Archbishop of Sydney

Religion and Culture: Catholic Schools in Australia

Keynote address to the 2006 National Catholic Education Conference, Sydney

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
28/9/2006

Catholics have always been the most significant and interesting minority in Australian history.  Whether the long established Irish-Australians are more interesting than the Maronites or the recently arrived Vietnamese is a moot point as is the unanswerable question of whether race or religion is more powerful.

Catholic history in Australia extends for little more than 200 years and for at least one hundred years of that story Catholic schools did more to change Australian hearts and minds than even the extraordinary network of parishes.  One challenge is to continue to believe in the capacity of our schools to change minds and hearts and so keep Catholics in Australia interesting – and for the right reasons.

Australian history would be very different without Caroline Chisholm and Mary MacKillop, without the network of Catholic dioceses and schools everywhere across the continent, without Cardinal Moran, Archbishop Mannix and Archbishop Duhig.  Without Catholics the First World War referendums on conscription would have been carried.  As it turned out Les Murray, our greatest contemporary poet, claims that Mannix then saved

“perhaps half
the fit men of a generation
from the shrapnelled sewer landscapes
of Flanders”.

Most of us have heard the story of the ALP member in N.S.W. who genuflected in the aisle as he left his branch meeting.  He had thought he was in Church as the same people were present.  Without Catholics there would have been no split in the Labor Party in 1954 and Menzies’ time as Prime Minister would have been much shorter.  There was also in those days no ready substitute for the working class Catholic unionists, who removed the Communist leadership in key Australian unions.  Without them the struggle would have been longer, harder and probably violent.  Would the Mabo judgements of the High Court on aboriginal land rights have been different or delayed without Catholic lawyers and judges and their understanding of natural law?

Without Catholics there would not have been a successful ninety year campaign for “state aid” as it was called inappropriately i.e. for government funding for non-government schools which Prime Ministers Menzies and then Whitlam successfully introduced and expanded.  We might have been like the U.S.A. where the separation of Church and State is still interpreted to preclude such funding of Church schools.  Without government money many Catholic schools would have been forced to close.  My first cousin, a Josephite nun, like many others once had to teach a primary class of over ninety children, some of them with English only as an imperfect second language.  This was unsustainable.

Originally the Catholics were poor, undereducated and Irish.  Especially in the first half of the nineteenth century they were often wild, victims of centuries of systematic oppression in the “old country” and the terrible transportation system.

William Ullathorne, an English Benedictine was the first Vicar General in Australia arriving in 1833.  Then young, formidable and strait-laced, he wore no rose-tinted glasses as he surveyed the early Sydney community.  “The eye of God looks down upon a people, such as, since the deluge has not been ….A community without the feelings of community, whose men are very wicked, whose women are very shameless and whose children are very irreverent”.  He became a determined and effective opponent of transportation: “the removal of such a plague from the earth concerns the whole human race”, which ended in Eastern Australia in 1853 and 1867 in Western Australia.

The waves of immigrants and the wealth which followed the discovery of gold in 1851 broke these patterns of deprivation.  But it was the arrival of hundreds of Irish teaching nuns and brothers after the removal of government funding for Church schools in the 1870s that accelerated the steady development and improvement of the Catholic community.  This paralleled the improvements in Catholic life and practice in Ireland after Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

These achievements were immortalized in the folk poetry of John O’Brien, also known as Father Patrick Hartigan, for 27 years parish priest of Narrandera, whose collection of poems “Around the Boree Log” sold 100,000 copies.  I have only rarely come across classes who were introduced to his poetry and that is a pity.  The schools he described, including the religious schools I attended fifty years ago, were effective reinforcers, indeed transmitters of our tradition.

“Long the quest and ever thieving pass
the pedlars o’er the hill
With the treasures in their bundles, but to
leave us questing still.
Mystic fires horizons redden, but each
crimson flash in turn
Only lights the empty places in the bracken and the fern;
So in after years I’ve proved it, spite of pedant,
crank and fool,
Very much the way I found it in
the old bush school."

This is not only the language of faith, but of self confidence; confidence in the Irish Australian identity and the personal and intellectual adequacy of Catholicism.

Everywhere in Australia the Catholics were (and are) a minority in both town and city, not concentrating in urban centres like Boston and New York as they did in the U.S.A., but still visible through churches, schools, hospitals and public activity.  This continues today.  We take it for granted but a visiting priest from New Zealand, where Catholics only comprise 14% of the population, was surprised at the media coverage Catholic activity received here.

Peter Lalor, the Irish leader of the Eureka Stockade rebellion at Ballarat in 1854 was Catholic and indeed had his arm amputated in the Ballarat East presbytery after the fighting.  More happily Australian life largely avoided political violence after that brief episode and Catholics became increasingly visible in public life especially with the founding of the federal Labor Party in 1900.  Australia had a Catholic Prime Minister, James Scullin in 1929, more than thirty years before the U.S.A. had a Catholic president.  The tertiary scholarships for ex-servicemen of World War II also provided opportunities previously unavailable to young Catholics.

The steady Catholic progress towards respectability had begun.  Today in every parliament there are Catholics on both sides of the house and probably in every ministry.  There were many Catholics in Moonee Ponds where Dame Edna Everidge was born.  She, of course, was not herself a Catholic but Sir Les Patterson was!  More seriously the Australian Catholic schools promoted a social mobility among their students which was not bettered anywhere, even in the United States and today we live with the consequences of this, which are overwhelmingly good, but not without a downside.  Many Anglo-Celtic Catholics are no longer struggling to keep up with the Joneses, but through intermarriage and education are included among them. 

One consequence of keeping up with the Joneses is that a quarter of young Australians are leaving their Christianity behind by the time they are 30.   To what extent will Catholics follow this pattern?  Another issue is whether those who remain, or hopefully return to the fold, will also be marked with the colours of the Australian majority religiously.  That is while fundamentally decent and Judaeo-Christian in most of their instincts, will they also be religiously indifferent and confused?  As they and their children struggle with all the wonderful benefits of prosperity, e.g., education, health care, travel, material comforts and struggle too with the down sides of our allegedly post-modern society including the consequences of marriage breakdown, the comparatively new threat of drugs, the old challenge of alcohol, soft porn in magazines and T.V. and on the internet, will their underlying faith be a strong enough compass to guide their reactions?  We live in interesting times, and as educators, the question of how strongly the faith underpins the lives of generation after generation of our young people rests in our hands also.  Like previous generations of teachers we too have influence.

STATE AND CHURCH AFTER WORLD WAR II

During my life time there have been myriad alterations in Australian life, but two in particular are significant as contributing to important changes in the Catholic community: post-War immigration and the invention of the contraceptive pill.

Catholic life is stronger and more colourful because of the arrival successively of the Italians and Maltese, smaller numbers of the Dutch, Central Europeans such as the Poles and Lebanese Maronites, then the Vietnamese who are still producing many vocations to the priesthood and religious life and finally the Filipinos, South Americans and Pacific Islanders.  As provincial school boys we worried that many Italians, especially the men, only went to Mass at Christmas and Easter (they proved to be trend setters for many of the Anglo-Celtics, but today most of our ethnic communities have a mass going rate above the steadily declining national average, now 16%.

The invention of the contraceptive pill was the catalyst for a social revolution everywhere in the Western world.  There were high hopes that the abortion rate would fall because of its development and that children would be better cared for.  None of this has happened, although the birth rate has collapsed dramatically with no country in the Western world producing sufficient children to avoid population decline, Russia is now losing people at the rate of 700,000 a year through abortion, contraception and some emigration.  The pill has liberated sexual activity from procreation, so that sexual activity has become a recreational right for adults, separated from marriage, family, children and often from love itself.  The incidence of divorce increased exponentially.  The Beatles and the Rolling Stones wrote the hymns of the sixties for this permissive revolution and not surprisingly, recreational sex, divorced from higher purposes has provoked the rise of powerful homosexual lobbies.  Against these trends the recent upturn in the birthrate in Australia is welcome as a sign of confidence in the future.

Different factors were at work in the Church.  The most powerful agent of change in the Catholic Church was the Second Vatican Council held in Rome between 1962-1965, which broke the Tridentine mould of Catholic life and was followed by radical developments, only some of which were intended.  Before proceeding to list some of these it is useful to recall that most young Catholics have little or no idea what Catholic life was like before the Council and Vatican Two is for them as relevant as the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451).

Pope Benedict, like his predecessor Pope John Paul, is important as an accurate guide to the true meaning of Vatican Two, which has to be seen in continuity with previous Church history; certainly a development but not a radical break which invalidated the previous ninety or indeed four hundred years of Catholic history.

A number of Conciliar teachings impinged directly on Catholic schooling with the renewed emphasis on baptism, on the primordial role of the lay faithful being particularly appropriate for the changed makeup of Catholic teaching staffs.

This recognition of lay leadership and the doctrine of the collegiality of bishops led to the introduction of parish and school boards and eventually diocesan, state and national education commissions.  It was my privilege to be a foundation member of the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria in 1973.

In those days there were very few non-Catholics in any Catholic schools and official contacts between Catholics and Protestants were discouraged.  Despite the fact my father was Anglican I had never been inside a non-Catholic church before the Council as this was forbidden, even for the weddings and funerals of relatives.

The most profound changes emanated from the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, the most problematic of all the Council documents at least in its implementation.  This constitution quite properly called for dialogue with the surrounding culture rather than condemnation and urged us to emphasise what was common rather than to begin immediately with our differences.  This is fundamental to the way we now see ourselves as an integral part of Australian society, the main reason why the majority accepts us as such and why all educated Australians now automatically and rightly presume that they have every right to comment publicly on distinctively Catholic teachings on e.g. the impossibility of womens’ ordination, or contraception or the mandatory celibacy of priests.  Most Australians are much slower to do this with e.g. the Orthodox or the Jews and Moslems.

The two principal motifs of the Council were “aggiornamento”, bringing things up to date and “ressourcement”, a return to the genuine sources i.e. New Testament and the Fathers.  The tension between these two approaches still lies at the heart of the differences today between gospel Christians in every denomination (sometimes called conservative or traditional) on the one hand and the liberals or radicals on the other.

Many of my contemporaries in the seminary saw the Council documents as a starting point for further reforms.  Most were not ordained and others left after ordination.  Unfortunately very few remain as priests now, an enormous loss to the Church.

Movements for reform are difficult to contain and direct, often developing into a revolutionary itch requiring more and more changes.

Many of my contemporaries were naïve and optimistic like myself, expecting a new Pentecost with all this sensible modernization.  Many others, older and wiser, who should have known better also seriously overestimated our capacity to influence and change events as we scrambled to escape from our Catholic ghetto, real or imagined.  We forgot that nearly everywhere in the West, and certainly in Australia, serious Christians of any sort are in a minority.

Very soon vocations to the religious life dried up, now vanished almost completely in many non-contemplative orders, and many left religious life, often to return and offer excellent service as lay teachers. 

The arrival of large amounts of recurrent finance into the Catholic schools after the Whitlam sponsored Karmel Report (1973) enabled many religious who continued as religious to leave the schools for other apostolic activities.  Governments regretted the extra money this required, but were powerless to prevent it.

We soon had a situation where religious teachers were in a minority in nearly every school; a development which was covered adequately in an educational sense but crucially weakened the religious witness in the schools.

This has developed further now as most schools have no religious at all on the teaching staff and often a significant percentage of non-Catholic (in fact 20% nationally) or non-practising Catholics as teachers.  While many lay teachers are serious Catholics and an increasing number possess theological qualifications, the balance has changed.  Obvious consequences flow from this.

The lay faithful have stepped forward to replace the religious.  Lay principals and the executive staff are responsible for the religious leadership of their schools, including the Catholic life of the schools.  Many lay leaders are now more explicit about this than some of the religious principals of ten or twenty years ago.

This transition, this turn of the wheel back to a situation where most teachers are lay, as they were generally in Catholic schools until the 1870s has often been noted.  What has provoked less comment has been the rise of the complex organizations that now administer schools and school systems.  Fifty years ago no diocesan or religious order education office would have employed more than ten people.

These Catholic education bureaucracies are a new phenomenon in the Catholic Church and it is essential that we also reflect on how they can best contribute to the evangelizing mission of the Church as well as in a more general educational sense.

There is no doubt the schools and school systems are now administered more efficiently and governments have only a limited number of competent agencies to deal with on a host of matters, including the increasing requirements of financial accountability.  Excellent work is done too on educational quality.

But the leadership role of diocesan bishops and religious order superiors in relation to their schools has been changed radically by the rise of these bureaucracies.  Some bishops and religious superiors have just abdicated, opted out, perhaps after watching the B.B.C. series “Yes, Minister”.  There will be yet another stage in these developments as many religious orders increasingly hand over policy control of their school systems to totally lay boards.  Such incorporations raise important canonical issues, because it is vital that neither properties nor institutions move outside official Church control (variously defined) to become independent secular institutions.

These new bureaucracies are indispensable leaders and allies of bishops and superiors in any concerted efforts to reform and improve standards, to change the curriculum or improve Religious education outcomes.  Their vital role has often been under-remarked and underestimated and there is little likelihood that their influence will reduce in the future.

I would like to pay public tribute to the work of Brother Kelvin Canavan the Sydney Archdiocese Director of Catholic Education and his team.  While he does not hesitate to tell me what he feels I need to hear, he has been conspicuously loyal to established policy directions, to working for better academic standards, improving outcomes in religious education, ensuring that most of our schools now have excellent facilities and he continues to work regularly and effectively for good schooling.  He is also a good friend.  In this case the new participative system is working.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

In the 2001 census Catholics constituted 26.7% of the Australian population, a percentage which has not varied much for forty years.  Catholics replaced Anglicans as the largest denomination in 1986 and our numbers increased by 202,000 between 1996 and 2001, reflecting the steady increase in Australia’s population.

However this increase, a percentage decline in 2001 of just over one third of one percent for Catholics, masked a significant exodus as Catholic migration should have pushed the percentage higher.  Another significant change, also little noticed, was that the percentage of self declared irreligious declined from 16.6% to 15.5% in 2001, the first such decline for 100 years.  Most Australians are still Christian (68%) and there is no inevitable progression to majority secularism despite the political correctness and irreligion which dominate most of the media.

All of us are aware of the steady decline in regular worship among Catholics from an estimated high point of 50% in 1950, to the present rate of 16%.  I had concluded from these different sets of figures until quite recently that few Catholics were opting out explicitly even when they did little that was Catholic to justify the title.  As there had been a big opt-out between 1971-6, this conclusion was wobbly and a recent survey has further dented my carefully circumscribed optimism.

A research project completed by Redemptorist Father Michael Mason and his co-workers, “The Spirit of Generation Y” surveys the beliefs and practices of Australians aged from 13 to 29 years.  Not surprisingly there was a mixed bag of good, bad and indifferent news.  Three quarters believe in God variously defined, but only about half identify with a religion, considerably below the national average.

An old Irish-Australian woman, when talking kindly about young people, told me once that what is in the cat comes out in the kitten.  There is much truth in this.  Parents remain the most powerful influence on their children, as this survey found little difference in belief and practice between continuing Gen Y Christians and their baby-boom Christian parents, but there are two particularly important developments.

About thirty percent of Gen Y are moving away from their Christian origins.  Some have reduced their attendance at worship or stopped attending altogether.  Others no longer identify with a religious denomination or no longer believe in God.

By the time Gen Y reach the age of 29 twenty five percent of those who used to belong to a church are already ex-members.  The number for Catholics is 29%, higher than any other denomination.

Another historically significant finding is that young women are no more religious than young men.  This has enormous consequences for the future.  Generations of children across most ethnic groups in Australia had the faith passed on to them and nurtured by the devotion of their mothers.  It remains to be seen how many Gen Y women revert to this role once they have children of their own.

Three other findings surprised me.  Only 10% of young Catholics believe “only one religion is true”, against a national average of 11% and a rate of 34% for other Christians, excluding Anglicans.  The question is capable of being understood in several ways, but the pressures on young Catholics beyond tolerance and ecumenism and towards muddle are evident here, channeled sometimes through the ill effects of courses in comparative religion.

Worse is to come.  75% of young Catholics believe it is “OK to pick and choose beliefs” against a national average of 36%.  While the national average is meaningless, because (for some strange reason) nine out of ten non-identifiers were not asked the question, this is still a particularly disturbing finding for Catholic educators indicating a malaise and confusion in the general approach to life rather than a few isolated points of heresy or unbelief.

This finding is paralleled by the fact that 56% of young Catholics believe “morals are relative”, almost exactly mirroring the national average of 57% and being much higher than other Christians (40%) and even the Anglicans (39%).

Too many young Catholics have been led by the pressures of contemporary propaganda, whatever might be said about the inadequacies of family life and Catholic religious education, so that their religious confusion is worse than that of all other young Australian Christians.  Why is this so?

They are also poorly equipped for any return to the fold when they have little instinct for or understanding that there are truths of faith and morals, which are to be sought after and judged according to rational criteria.  More of them seem to believe that life offers a smorgasbord of options from which they choose items that best suit their passing fancies and their changing circumstances.

The Generation Y Survey was not able to detect any religious effect of attendance at Church schools, although a majority of those who believe in God and attend Church schools say the religious education is helpful.  Neither was I surprised to learn that about a third of the more religiously committed students (fewer at Catholic schools, only 19%) reported being made fun of at school because of their religion, confirming anecdotes I have heard off and on for twenty years.  This parallels a small number of religiously committed parents who choose to send their children to non-Catholic schools claiming that their children’s religious practice was more likely to survive intact there.

Like the Holy Father citing a comment about Mohammed in his recent Regensburg address I too cite this example without endorsement!

The Spirit of Generation Y is a thoroughly professional survey, which makes no claims to infallibility.  Neither do I know what margins of error the authors might estimate, but there are no professional reasons to reject its findings.

In some ways it does not square exactly with the official 2001 census and a better context will be provided by the results of the 2006 census.  But there is some chance that we are experiencing an acceleration in the Christian slippage, with Catholics slipping faster, even though they have bigger numbers on the slope.

Catholic school enrolments do not necessarily contradict such an hypothesis.  Across the nation we now educate 677,659 students, 20% of the nation’s children, an increase of 201,229 since 1965.  Most of the growth is at secondary level, with primary enrolments almost steady in N.S.W. and declining each year since 2000 in Victoria.

Three factors however are important in reflecting the changing place of Catholics in the national profile.

23% of Catholic school students are not Catholics, with Tasmania (44%) and South Australia (36%) having the highest non-Catholic participation a tribute to the perceived qualities of our schools, a result of the blessing of ecumenism and cementing our place as an accepted part of the Australian mainstream.  In N.S.W. all enrolment growth for the last 20 years has come from non-Catholic pupils.  Without them enrolments would have declined by 1600!

47,115 young Catholics are at non-Catholic private schools (5% of Catholics attending school) for a variety of reasons.  Better academic standards and more powerful social networks are two possibilities.  Once or twice in parishes I have found that all the teenage altar servers have been from such non-Catholic schools, but Anglican chaplains have explained that most Catholics in their schools are not excessively committed to the devotion of the fifty-two consecutive Sunday Masses.

43% of Catholics are educated in state schools, including 69% of Catholics students from families with lowest third of family income.  Only 21% attend Catholic schools.

As a consequence Catholic schools are not educating most of our poor, especially at the primary level.  72% of Catholic students from families with lowest third of family income attend Government infant/primary schools and only 19% attend Catholic schools

At secondary level 63% of the “poorest” Catholics attend Government secondary schools and 22% attend Catholic secondary schools.

Predominantly our schools now cater for the huge Australian middle class, which they helped create.

This is of significant challenge, a major reason for holding down increases in school fees and explains the necessity for nurturing and expanding our network of C.C.D. catechists working in the State schools.

CONCLUSION

This year Professor James Franklin of the University of New South Wales produced a brilliant little book entitled “Catholic Values and Australian Realities”.

The introduction began with these words “Australian Catholics have had a distinctive image: Irish tribal loyalties, Labor but anti-communist politics, childhoods full of guilt and incense.  There is more to their distinctiveness than that.  Their central contribution to Australian thinking is an objective view of ethics.” (p1)

Guilt will always be with us, even when it is unrecognized and emerging as hatred of self or society, burning incense too continues at Catholic funerals and in our Cathedrals, but an objective view of ethics among most Gen. Y Catholics has disappeared as completely as Irish tribal loyalties.  Our situation is changing.

I realize that my thumbnail sketch of Catholicism in Australian culture requires another paper of equal length spelling out what might or should be done.  You will be relieved to know that you won’t be receiving it from me today.

I have not set out to be bland and anodyne anymore than I have set out to ignore our achievements and our considerable strengths.  I love the Catholic schools too much for that.

In five years I have visited more than 100 of our 163 schools in the Sydney archdiocese.  Overwhelmingly these are happy places of learning, serving and basically satisfying their constituencies, generally in good facilities where the Federal government provides 50% of the capital money and the N.S.W. government covers the interest on the money contributed by the local community and the System.  There is no crisis of morale in the Catholic schools and testing results reflect the quality of these schools and the socio-economic makeup of the pupils, being regularly better than national averages.

I also realize that I am not talking to a local parish group, but to the leaders of Catholic-education across Australia who deserve the bad news with the good.  We are in a complex and turbulent process of change.  Tomorrow Generation Z will be different again just as older generations have their own particularities.

We Catholics are likely to remain around one quarter of the population in an increasingly secular Australia.  While ours is a God of surprises we have only a limited capacity to transmit our tradition and preserve our identity.  We should clarify our goals, try to learn from our mistakes.

Secularists strive to remove religion from the public domain and restrict it to private life, where individual religious choices reflect personal preferences unrelated to truth and general principles.  They see religion as another area for consumer choice.

For us as Catholics our central concern is the presentation of the person of Jesus Christ, with his call to repent and believe.  We espouse crucifixion Christianity which leads to the resurrection and believe that everyone stands under the four last things of death and judgement, heaven and hell.  Catholicism calls to faith and reason as well as love and hope.  This is now profoundly countercultural.

The decisions to believe in Christ are mysterious and individual.  But schools can impart religious knowledge, encourage patterns of clear thinking, constructive enquiry and a thirst for answers.  We need to inculcate a respect for reason and tradition as well as call to faith, hope and love.

These are mighty tasks, but attempting them is a wonderful vocation.  Especially in our challenging environment, catechesis, and envangelisation are not only a duty, but an adventure and challenge, truly one great work of the Holy Spirit.

I thank you for what you are doing and urge you to continue with all the wisdom and perseverance we can muster.

I conclude with a series of questions to help focus your thinking and discussion.

1. Do Catholic schools retain today a capacity to strengthen the faith and improve the morals of their students, as they did in the past?
   
2. Are Catholic truths presented to your students sequentially and comprehensively over the 13 years of schooling?  Do students know what are the 4 or 5 fundamental truths of our faith?  What is the place of student text books in Religious Education?
   
3. What strategies would overturn the assumption that all morality is relative?  How can the truths about life, marriage, family and social justice be defended?
   
4. What strategies might be adopted to strengthen the Christian faith and perhaps make converts among the 23% of non-Catholic students in our schools?
   
5. What strategies would make Catholic schools more accessible to lower income families?  Should our “elite” colleges offer more scholarships to the disadvantaged?
   
6. Is it a concern that few Catholic schools are listed among the best academic schools?
   
7. Is there sufficient diversity among Catholic schools?
   
8. Should more be done for the religious education of Catholics in state schools?
   
9. What must we do to prepare the next generation of leaders for truly Catholic schools?
   
10. How can we attract committed Catholic school graduates into the teaching profession?

Pope John Paul II should have the last word from his message at the start of the third Christian millennium “Duc in altum! These words ring out for us today, and they invite us to remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm and to look to the future with confidence: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb 13:8).

Amen to that.