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AUSTRALIAN CATHOLICISM - FACING DISASTER?

 Most of those aware of what is happening in the church know that Australian Catholicism is in trouble. When people focus on this most think of sexual abuse. In fact this is more a symptom than the actual core of the problem. The core issue is leadership, or lack of it, and the failure to provide adequate pastoral ministry.

 This is the overwhelming conclusion of Peter Wilkinson’s just published and detailed study Catholic Parish Ministry in Australia: Facing Disaster. Drawing statistics from The 2010-11 Official Directory of the Catholic Church in Australia Wilkinson looks at everything connected with on-the-ground ministry in Australian Catholicism and shows that parishes are failing for a complex of reasons to meet even the basic liturgical needs of parishioners, let alone the broad range of other challenges facing the church. ‘The crisis is real’, he says, ‘and the scale is huge.’

 Wilkinson says that ‘it would be simplistic to measure the faith of Australian Catholics and the success or failure of parish ministry purely by rates of regular Mass attendance, which might perhaps be better read as ordinary Catholics attempting to convey a message to their leaders about how they see their church.’ In this context I actually think he overestimates the percentage of Catholics attending Mass. He puts it at 13.8% in 2006. My guess for 2011 is somewhere between 7% and 9%.

What this study has done is to substantiate the claims that many have made, but none before have adequately demonstrated. He shows that one in four Australian parishes is now without a full-time priest, that very few new parishes have been established despite a rapidly increasing Catholic population and that 184 existing parishes have been merged since 1994.

There has been a catastrophic decline in the number of priests, recruitment of seminarians is far below the number needed, the average number of Catholics per parish has increased 25% in the last ten years (from an average of 3481 Catholics per parish in 2000 to 4368 in 2010), and fewer students from poorer Catholic families are enrolled in Catholic schools.

 A most useful aspect of the study is the material Wilkinson has unearthed on the recruitment of overseas priests. This strategy (which he says ‘appears to have originated out of despair and desperation’) has been in place now for over 20 years, but it has hardly ever been discussed in public except in last year’s ABC Compass program The Mission on Nigerian priests in Hobart Archdiocese. Accurate statistics on foreign priests are particularly difficult to unearth and, as Wilkinson says, ‘the few publicly stated objectives of the strategy are confusing’.  

 When I recently contacted the Department of Immigration requesting a copy of the contract between the Bishops Conference and the Department under freedom of information I was told that this was ‘commercial in confidence’. This is problematic given the church is not a commercial operation and claims tax exemption. A case of having your cake and eating it too?

 As a band-aid solution, importation of priests only puts off the question of asking why local vocations are scarce. Wilkinson points out that if the bishops want to maintain an average of one priest for every 3600 Catholics nationwide then, given the number of local priests available, the majority of priests in parish ministry in Australia in 2020 (nine years from now) will have to be overseas born. The statistics are that the number of priests needed is 1780; the number of local priests available will be 800, which leaves a shortfall of 980 which will have to be supplied by foreign priests. Local seminarians will not make up the shortfall. Wilkinson is not the first to argue this. Melbourne’s Father Eric Hodgens has been arguing this for a decade now.

 Wilkinson points out that there are some real problems involved in importing priests from other cultures. One is the mismatch between the ‘missionary’ ambitions of many of the foreign priests who see themselves as evangelizing the Australian church, and the pragmatic expectations of the bishops who simply see them as getting us through a tough period. ‘If this mismatch is not resolved quickly’, Wilkinson comments, ‘the strategy could end in tears.’

 He also shows that of the 205 diocesan seminarians, 38 are studying at the Neo- Catechumenal Way (NCW) seminaries in Perth and Sydney. While these will be incardinated into these archdioceses when ordained, they actually only have to do two years work there before they go ‘on mission’ elsewhere in the world. So that means that there are really only 176 seminarians for the whole of the Australian church.

 Another difficulty that Wilkinson doesn’t canvass is that many of these foreign priests are inexperienced and come from cultures that are tribal and patriarchical. They have little or no comprehension of the kinds of faith challenges that face Catholics living in a secular, individualistic, consumerist culture that places a strong emphasis on equality, women’s rights, and co-responsibility for parish ministry and mission.

Catholic Parish Ministry in Australia: Facing Disaster? is without doubt the most comprehensive survey of its kind ever undertaken. Not only is it a valuable source of statistics but it clearly sets out the issues confronting Australian Catholics. A full copy of the report is available on this webpage. Just click on the box on the homepage entitled The Death of Australian Catholicism.