners. His chapter on the death and resurrection pay for particularly close reading as so much of our belief is based on these events. Like so many scripture scholars, he asks the reader to discern the various types of writing in the gospels, myth, hubris, image, fact. In the end it is a serious study that all believers in Christ need to take into account rather than accept everything as if it is literally true.

Richard Holloway, Between the Monster and the Saint. Reflections on the Human Condition.  Melbourne, The Text Publishing Company, 2009, isbn:9781921520112, $24.95.

 Richard Holloway is currently in Australia for the Sydney Writers festival. Holloway is also a former Bishop of Edinburgh, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, a former professor of Theology and very much a present day gadfly. This book will surely cause some heated arguments. He has left organised religion behind him as he believes that it too often can stand in the way between a seeker, a believer and God. In essence his book attempts to find out how and why people  - that is, most of us - in the middle ground between outright good and outright evil manage their lives. In the end he quite firmly believes that belief in Jesus Christ/God is the best answer available to the world. Jesus represents pity or compassion which is the strength of the saint and the weakness of the monster. This does not stop him from being quite critical of how the churches who claim to represent Him have made a mess of things. He writes of Eichmann, Speer, the monster that treats women as objects, and even the way we commodify animals to satisfy our hunger. His musings about the soul ands how churches have played a hand in helping humans believe that life goes on forever and to avoid the reality of death, would be of interest to Christians of all denominations. Readers will not agree with all he writes but one thing they will agree on is his writing of the dignity of Jesus when faced by the monster; it is here that the real power of the saint wins out.

Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant, 2008, ISBN: 9781921351785, Text Publishing, Melbourne, hb, $45 (RRP, often #32.50, but try Kmart or Big W where it could be approx $20).

 Kate Grenville’s latest novel gets to the core of conversation. Lieutenant Rooke, mariner of the First Fleet, allowed to be the first astronomer on a high point west of the settlement, meets and befriends a young aboriginal girl. He attempts to learn the language, first by repetition of sounds, then by writing the words down in his notebook, and continues to do this until hen realises that this is not communicating at all. The novel explores the nature of language, of communication between two people who at first know nothing of the other’s language, but who slowly learn beyond individual words and reach into each other’s mind, emotions and soul. Rooke begins with ‘conversation was a problem he could not solve”; he discovers that he can communicate with words and with emotions: “’Yenioo, kamara,’ she said, I am going, my friend. She looked up at him and he thought he saw in her face the same thought he had: This is the last time we shall see each other”.

Literary critics will focus on other aspects of this novel; Catalyst members might well think about how one even begins to communicate with another when one knows nothing of that person’s language, gestures, culture, emotions and spirit. What is the basis of any communication? Are we prepared to be changed by the conversations with another? Rooke certainly was in a way that changed the course of his life.

This is a novel well worth its literary merits; it is also a very interesting study of the power of communication and conversation.

St Thomas More’s Forum, The St Thomas More’s Forum Papers 2005-2007, pb, 2007, PO Box 68 Campbell, ACT, ISBN: 9 780 646 478 227, approx $20.

 This book is like a parish-based Spirituality in the Pub. Parishioners of St Thomas More in Campbell, ACT, acted with foresight and imagination to get interesting speakers to address issues of the times. The book is the print version of the talks. Like all such ventures, some are far more interesting than others; the same can happen with SiP too. The speakers include Cardinal Pell (on conscience), Frank Brennan on bioethics, Kevin Rudd on modern Labor and the Catholic Church, Mick Keelty, Angela and Dennis Shanahan on faith and the media, and politicians Kevin Andrews, Peter Garrett and Tony Abbott, Duncan McLaren (former head of Caritas International), and other often more interesting but perhaps less well known speakers.  The book will not come as a surprise to Catalyst members as they are well and truly au fait with how the evenings would have proceeded; and that points to the fact that we don’t take part in the “conversation” of the evenings. That should not, however, dissuade one from picking this small text up and reading through the talks that are of interest. This book would be a valuable addition to the copies of The Mix that readers will have on their bookshelves.

Paul Collins, Believers. Does Australian Catholicism have a future? Foreword by Geraldine Doogue. UNSW Press: University of New South Wales , 2008. ISBN:978 0868 40 831, 175 pages with notes, pb.

 This book is certain to ruffle feathers even if it shouldn’t. Paul has stuck his neck out again in the cause of a renewed Australian Church , something that would resonate with Catalyst members (and Catalyst does get a paragraph’s mention). As any discerning member of the Church knows, Paul has been a champion for renewal, be that from addressing the environment or Church treatment of those Rome doesn’t agree with or in this latest book, the need for the Australian Church to renew itself and grow to its God-entrusted challenges.

Paul quotes liberally from research, Australian-based and other research, but he relies most heavily on his own knowledge of history and theology to make his points. He bemoans the treatment of women, the current impossibility of their being ordained, compulsory male celibacy, the sway of a few bishops, the lack of transparency, and the decline in numbers of active clergy, to name a few of his targets.  It is easy to see that he will be in hot water with some – again – but Paul’s heart and mind are focussed on wanting a Church living up to its potential.

Yet Paul Collins is essentially an optimist, a believer that the Church has a great future if only the essential issues were addressed openly and honestly. Yes, he is critical of Rome’s (read John Paul 11’s and a hint of Benedict XV1’s) inaction over the sexual abuse scandals, but the greatest scandal is the likelihood of people being deprived of sacramental and liturgical life unless something radical is not done about the decline in number of priests. He is careful to acknowledge their increasing age, tiredness, the assistance from non-Anglo overseas priests; yet he also writes that we must acknowledge that there is a huge untapped resource unused and denied by the Church: women, former priests in good standing, to name two.

The easy response to critiques offered by Paul and others is to tell him to get out if he’s dissatisfied. Well, Paul’s not going.

 Peter-Damien Belisle, The Language of Silence. The Changing Face of Monastic Solitude. Orbis Books: New York , 2003. ISBN: 1-57075-486-1, 172 pages with notes and further reading, pb.

Stephen Chase, Contemplation and Compassion. The Victorine Tradition. Orbis Books: New York , 2003. ISBN: 1-57075-473-X, 154 pages with notes and bibliography, pb.

John Anthony McGuckin, Standing in God’s Holy Fire. The Byzantine Tradition. Orbis Books: New York , 2001. ISBN: 1-57075-382-2, 154 pages with notes, bibliography and short glossary, pb.

John Chryssavgis, Light Through Darkness. The Orthodox Tradition. Orbis Books: New York , 2004. ISBN: 1-57075-548-5, 142 pages with notes and suggested further reading, pb.

 These four books are in the Traditions of Christian Spirituality Series and are written by authors of various Christian faiths. The series editor, Philip Sheldrake, writes that common to all books in this series are three things: Christian spiritualities are derived from Scripture, especially the Gospels; spiritual traditions derive from attempts to live out the gospel values in a positive yet critical way in specific historical and cultural circumstances; and the spiritualities are concerned with the whole of life’s experiences seen within a conscious relationship with Christ.

Not only are the traditions different, there are also differences within a tradition. For example, Belisle demonstrates the differences within the monastic tradition, between the Carthusians, Benedictines and the Cistercians; he also shows the differences between Charles de Foucauld, Dorothy Day and other modern day contemplatives.  There is no sense that there is competition; as the series editor has indicated, there are different historical and cultural circumstances that lead to the different traditions. Stephen Chase writes of the importance of what nowadays might be called outreach as a means of living out the Victorine tradition which developed from the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris in the twelfth century.

Reading these books or even one gives credence to what is often spoken about, namely, the tradition of spirituality that exists within the Church.  Each book is essentially introductory to the tradition it describes and thus the importance of the notes, glossary and further reading suggested. 

For those starting out on the discovery of the tradition most commonly seen as Catholic, Belisle’s would be the best starting book as there are better known referents, Moses, Elijah, Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, and the religious orders such as those mentioned earlier in this brief outline.