Catholicism's Condition

No Set Agenda
Paul Collins,
David Lovell Publishing

No Australian who has paid even cursory attention to public debates in the last few years could fail to be aware that something is seriously amiss in the Catholic Church.  Besides periodic controversies attending the moral, financial and doctrinal improprieties of some churchmen -- not to mention the political sympathies of some Church agencies -- we have been treated to countless assurances by journalists and concerned Catholics that the Church has been embroiled in crisis ever since the Second Vatican Council.  Given the institutional power of the Church, this crisis has significance for far more people than just its members;  it has also provided the licence for any number of books and articles on the subject of what is to be done.  Of all the accounts vying for the Catholic mind, however, No Set Agenda, by Father Paul Collins, must surely rank among the most influential.

Amongst Catholic commentators in this country, perhaps only B.A. Santamaria can match Paul Collins for both prominence and persistence in recent times.  Collins' book Mixed Blessings became one of the two most influential analyses of the Church at the time of the Pope's Australian tour in 1986.  Since then, as presenter of ABC Radio's Insights program and as a frequent interviewer on ABC TV's Compass (and now as Director of ABC Religious Radio), Collins has enjoyed privileged access to a wide and apparently appreciative audience.  His views are likely to command wide assent not only among Catholics, but also among other Christians.

CHURCH OF WASTED POTENTIAL

In No Set Agenda, the portrait he paints of the Church is, on the whole, a bleak one.  It is a picture of wasted potential, self-doubt and confusion of identity.  Whereas in many other parts of the world (notably in Latin America), Catholicism is "an extraordinarily creative and radical force", "seriously engaged in the religious, spiritual, ethical, cultural, political, environmental and economic issues of our time", Collins thinks that in Australia this is sadly not the case.  "To a considerable extent", he believes, "the Church has lost its sense of being both 'Catholic' and 'Australian'.  Its leadership has largely retired from engagement with the issues that face our contemporary society and many church people have retired into their own safe sub-culture".

This situation would seem to be the product of practices which are as deeply ingrained in the Church as they are unsuited to the demands of modern social life.  To start with, there is an "unspoken but profound ambivalence about living in a liberal democratic society".  Steeped in the ways of hierarchy, the bishops and their spokesmen appear incapable of entering the sophisticated public discourse of our society -- often giving an impression of nervousness or of unsmiling, inhumane or moralistic simplicity in the face of complex human and ethical issues.  Worse still, the procedures of episcopal appointment ensure that the best people for the jobs -- the strong, outspoken ones who can show respect for conflicting views -- are the very people least likely to reach leadership positions.

According to Collins, clerical celibacy is another major contributor to the church's malaise.  Like most American (and presumably, Australian) men, most priests are emotionally immature.  But whereas the ordinary man is given countless opportunities to overcome his immaturity through situations of personal intimacy, for the priest no similar chances arise;  the duty of celibacy precludes them.  This leaves clerics psychologically unprepared to meet the demands now made upon them.  The results are "radical loneliness" and lack of vocational satisfaction.  Many of the most creative men are either stifled or driven to leave the priesthood altogether, placing further burdens on those who remain while diminishing the likelihood that the reforms so urgently needed will be initiated by the clergy themselves.

With the people who celebrate the Mass in such a sorry state, it would be remarkable if the ceremony itself were not affected.  And indeed Collins informs us that "the sad realityis that most liturgy in Australia is dull, lifeless and boring, and in some places it is quite appalling".  Again, worship is often perfunctory, unprepared and unimaginative, while the music is almost universally bad -- tuneless, difficult to sing and cliche-ridden.  Collins, however, does not lay all the blame for this at the feet of the priests.  Another major factor is that in Australia Catholics lack the common culture necessary to sustain a "coherent and living liturgical celebration every Sunday".  Nor are things helped by some heavy-handed attempts to make perfect strangers behave like a community of the closest friends, since most Catholics go to Mass not to overcome social alienation, but to enter the presence of the living God.

A further pressure on the liturgy comes from what Collins believes to be the "orientation of post-modern Western culture toward the superficial accessibility of words and away from other deeper forms of symbolic understanding".  This has led the Catholic Mass in a Protestant direction, focusing on reading and interpretation of the Bible more than on the symbolic action which renders Christ truly present.  Collins rather boldly declares that "you cannot blame people for not going [to Mass];  the miracle is the faith of those who still do".

Mention of Mass attendance brings us logically to the laity, for if there is one thing which can be said with confidence about such a large and heterogeneous body of people, it is that fewer and fewer of them are fulfilling their obligation to attend Sunday services.  Collins quotes one researcher's calculation that in 1985 only 36 per cent of Catholic women and 32 per cent of Catholic men attended weekly Mass (as compared with 60 per cent and 42 per cent in 1967).  He also tells us that statistics from the Melbourne Archdiocese's annual Mass count indicate an attendance rate of just 24 per cent of the nominal Catholic population.  I understand from newspaper reports that more recent figures suggest a slight improvement, but this could offer churchmen little solace in the face of such a marked long-term decline.

Collins estimates that less than 25 per cent of Catholics can be classed as "serious", that is, as those who practise regularly and whose convictions are deep.  Even among this group, however, he thinks there can be only 10 to 25 per cent (maybe five per cent of the whole Catholic population) for whom the Faith is the "radical and central focus of their lives and the foundation of their meaning structure".  The others see commitment in largely moralistic terms, going to Mass, for example, because "it is a sin not to".  For these people, as for the so-called "Christmas and Easter Catholics", belief is essentially subjective or private:  they want a personal experience of God and a church that will comfort them like a friend, protecting them from the stresses of the secular world;  they see commitment to the Faith as a matter of Mass attendance, sending their children to denominational schools and complying generally (which can often mean highly selectively) with the doctrinal and moral teachings of the Church.  Ministry they see as someone else's responsibility.  Few of the laity evince (or have ever evinced) the strong commitment to social justice which is meant to be an integral part of living Catholicism.

Collins supports his picture of the Church with a plethora of sociological and historical references, and the casual reader could be forgiven for seeing No Set Agenda as the last word on the condition of Catholicism.  There are, however, several grounds for treating the book with greater scepticism, not least of which is that its author's ambitions do not rest with the mere sketching of a vivid panorama.  Collins also aims to fill the void he has perceived -- to present at least a partial agenda upon which to focus the energies of his co-religionists during the 20th century's final years.

SO-CALLED REACTIONARIES

Superficiality and imprecision -- the characteristic flaws of journalism -- are much in evidence in No Set Agenda, especially when Collins holds forth on the subject of so-called reactionaries in the Church.  When first we meet these shadowy figures, we learn that they denounce Collins as a "Judas" and "subversive" disloyal to the Pope.  They define the Church "far too narrowly", finding the perfection of tradition always in the period before 1962, and are really a tiny, albeit vociferous minority of Catholics.  Collins thinks that far more notice is taken of them than their numbers warrant (curiously, however, this doesn't deter him from referring to them repeatedly throughout the book).

As we read on, we learn that these troglodytes are showing signs of increasing anti-clericalism, blaming the fall in practice rates and vocations on "liberal" clergy and church bureaucrats who fail to teach "correct" doctrine and who do not maintain the proper discipline.  Despite their alleged paltry numbers, there is also evidence that a "sizeable coterie" of "reactionary types" has attempted to take Holy Orders.  Collins congratulates seminary officials for trying to keep such undesirables out, despite the shortage of priests.  In his words:

"It is to the credit of almost all Australian seminaries that they have tried to face the difficult task of making sure that only men adjusted to life and ministry in the contemporary church are ordained" (p.133).

Paradoxically, within world-wide Catholicism, and to an extent in Australia, it is "reactionary" organisations like Opus Dei, Italy's Communion and Liberation and the Neo-Catechumenate which have been successful in harnessing the idealism and energy of young people.  So it would seem that you can keep them out of the priesthood, but you can't keep good reactionaries down!

I suspect that few of the people Collins has in mind when he bandies about this term "reactionary" in fact deserve the label.  Although he is very free with the names of supposedly "reactionary" organisations, he is disinclined to identify many individuals whose views we could elicit for independent assessment.  His reticence would not appear to stem from old-fashioned good manners, either, for he is quite willing to criticise other people who decline to name names (for example, when John K. Williams writes very generally of environmentalists who hold a religious view of nature, Collins suggests he is creating a straw man).  In the one case where Collins is prepared to single out an individual "reactionary", namely Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop George Pell, the evidence he proffers is too weak to stand up to much scrutiny.

In his first chapter Collins gives a quotation from a speech Bishop Pell made in 1988, wherein he expressed the conviction that a style "which is a mite more confrontational and certainly less conciliatory to secular values" would enable the Church to stem the exodus from its ranks and attract more converts.  "The Cross", he argued, "is a sign of contradiction".  Collins says that this sounds reasonable enough, but adds that Pell "then goes on to outline the type of traditional Catholicism that he thinks should be revived", a type which Collins takes to be "little different from pre-Vatican II Australian Catholicism in the 1950s".  No further quotations are provided in order to establish the resemblance, but this does not deter Collins from concluding that "what the Bishop is actually calling for is the restoration of a Catholic sub-culture".

One would never guess, from Collins' account of that 1988 speech to the Conversazione of the Seminar on the Sociology of Culture, that the Bishop expressed support for some matters dear to Collins' own heart.  He expressed the hope, for instance, that the Papal encyclicals on social issues would be supplemented by regular statements from the Australian bishops (like that on wealth distribution), and that these would be "serious contributions to national debate and equally serious efforts to convince the majority opinion in parliament and population".  So far from advocating a retreat to the sub-culture, he insisted that the Church must speak out on social issues, and not only on abortion, euthanasia and IVF either, but also "social justice questions such as expanding Australian poverty, justice for Aboriginals and our responsibilities to Asian refugees and the poor overseas".  Anticipating Collins' criticisms somewhat, the Bishop pointed out the need for Catholics to "move much more into television" and to "radically upgrade our present efforts, which are amateurish and second-rate".  He also called for a major effort to extend ecumenical contacts with the Greek Orthodox.

Bishop Pell did, it is true, urge that devotion to Our Lady and the saints be encouraged;  also that children in Catholic schools be told regularly of the duty to attend Sunday Mass and of the Ten Commandments' status as part of Divine Revelation.  In addition, he rejected the ordination of women and the general re-introduction of married clergy.  Yet unless one can establish that such stances are incompatible with Vatican I1 (and the Council documents do not support such a claim), it is difficult to see how they can betoken a longing for pre-Conciliar arrangements.

"AMORAL CAPITALISM"

Collins' comments about free-market economics are as hackneyed as they are unbalanced.  "Economic rationalism", we are told, "is just another name for selfish and amoral capitalism", an " 'open slather' for competitiveness, individualism and particularism to run riot, allowing the most ruthless and amoral to enhance their financial power and prestige at the expense of others, especially by the manipulation of debt".  He says it is ironic that "a number of Australia's recent free-market buccaneers are Catholics and that it was state and federal Labor governments that created the conditions for this totally unproductive and immoral form of capitalism".  He chooses to ignore the fact that the "buccaneers" generally did not make their millions through competition in a free market but through corrupt deals with government mates, and that it was the advocates of the free market who provided some of the stoutest criticism of those deals.  I would not wish to pretend that free-marketeers are saints (nor, I dare say, would the people themselves), but from the way Collins carries on one would think they were the repositories of all evil.  Has there never been a ruthless or amoral public servant, happy to prosper at the expense of the tax-paying public?  Come to that, are we to believe that every single advocate of protection speaks out of disinterested conviction rather than self-interest?  Collins is blind to such considerations, and this lack of proportion does him no credit.

Perhaps the silliest claim of all in No Set Agenda, however, arises during Collins' discussion of the different Christian conceptions of God.  Strains of Christian mysticism imagine God as an impersonal "presence" rather than as a person, and Collins laments that "some parts of contemporary spirituality have lost this awareness and are riddled with excessive emphasis on the personal nature of God".  As an illustration of this "excess", we are told that "in the liturgical texts of the church there is constant reference to God as 'Father'.  The Latin word underlying this is so much more impersonal, referring to God as Deus.  'Father' is not the meaning of the word at all".

Now, Collins is under the impression that he received an excellent training in philosophy during his years in the seminary, but he must have either skipped or slept through every session on Latin;  how else could he have missed the facts that the Latin for "Father" is not Deus but Pater, and that the liturgical texts of the Church are full of references to both words?  The Credo, for example, begins with "Credo in unum Deum/Patrem omnipotentem/factorem caeli et terrae", which translates as:  "I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth".  One does not need to be fluent in Latin to appreciate the distinction, just to be the owner (as I am) of a reliable Latin-English Missal.

The deficiencies of Collins' analysis find their counterparts in his prescriptions.  For a man who claims to be in the business of agenda-setting, he can be insufferably vague -- perhaps even evasive -- about what ought to be done.  Concerning the roles of women, for example, he warns darkly that "if the church does not address this issue it will not only lose half its constituency;  it will lose its right to articulate the basic issues facing humankind and in the process lose its own soul".  Portentous stuff indeed, but as the case of Bishop Pell shows, the church is actually addressing the issue;  it is very firmly saying "No" to the possibility of priestesses.  One presumes that Collins uses the word "address" as a synonym for unconditional surrender to secular enthusiasms like feminism, but this idiosyncratic use of language hardly aids the reader's comprehension.

It is implied that the vocations crisis makes the acceptance of married priests and female priests, in tandem with a further expansion of lay ministry, the only alternative to the horrid prospect of "priestless parishes".  Yet earlier this century in many parts of Australia (such as in far-western Victoria, whence came relatives of mine) priests were in such short supply that they would have to travel hundreds of St Patrick's Cathedral, Melbourne miles from town to town of a Sunday in order that each community would receive mass at least once per week.  These limitations on the availability of priests did not impair the parishioners' faith -- it may even have paved the way for the historically exceptional intensity of devotion in the 1950s.  When one considers the improvements in transportation which have been made in the last 50 years, there is no reason why Catholicism cannot cope quite well with fewer male priests.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Social justice is undoubtedly a high priority for Collins.  "To be a Catholic these days demands a commitment to justice", he says, and prophesies that "for the Catholic of the near future sins against social justice will be seen to be as serious as sexual sins were in the past".  Yet the sorts of policies and activities to which he expects Catholics to commit themselves in pursuit of social justice are nowhere spelled out.  From his intemperate remarks about economic rationalism we might guess that Collins harbours the usual anti-capitalist sympathy for punitive wealth redistribution through taxation, but this is just a guess.  He suggests that Jesus' call to his disciples to "leave all and follow him" is a call for "risk-taking flexibility", an injunction to abandon the everyday pre-occupation with security;  but this is a voluntary decision for each believer to make, not for the government to enforce, and it can tell us nothing about what is "socially just".

Regarding the Aborigines, Catholics must apparently abandon their "arrogant" and "European" impulse to convert them from their polytheistic religions, and instead provide support to them as they struggle for land, the preservation of their cultures and an assured place in the political process.  Collins tell us "it is impossible to generalise about their culture and their religion, which differs markedly from place to place", and on the very next page proceeds to make a gross generalisation:  "Aborigines see the land as a living reality ... They look at the land with reverence, and not with the greedy eyes of mining or logging companies or developers".  Yet suppose we leave his self-contradiction aside and grant him the innumerable regional differences in Aboriginal beliefs (considering that their traditional cultures were pre-literate and flung across a sparsely-populated continent it would have been remarkable if there had not been variations).  If Aborigines are so diverse, why should we assume that all of them will find Christian proselytising "arrogant", "paternalistic" or an imposition?  Why should Catholics forebear from welcoming whichever Aborigines prove receptive into what is supposed to be, after all, "the one true Church"?

The biggest issue of all for Collins is the "ecological crisis".  Having been told that "all other theological, moral and pastoral issues fade into insignificance beside this", we might expect his agenda to be explicit here if nowhere else;  but such an expectation would be in vain.  The problems of the environment apparently stem from the "exploitative anthropocentrism" which dominates our consciousness, and for which Christianity bears a large share of the blame.  To combat it, Catholics must embrace a new cosmology:  "today's theology cannot begin with the parameters of biblical history, for this is too narrow.  We have to begin with biological history ..."  But what this cosmology will actually amount to, is anybody's guess.  About the only practical conclusion Collins draws is that Catholics must reverse their attitude to immigration.  Keeping the population down to preserve Australia as a "world 'national park' for the future" may be "morally more justifiable" in the long-term than sharing our assets with people from less fortunate lands.  "There is agreement to preserve Antarctica as a world heritage area so we ought to be thinking of Australia in the same way".

THE PHONEY REVOLUTION

Ultimately, No Set Agenda generates more heat than light for Catholics attempting to make sense of what is happening in their Church and how best they can apply their energies.  A more illuminating account has been provided by Piers Paul Read, the British Catholic novelist, in a recent pamphlet for the Claridge Press.  In Quo Vadis:  The Subversion of the Catholic Church, Read writes:

"Because few Catholics have actually read the decrees of Vatican 11, 'progressive' theologians and 'renewing' catechists are able to postulate a revolution in Catholic thinking which in fact never took place".

This may explain the vehemence and abandon with which some "progressives" fling the "reactionary" epithet around, for how else than by silencing or discrediting the orthodox could those making illicit changes in the name of Vatican II conceal the credibility gap which yawns constantly before them?

Read remarks that "it is common today to describe the opening sessions of the Council as a struggle between liberals and conservatives in which the liberals triumphed.  Reading the decrees of the Council it seems more accurate to describe what difference there was as between conservatives and arch-conservatives".  The Council confirmed the infallibility of the Pope and decreed that Catholics must give "loyal submission of the will and intellect ... to the authentic teaching of the Roman Pontiff even when he does not speak ex cathedra [i.e. infallibly]".  It merely allowed that a wider use could be made of vernacular languages in the Mass, while holding that "the use of the Latin language, with due respect to particular law, is to be preserved in the Latin rites".

Read reminds us that Gaudium et Spes, the Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, warned Catholics "in their zeal to promote social justice ... against forgetting the primary teaching of the Gospel.  They must be careful to distinguish earthly progress clearly from the increase of the kingdom of Christ ... Christ did not bequeath to the Church a mission in the political, economic or social order;  the purpose he assigned to it was a religious one".  This cuts to the heart of the matter.

The true objectives of the Church are, in the best sense of the phrase, out of this world, which is why its rituals and church buildings should be designed to express the sacred -- the "set apart".  One can find a flicker of recognition of this fact in Collins' discussion of the Mass, when he says that "the celebration of a liturgical action should lift those participating out of everyday reality and move them into a sacramental space which transcends time and within which the risen Christ is personally present".  Collins has rightly been praised for these words by Dr Geoffrey Hull, a devotee of the traditional Tridentine Mass, writing in the January 1992 issue of AD2000.  Unfortunately, however, Collins seems incapable of thinking through all the implications of the insight.

In the immediate aftermath of the Council, the people who pushed the liturgy in the vulgar Protestant direction Collins abhors were generally the same people who dissented from the Church's moral teachings (which Collins thinks is quite acceptable) and sought the same egalitarian, Presbyterian model of ministry that Collins seems to favour.  In each instance their motivation was the same:  a belief that "desacralisation" (as it was called) and all the other changes would make the Church more "relevant" to the surrounding secular society.  Collins seems to think one can embrace this "progressive" this-worldly outlook in respect of doctrine, organisation and moral teachings without losing the sense of the sacred in the Mass;  but it just will not work.

The real choice for Australian Catholics is not, as Collins supposes, between the ghetto and engagement with the burning social issues of our time.  It is between a religion oriented primarily towards the service of the transcendent God (one component of which service is to aid one's fellow men) and an ethos which focuses on worldly expectations and worldly blights to such an extent that God gets shoved to the background.  It never seems to occur to Collins that Catholics should pray for a rise in vocations;  yet the call to the priesthood is supposed to be a gift of God's grace, in which case prayer should be an efficacious solution to the problem.  Collins' mentality has been secularised, and this makes No Set Agenda a very poor guide for Catholic action in the 1990s.