Our People

Faith, Ethics and the Future of the Catholic School

St Ignatius’ College Riverview Preferred Futures Forum 2 on Values and the Future of Church and Religion as we know it

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
2 March 2004

The Church and Religion

We have emerged from a century of extraordinary technological progress, advancement of democracy and human rights, growing tolerance and religious renewal – as well as terrible totalitarianism, evil ideologies and unparalleled bloodshed in war, ethnic holocausts and abortion. We have now entered a new century not half so optimistic or naïve perhaps, but every bit as promising in areas of human economic and democratic progress – yet one already sadly stained by gross acts of terrorism and warfare and a zeitgeist more formed by this-worldly consumerism than the faith of our fathers (and mothers). In a world in which people insist on the absolute sovereignty of their own opinions and will, where can the vulnerable look for support, the voiceless for voice, the confused for wise counsel, confident that such support will not be self-interested and such counsel not just one more opinion in the endless market of ideas?

Many people, and not just Catholics, still look to religion and especially to the Church—even more now that we have so few institutions able and willing to speak the truth—the impartial, honest and sometimes hard-to-handle truth. They do so despite the battering the credibility of the Church has taken in the face of scandals involving perhaps as many as 1 in 25 priests in some countries. They do so despite the vast smorgasbord of self-appointed moral authorities and attractively packaged ideologies available in our culture today. And they do so even in affluent, pluralist, increasingly secular and apparently ‘post-Christian' countries such as Australia. When some disorienting issue such as cloning or warfare or asylum seekers or same-sex marriage hits our society, its organs of thought and communication still instinctively look to the Church for its views however unfashionable. And whether or not the powers of this world take those opinions seriously, countless millions of ordinary people still do.

Counter culture

The recent controversy over Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ seems to me to be a good example of a rôle religion continues to have in our society. While a fair-minded commentator such as Australian Fr Peter Malone, president of the World Catholic Association for Communication [SIGNIS], commended the film as a considerable achievement of art and faith, many mainstream critics panned it. Charges such as fundamentalist, gratuitously violent and anti-Semitic were thrown around with gay abandon. Ordinary people, on the other hand, are flocking to the film and if the 400 university students with whom I saw it are anything to go by, they are being deeply moved by it.

That I suspect is exactly why there has been such a fuss. What has really annoyed the critics was not anti-Semitism – for the film is not anti-Semitic – but anti-secularism. The film tells Jesus' story with conviction. Its real target, if there is one, is all those uncomfortable with high octane religion.

The Passion challenges any new age rendering of Jesus as a nice guy who pats us a lot but makes no demands. The unsanitised Christ contends with sin, the flesh and the Devil. That's very unfashionable in a culture that has translated sin into a psychological problem or political incorrectness. That sees flesh as something to be indulged or exploited, rather than reverenced and sacrificed. That denies the existence of evil and whose only demons are enemy leaders. A culture that would empty the cross of its power, and substitute something altogether more tame and comfy.

At his trial Christ declares as must every Christian after him: I have come to bear witness to the truth . Such a claim deeply disturbs a modern society more in synch with Pilate's Quid est veritas? Truth, what's that? Though only the truth ultimately satisfies, it can be terribly unsettling. It exposes our unjust structures, institutions and policies; our long-ingrained and firmly-held prejudices; our self-centredness, ideologies and inhumane behaviour. Truth is confronting, disturbing subversive. So much so, we sometimes want to kill it, to flay it alive.

Religious Beliefs

Just as some movie critics find the idea of a film which is both art and worship deeply threatening, so some non-believers find all but the most lukewarm religious beliefs zany, dogmatic, even dangerous. Philip Adams, Australia's evangelical atheist, has on several occasions proclaimed his credo: “I believe that life is totally meaningless and that we have no destiny, no purpose, no author. We just are. For a little while, anyway. Then we aren't.” At five years old, he says, he realized that any other belief is irrational; it took him a little longer to realize that religion is not only pointless but very dangerous. Almost all the wars of the twentieth century, he suggests, were wars of religion. Religion has blood on its hands as thick as that on Gibson's executioners.

Adams is not much of an historian. Jonathan Glover, a professed atheist, in his recent book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, recognised that unlike any century before it, religion played very little part in the great wars and holocausts of the twentieth. Indeed he suggests that “Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading. The evils of religious intolerance, religious persecution and religious wars are well known, but it is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have also come from principled religious commitment.” (p. 405).

Glover argues that an important factor that held some people back from cooperating in the past century's moral catastrophes was religion. He cites as an example Elizabeth Anscombe's heroic protest against the accumulation and use of nuclear weapons and so against the granting of honours to Harry Truman by her University. Her protest was based upon a doctrine of just and unjust war which had deep roots not just in secular philosophy but in Catholic theology (pp. 106-9). He concludes that “The decline of this moral commitment would be a huge loss. If the decline of religion means this, then Jung Chang's worrying thought, that if you have no God your moral code is that of society, might be true.” (p. 405). Without the external critique that religion can be, we become hostages to tribalism, inherited prejudices and social fashions.

Churches, of course, can themselves become such hostages and religions can be used as covers for atrocities really grounded elsewhere. But that a billion-plus people still believe in Catholicism is, on balance, a humanizing and civilising force. They are not all victims of a hoax for those with an intellectual age below five. Their beliefs in a Creator-Redeemer God who loves humanity deeply and wants nothing more for us that our true and lasting happiness, who forgives our mistakes and takes steps to rectify them, is not merely dogma dictated by old men in Rome. Thinking about the universe, human life and each individual's life, and the questions which each of these raises, point towards a faith which goes beyond reason without in any way contradicting it.

I remember when I was about 16 in RE class here at Riverview that a Jesuit priest offered us a short course on the philosophical ‘proofs' of the existence of God. I do not remember, in any detail, what he taught, though it forms part of that Riverview-given mental furniture that I carry around to this day. But I remember so clearly how my mind was enthralled by the intellectual challenge of it, and how my heart thrilled at the thought that my still-evolving faith and ethics were not, and did not need to be, contrary to reason; indeed that my reason might be challenged and completed by the gift of faith.

Some people do not really understand the religious beliefs they reject: it is the god of when they were five years old that they reject. It takes serious theological and philosophical study, after all, to understand beliefs, as opposed to some pop version of them. People would be laughed off the platform if they rejected General Relativity, or evolution, or economic rationalism, or socialism without a thorough and well-studied understanding of the best versions of these things: you need to know something on its own terms before you can rationally reject it. I am convinced that our system of faith and ethics will stand up to any challenges when it is properly articulated. But as one wise prelate has suggested, at the very least we should expect that any Catholic youth who rejected the Catholic religion did so really understanding what he or she was rejecting. That, he thought, was a minimum benchmark for our schools: that if our young people leave the Catholic faith they know what they are leaving!

Religious Practice

Attendances at Mass have fallen; participation in the wider life of the Church has decreased in many areas though not all. Many reasons are given: clerical scandals, remote and irrelevant liturgies, bad preaching and catechesis, the rise of secular cultural alternatives, affluence, the sheer lack of interest in questions of meaning and human destiny in the post-modern world. Whatever of these responses, we can compare the fall in religious practice to the decline in healthy eating and physical exercise, the breakdown of marital and family life, the collapse of the birth rate, low standards of literacy and culture, the paucity of artists and scientists who can really nourish the soul — in all of these fundamental areas of human involvement and human need, practice has slumped even as some other things have improved. Why?

One answer is that the modern obsession with what I want and what I feel actually stops people thinking of themselves as real, fully-rounded persons: we are just bundles of passing opinions and feelings; we have no real structure and integrity, no vision of ourselves, no sense of purpose or destiny. So we tend to think of education, art, family, health, even religion in fairly utilitarian terms: let's get enough to satisfy our needs and wants; there is no more to life than that. Catholicism is a counter-vision to that.

My thought here, then, is that it is not just religious practice that has declined in the decades just past, but much of what we might call human practice. We do not practice being fully human well enough today—and we certainly don't practice what we preach—about life, health, truth, relationships, beauty, religion. To focus education on HSC results and university entry marks, for instance, as I suspect some places do rather too much, is to sell our boys terribly short; it is radically to underestimate their all-round potential under grace. Likewise it sells teachers and parents short, as if they have little more to offer than a 50 point margin on aggregates. We must aspire to much, much more than high marks for those we love. This College, if the truly thrilling numbers of Our Alma Mater are to be believed, is trying precisely to achieve an Ignatian Christian humanism which addresses the whole range of human goods. And this I trust it will continue to do in the future.

How will we know if Riverview is a success in communicating a fully human, Ignatian, Catholic vision? I want to suggest as primary indicators Mass attendance, priestly and religious vocations, and lasting marriage and family formation. Not because I think these things are all that matter: I have already explained why I think there is much more at issue. But because I think that if Riverview boys five or ten or twenty years after leaving school are about average on these indicators odds are the College is having no lasting impact on other important aspects of their lives either. If, on the other hand, the College finds it is making a positive difference with respect to these indicators my guess is that its aspirations for the rest of human and religious formation – in faith, prayer, social doctrine, leadership, bioethics, sexuality, leisure, communication, ecology and the rest – will also be met. To tell ourselves the boys might not practice their religion but are otherwise deeply Catholic is perhaps consoling but also, I suspect, illusory.

Values

The debate of a few weeks ago about parental preferences for private schools that offer values touched on something very important for the future of schools such as Riverview. But talk of ‘values' can sound a little like ice-cream flavours: ‘Which values do you prefer? Which are most to your taste?' Whatever values are—and that's a great philosophical mystery—they are obviously not valuable because you or I choose them or because we want them to be. They are valuable independent of me, independent of my thinking they are valuable. But what has value independent of our thinking?

‘People' is one good answer. The value of a person does not rest on his being valued: it belongs to him, is intrinsic to him, whether others recognize this about him or not. Most people will agree with that — but then feel unsure about what is a person. Is an unborn child a person? A laboratory embryo? A permanently unconscious human? An enemy leader or soldier? A chimp? A computer? Part of a Catholic school's work is to begin opening up young people's minds to these sorts of questions which so perplex the contemporary mind and are likely to do so ever more perplexingly in the years ahead. That's called ethics or values.

Once a student has started on this thinking, many more questions will then open up. What about the activities persons value: are they valuable too? Or the experiences they enjoy: is pleasure valuable, or imagination, or excitement? Are values like friendship more important than pleasure? Is religion more important than wealth? Family than friends? Private satisfaction than public success? Everyone thinks of these questions; but only people with some early ethical training think about them well.

In Ethics After Babel non-believer Jeffrey Stout deplores the “nearly complete breakdown of fruitful dialogue between secular philosophical thought and the religious traditions”, suggesting that this impoverishes both and is the result not only of secular thinkers adopting “tropes and fetishes” that virtually preclude such conversation but also of believers failing to offer anything that might make an educated public sit up and listen. We non-believers, he says, don't need to be told by believers “that Genesis is mythical, that nobody knows much about the historical Jesus, that it's morally imperative to side with the oppressed, or that birth control is morally permissible. The explanation for the eclipse of religious ethics,” he suggests, might very well be that believers “have increasingly given the impression of saying nothing atheists don't already know.” (p. 164) The challenge for a college such as Riverview in the years ahead will be to demonstrate that it has anything to say that the world does not already know.

The Place of Worship and Prayer

Prayer is really the only thing in the world that we can know with absolute certainty works. Next time you find yourself overcome with temptation, or confusion, or anger, or weak-will, or fear: stop; fix your thoughts on Our Lord; and devoutly pray an SOS. The prayer might not always be answered in way we had hoped, but answered it will be.

Believers who do not worship and pray regularly are not true believers. Christians do so throughout the day. Our prayer is that Spirit murmuring in our hearts offering Jesus to the Father: an offering of love and trust, to which the Father always replies with generosity and gentleness. We cannot see anything as God sees it; we certainly cannot see ourselves with any great accuracy. Sensibly, we often hand ourselves over — our bodies or minds or futures — to other people better equipped to look after us; as Christians, we must repeatedly hand ourselves over to God.

People are sometimes embarrassed by worship and prayer. But the strength of a boy who kneels down to pray publicly, knowing he risks being mocked, is awe-inspiring. So public a confession of faith alters him and those who witness him; it haunts the memory, tames selfishness, and shows up violence and ridicule as powerless. Riverview boys who voluntarily come to Mass in a society where Mass-attendance amongst the young is at its lowest in history are truly generous, courageous boys. They are men of large spirit in the making.

How will Riverview of the future encourage worship and prayer? By constantly worshipping and praying. Staff, students and parents need to pray together — at the start of the day, the start of class, before sitting down together for meals, before sleeping. Prayer and worship will above everything else mark out a Catholic school from other excellent, non-religious schools. Just as Jesus did so will this College have to teach people how and when and where and why to pray. More than ever boys and staff and parents will need to be taught the art of that particular kind of time-wasting with God and for ourselves, as our secular society forgets how.

Implications for Life

Students from this college go on to take up major positions in government, business, the professions, the Church, single, married and family life. Outsiders may think they have ‘joined the establishment'. But they have not; and they must not. They are being educated to change the establishment. I have already suggested that schools should never educate just for high grades and well-paying jobs: the boys deserve more than this: it is their integral fulfilment we seek in this life and heaven for them in the next. But such an all-round education is not only good for the boys: it is essential for a society in crying need of evangelisation.

That last word can frighten people. It can sound like fundamentalist missionaries pushing doctrine down the throats of the unwilling. It can sound like the goal of another age. Yet as Pope John Paul II has repeatedly made clear, especially on occasions when addressing audiences of millions of teenagers, this is precisely the Church's hope for the Catholic youth of today. If the best of our Catholic students in the future join the world of work and family and art and politics afraid to speak the name of Christ or embarrassed about going to Mass, then their education will have failed them, the college will not have succeeded.

The future of the Catholic School

A few last thoughts on the future of faith and values as expressed in the life of the Catholic school and especially in this college.

First, Catholic schools must in the future give the teaching of Catholic faith and morals pride of place and minimally take it as seriously as the teaching of literature, art or science. RE teachers will need to be as well-trained and professional or more so than any other teachers. RE will have to be given more or as much classroom time as any other subject and have as high or a higher profile. If we cannot achieve this, we cannot expect people to continue to take seriously our claims to being worthy of government funding and private contributions as a real alternative to the other excellent schools available.

Secondly, this will require that Catholic religion be increasingly visible in our school environment the more invisible it becomes elsewhere in our culture. Our boys will need more than ever to be immersed in a Catholic culture here, marked by signs and symbols, rituals and devotions, the stuff of identity and imagination that sustains us when other things in the world around us might not always be so supportive of our faith.

Thirdly, Catholic schools will need to integrate their various activities such as social activism, community service, leadership skilling and teamwork, arts and sciences, with other aspects of Catholic faith and practice and name them precisely as aspects of that Catholic faith and practice rather than compartments of life distinct from it.

Fourthly, we will have to grow past the hermeneutics of ‘pre-Vatican II' vs ‘post-Vatican II', ‘formal' or ‘institutional' Church vs ‘informal' or ‘community' church, ‘Catholic' vs ‘Christian' or ‘Gospel', ‘College' vs ‘parish' and the like. Such empty dualisms only feed tired old polarisations and make little sense to the new generations so attracted by The Passion of the Christ while so many of their elders and betters bemoan it.

Which brings me back finally to the film of the moment . Everyone will find things in that film that impress them: the tableau of the Pietà, for instance, is burnt permanently into my imagination. Other things we might have done differently. We might have toned it down on places; we might have drawn it out in others; we might have selected differently. But this story should confront us. And such a story must be told by Riverview, one way or another. A story that the world, including its favoured critics, sometimes find threatening. A story that moves young hearts. And breaks them. And changes them.