Apparent a-religiosity among Catholic schools and hospitals was a major sign an authentic reception of the Second Vatican Council had yet to take place in Australia, a leading Australian Catholic intellectual told an international conference last week.
Professor Tracey Rowland, Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Melbourne, delivered a frank assessment of the reception of the Council in Australia at The Great Grace Conference (May 20-23) in Sydney.
During her address, Prof Rowland said the apparent absence of God in the mission statements of many Catholic agencies and institutions was a ‘major sign’ the Council had yet to be embraced in this country.
In many places, ‘bureaucratic secularism’ continued to impede the Council’s reception, she said.
“It is very rare to find a mission statement of a Catholic school or a hospital that actually mentions Jesus Christ, let alone the Trinity,” Prof Rowland said.
“The mission statements of educational institutions typically talk about fostering a sense of community; being inclusive; providing an education for the future; producing the leaders of tomorrow who will care for the welfare of others.
“They could equally be held by any state school or any secular institution. Who doesn’t want to produce graduates who make a positive difference to the lives of others.”
Atheists were capable of doing the same, Prof Rowland said, and were reasonably offended whenever it is suggested that Christians have a monopoly on philanthropy.
“When our mission statements start to say that our institutions exist to foster the humanism of the incarnation; or to produce graduates to participate in the light and love of the Holy Trinity through the agency of the Church, as the universal sacrament of salvation; or, in the case of hospitals, to serve the sick as if they were Christ himself; when, in one institution after another, we acknowledge that our reason for being is to foster a Trinitarian Christo-centric civilisation of love and direct our actions to that end, then the great grace of the Council might have a chance to break through the layers of bureaucratic secularism, which in many places continue to impede its reception,” Prof Rowland said.
In her formal paper, Prof Rowland wrote that Sydney’s Cardinal George Pell had insisted that God be mentioned in the mission statements of Catholic institutions in his archdiocese, and Parramatta Bishop Anthony Fisher OP noted a recent reform in his diocese, to speak of Catholic schools ‘educating the saints of tomorrow’, making it clear a Catholic education is specifically different because of its accent on spiritual formation.