Archbishop of Sydney

The Catholic Contribution to a Christian Australia

Third Jubilee Lecture | Catholic Institute of Sydney

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
26 May 2004

How religious is Australian public life and culture?

Describing Australia as a secular society has become almost a throw-away line, but the reality is different. The 2001 Census showed that 68 per cent of Australians describe themselves as Christian, and about 75 per cent believe in God. The Australian Community Survey indicates that two-thirds of Australians believe a spiritual life is important to them, and 70 per cent have some contact with the Christian churches each year. 33 per cent of the population say they pray or meditate at least weekly.

None of this evidence is consistent with the claim that Australia is basically a secular country. Rather this claim reflects the fact that among academics, journalists and other members of the commentariat the religious situation is roughly the obverse of what it is in the general community. People in these privileged positions mainly mix with people like themselves, and this can cause spectacular errors of judgement. The American historian and social commentator Gertrude Himmelfarb once told of an academic who was convinced that a conspiracy had made Ronald Reagan President of the United States , because no one she knew in her university had voted for him. This is like our situation, where a disproportionately secular opinion-forming class assumes that everyone else is secular too.

Many of Australia 's important secular institutions owe their origins to Christianity. The university is a medieval Christian invention, and enjoyed considerable autonomy from secular and ecclesiastical authority from its foundation – not just from the time of the Renaissance, as the traditional mythology would have it. The American sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that an institution like the university was only possible in a culture founded on belief in a conscious, rational and all-powerful Creator. Western science had its origins in the same theology, and the advantage the West had over cultures was precisely its conviction that God was reasonable and that his work in creation was also reasonable, predictable and intelligible to us. The belief in the basic intelligibility of the world, although under attack from philosophical claims which insist that there is no such thing as truth, is still a foundational assumption of the so-called secular societies of the West, like Australia .

Hospitals and schools are more basic examples of institutions that we take for granted, which also had their beginnings in Christian convents and monasteries. Even secular democracy is only workable on the basis of Christian assumptions about human dignity, respect for persons, natural rights, the common good, and tolerance and compassion. These principles do not come about simply by bringing people together in a community. It is frequently observed today in relation to Iraq that democracy is not something that can be imposed; that democracy needs a certain sort of culture to make it possible. For the West that culture is fundamentally Christian.

The secularism of modern democracy continues to rely on the cultural capital bequeathed it by Christianity. While I rejoice in the separation of church and state, it is inaccurate to claim Australian society is secular. This raises the question of the sustainability of our most important institutions in the long-term as the Christian cultural capital on which they depend is eaten up and not renewed. One area where this is already assuming critical importance is in the law, particularly as it deals with rights and the conflict of rights. The link between rights and natural law has long been sundered, and it is not clear that either democracy or the idea of rights has been well served by this development. The Church has an important contribution to make here, but perhaps before outlining this it would help to set out a few general observations on the contribution that faith makes to culture in the modern situation.

The contribution of religion to democratic culture

The particular contribution that the Church has made to Australia differs from that which it has made in other places. There is no surprise in this. We are used to comparisons of our own situation with that in the United States , and this seems a good rule to follow here, not least because of the powerful impact that American culture and developments have throughout the world.

In Australia , while evangelical Anglicanism in places like Sydney is strong, and evangelical communities are growing, this is yet to translate into a clear public voice of the sort commanded by groups like the Southern Baptists and the Christian Coalition in America . For the moment this absence is one significant difference between Australia and the United States in matters of religion. It is true that the American evangelical churches and churches in the tradition of nineteenth-century English revivalism – perhaps the Hillsong Church is the most striking modern example in Sydney – have historically tended to keep to themselves and to stay out of the political and social fray. In Australia the movement of these groups towards more active participation in public affairs has not always been welcomed. In 2001, when the Anglican Archbishop Dr Jensen suggested that Christians should do more to evangelize Australian society, the Sydney Morning Herald published an editorial condemning this idea as arrogant, dangerous and a recipe for bloodshed. Observing that “in Australia , one's religion is largely a private matter”, the editorial concluded—with only a small hint of menace—that “it should remain that way”. This editorial epitomised a certain secular attitude to traditional religion which tolerates some of it for the sake of “diversity” but only on the condition that it is privatized.

This is not a deal that Australian Catholic church leaders have generally been willing to accept. The Catholic Church in Australia has been blessed with bishops like Cardinal Moran and Archbishop Mannix who were prepared on occasion to be a little outspoken, an advantage which the American Church may not have enjoyed to the same extent. In Australia , this has been good for the Church and good for democracy. The privatization of belief is usually justified by referring to the importance of maintaining the public domain and public policy as “neutral” areas. But privatization does not favour neutrality. It is a way of silencing opponents and as such favours the dominant secular cultural identity.

The privatization of belief was basically the solution which John F. Kennedy proposed to reassure American voters that it was safe to put a Catholic in the White House. As an old Kennedy groupie, I say this with some sadness. One effect of this in the United States at least, has been to raise up a generation of Catholic legislators who seem to think it is possible to be openly pro-abortion in their work and still be a Catholic in good standing. In Canada and in Victoria , there is the danger that anti-discrimination commissions will be used to silence Christian ministers who criticise same-sex marriage or Islam. This would not be good for religion, nor democracy.

The Catholic Church was slow to give public approval to democracy. The main reason for this is that the nineteenth century, which we now see from our perspective as the period when democracy inexorably began to replace other forms of government in the West, offered to contemporaries many examples of experiments in democracy going wrong, beginning of course with the French Revolution. Many of these governments were also hostile to Catholicism. For this reason the Church's thinking in philosophy and theology about democracy is still young. But there are others who can offer us a few useful pointers, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote so perceptively of the French Revolution and democracy in North America .

De Tocqueville believed that the premises of secularism do not sustain democracy but undermine it, encouraging a lowering of personal taste and public standards, as well as materialism and moral relativism. The end of this would be, he claimed, a new soft despotism, imprisonment by a thousand silken threads. Against this danger, the faith of the West offers a belief in the inherent dignity of each person, made in God's likeness; a belief in the equality of all humans in God's sight, whatever their natural inequalities; and a belief in the centrality of liberty in the purposes of the one true God for the cosmos.

In a democracy, religion should strengthen and correct morals and manners, not so much by its contributions to law making, as by its influence on daily living and especially in the family and the home, where stable morals and good order remain the basis of civilized life. Moral clarity is a great gain, especially in times of crisis, and the Christian concepts of God and especially human nature are indispensable helps to daily living. Faith also goes beyond a morality of mere reason by introducing the notion of immortality, life after death, whose quality will be decided by a personal and undeceivable Judge.

De Tocqueville wrote that the apparently opposed tendencies of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom do not harm one another but “work in harmony and seem to lend mutual support”. “Religion regards civil liberty as a noble exercise of men's faculties . . .”. On the other hand “Freedom sees religion as the companion of its struggles and triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its rights”. Australian society is one of the best in the world for most of us, in no small part because of the way in which Christianity has informed and guided our most important institutions. But this will not remain so automatically. Wisdom and hard work are needed to defend democracy and the culture of freedom within which it exists, both from its critics and also from its friends.

The case against rights

For several decades, the Catholic Church has explained moral truths and their application to social issues using the concept and rhetoric of rights. Reasons for this include the attempt to use the secular grammar of “rights” as a basis for a dialogue with secularists, and the strong belief by some Catholics that rights-talk is a good vehicle for advancing a Catholic understanding of justice, morality and the common good. But one of the downsides for the Church and Catholic thinkers is that it exposes us to two dangers: that of embracing democracy uncritically and seeking to make our peace with it at any price; or alternatively, a return to sectarianism and the ghetto.

Some in the Church argue Catholics should not use what Alasdair MacIntyre has called this “dubious idiom and rhetoric of rights”. Among these are Australian theologian Tracy Rowland. Dr Rowland is the author of a recent book Culture and the Thomist Tradition which has made a first rate attempt to look critically at the Church's engagement with modernity, and our relations with contemporary culture generally. The book is rich, substantial, and a call to serious discussion about the language and assumptions of contemporary moral and social debate.

Philosophically speaking, Rowland is echoing the view of MacIntyre that moral terms belong to a particular tradition and narrative, and that, for example, taking rights-talk from post-Enlightenment secularism and attempting to use it to further the claims of classical Thomism is incoherent. MacIntyre argues that liberals and Thomists will mean radically different things by “rights” and the lack of a shared conception of the common good means the appearance of agreement is a façade concealing serious dangers for Christianity.

Rowland believes that using secular language to set out Catholic claims makes it easier for Catholics to slip into a secular understanding of autonomy and freedom, hostile especially to the hard teachings of the Gospel. We need to recognize, she argues, that Catholic language and symbols are part-constitutive of the tradition and that moving from these is theologically dangerous. It is accepting the appearance of short-term agreement in place of the deep and difficult debate which believers need to have with secular liberalism.

Rowlands opens up much that is important in the debate but I would not want to exaggerate the dangers of speaking to contemporary society. The Church's clear preference for modern democracy, and its commitment to human rights as a proper goal of democracy, co-exist well with a traditional Catholic approach to faith and morals — they certainly do so in the teaching of Pope John Paul II. It is relatively early days yet for the Catholic option for democracy and rights. Our teaching on rights is coherent with our anthropology, with the natural law tradition of Aquinas, and with the moral principles with which we approach bioethical, sexual, and other human issues such as social Justice. We are all aware of the enormous secular pressure on Church leaders and Christian politicians to mind their own spiritual and religious business, and to leave the question of which values the community should adopt to those who can consider it in an “unbiased” - that is, secular - fashion. This is not a position that Christians can ever accept. The Church's intervention in the public domain is crucial - in particular, its interventions on behalf of those unable to speak for themselves - and one of the important grounds on which Church leaders base their interventions is fundamental human rights. Abandoning rights is not an option for John Paul II nor for the twenty first century Church.

Thinkers like Rowland, MacIntyre, and David Schindler who counsel us against the dangers of any sell-out to secular liberalism do us important service. But there is need for moderation: the Catholic Church is a great church and not a sect. The only question for me is the nature of the terms in our dialogue with modernity. The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment worlds are not such a stranger to our own tradition that we have nothing to say to them and everything to fear. The Enlightenment itself is in many ways a child of Christianity - however unexpected and puzzling the off-spring. Indeed, Enlightenment modernity fails to understand itself fully unless it acknowledges its Christian roots and context: how can we understand Hume without the background of Calvinist faith and ethics to which he is responding? The French Enlightenment thinkers without Jansenism? The existentialists and deconstructionists of our own times without the traditions of Christian essentialism and Christian authority against which they are rebelling. We may feel we have little in common with these other traditions; but like all families with messy genealogies, there is still enough common DNA around for us to speak (parts of) each others' language, while being wary of the dangers of compromise.

The Clash of Rights

Rights matter, but rights-talk does not exhaust the meaning of faith. In particular, Christian faith looks askance at those who would interpret the whole of life in terms of our own personal claims. People of faith are at least as concerned for the rights of others as their own rights; and are more concerned about the rights of those in serious need than their own rights. They are also passionate about duties - and not just the duties of the state or the Church or other unnamed agencies, but my own obligation to move beyond my comfort zone and to work at personal cost to satisfy the needs of others.

We believe in this demanding approach to rights because we believe it reflects moral truth. Thus part of my answer to Rowland, and others, is that Christian rights-talk is not simply claims based on wishes - like the rights-talk of the secular liberal - but claims in justice based on moral truths about the person. The claims of all persons to obtain at least the minimum requirements, usually through work, in each different society, in order to flourish as a person is a moral truth ; and so far as the rights of the person are based on such a perception of moral truth, they are very real and very serious. Thus I agree with John Finnis that “if its logic and its place in a reasonable approach to human flourishing are kept in mind, the modern usage of ‘right' as the principal counter in political discourse should be recognized . . . as a valuable addition” ( Natural Law and Natural Rights , p 221).

This raises the important issue of the denial of rights to some individuals and minorities, and the vital role of the Church in speaking up for victims at such times. If rights are claims to just treatment concerning important human goods, then children's rights will be at the head of our moral wish-lists today. Children, like all of us, have a right to life, to healthcare, to truth, and to a family; but in their case the rights are even more important, given their youth and vulnerability. Naturally, not everyone can always be given all to which they have a right: death, or other lesser tragedies, makes orphans of children. Yet the natural right to be loved and reared by mother and father is a matter of justice that ought to be supported by moral custom, general society, and legislation. For individuals to deny their obligations to their children, we would all agree, is appalling; for the state to deny the common obligation to children by encouraging the breakdown of marriage and family should appal us even more.

Attacks on family are surreptitious, and no doubt often well-meaning to other groups hostile or indifferent to the traditional family. Yet our human rights tradition requires us to resist unjust denial of rights to children on the flimsy grounds of awarding a minority of adults the satisfaction of their personal choices. Supporting marriage and family is just one way in which strong religious belief and belief in human rights combined can help expose the pseudo-rights of modernity. Modern rights are very often not human rights - they are not claims based on the truth about the human good and common good. Rather, they are conventional rights, based on no more than an exaggerated claim for autonomy and the chosen lifestyle-values of minorities. Such ‘thin' rights claims should always be trumped by the human rights claims defended in Catholic teaching and supported by natural law thinking.

A commitment to human rights will also mean an interest in policy questions. Of course, the Church claims no expertise in economics or the social sciences and has no mandate for partisan interventions in political debate. Yet a policy that, for example, reduced the minimum wage beneath what a parent needs to maintain a family, offered tax breaks to high-earning singles, or smoothed and widened the path to divorce or abortion or access to artificial reproductive technologies would be a policy that raised major human rights questions, questions in which the Catholic Church has an interest because of her God-given mandate to care for persons, families, and all in serious need.

The age of terror in which we now live has followed a brief decade of unchallenged secular liberalism; a decade which, in turn, followed the eventual collapse of the communist nightmare in 1989. We do not know how events will now unfold, but it seems that for many, Christian voices will be important, prophetic, necessary. The issues at stake today are large, and secular liberalism now looks rather smaller, rather more confused, less able to deal with the new, vast political realities.

In the new situation religion will play a key role and the witness of Christians for those in need - for love and not for violence, for service and not for triumph - will continue to be important. Yet dogmatic liberalism attempts still to silence the Church's contribution. Liberalism ought in principle to give everyone a voice, and an equal voice: that is what liberalism means. But in fact, increasingly, dogmatic secular liberals use liberalism to exclude the voice of the Church. In Australia , there have been calls for the Church to stay out of public debates on medical and bioethical issues: the liberal rhetoric may say “all have an equal voice at the table”, but the dogmatic secularist holds “only our liberal friends are really free to speak”. Such dogmatism may be of little help in the new age of terror. The Catholic Church, however, has a moral wisdom and expertise to offer: the ethics of love for our enemies and of justice for all. The challenge from liberalism will continue, yet we can ponder that liberalism now has less to boast about, and rather less to say since the disasters of September 11, Bali and other recent outrages.

Faith and Democracy

Meanwhile, of course, we must continue to exist and to flourish within our pluralist liberal democracy. How do we respond to those who argue for new and anti-Christian approaches to family, to the status of the embryo, to those who are terminally ill or unconscious? If people do not share our faith, how do we respond to the accusation that we are simply imposing Christian values on a secular state? We can of course state that our central moral arguments are based not only on revealed truth, but on natural law truths accessible to all people of good will and clear mind. But from a society like ours that rejects such a moral theory, accepting instead an ethic of preference-satisfaction and pragmatism, large-scale agreement cannot be expected.

Another response might begin with a discussion on the real nature of participatory democracy, and the Church's role in democratic debate. In Evangelium Vitae (§§ 69-70) the Holy Father spoke about the moral legitimacy of a democracy. There is no more a divine right for a democracy to do as it wishes than there was a divine right of kings to do so. Democracy is not to be “idolised”, treated as an infallible voice of wisdom, an adjudication always to be followed and never to be questioned. It is useful to remember Winston Churchill's verdict in 1947 in the House of Commons “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. The legitimacy of a democracy - as of any form of government - stands or falls on whether or not it serves the common good, and does so well. Good democracy cannot simply be the acceptance of what the majority “considers moral and actually practices” (§ 69). The Pope asks: would a crime cease to be a crime if “instead of being committed by unscrupulous tyrants, it were legitimated by popular consensus?” (§ 70). Clearly, democracy is not a substitute for morality, but rather is an excellent version of government - if people are educated in good judgement about citizenship values and a healthy respect for the common good.

Talk of the nature of democracy may sound suspicious to some liberal ears and consciences, but it proceeds from a deep respect for democracy and a wish to protect democracy's own ends and to stop it turning into simple majoritarianism. Thus the Catholic community claims the right to democratic in-put in two major ways: first, to speak up as one of the voices that respects democracy itself and wants to see the great democracy of Australia flourish, grow in moral legitimacy, and not descend into a majority consensus based on short-termism or selfishness; and secondly, to contribute our own Christian views on all serious topics, as we have a democratic right and duty (as well as a divine mandate) to do. This is done differently by priests and bishops on the one hand and Christian lay people more directly and regularly involved in political life, on the other.

The best solution to conflicts and disagreements about rights is a moral realism about rights: that is, a view that takes natural rights grounded on moral truths seriously. The best hope for achieving such a realism today is an insistence on genuine democracy; democracy legitimated by serious thought about the common good and basic human rights for every person, on our shores and beyond. Where true democracy breaks down - where human rights are undermined by attacks on defenceless life, the family, or by repelling desperate strangers to our country in the name of ideology or party - the Church reserves the right to speak up for the democratic spirit, for the common good, and for the view of human rights based on the moral truth about the person.

Conclusion

From the time of St. John's gospel with its clash of light and darkness, godliness and “the world” Christians have realised that no earthly society is entirely congenial to living the gospel.

Despite this Australia offers unique opportunities for Christian and Catholic life as well as particular challenges. Most Australians are Christians, but less than a quarter worship regularly. Practice rates in the USA are much higher, but so are the civic restraints on church practices and institutions there and their hostility to religion.

Christian notions of regularl religious worship and of marriage and family life are under particular pressure in Australia .

The equilibrium regulating the number of children and sexual activity over the past 50 to 100 years in Australia has been gravely disturbed by the invention of the contraceptive pill, women's liberation, the decline of religion, the separation of love, sexual activity and children, one from the other, and rising expectations of material prosperity. This has meant that no Western country produces sufficient children to keep the population stable. Children are seen less as a gift from God and often as an expensive burden.

Other crucial issues of social justice, euthanasia, legalizing same sex marriages surround the central challenge.

The quality of the Christian and Catholic response to these challenges will determine not only the future level of religious vitality in the Catholic community, but how much and for how long Australia remains a basically Christian country.