Editorial: It’s the family, stupid

The renovation of the Church in Australia will come through the laity. That the Church is in need of renovation cannot really be in any serious doubt. How it will come about is an entirely other affair.
To baldly state the above can, in the Church in today’s Australia, be interpreted as asking for trouble. On the one hand it may be imagined by some that such a statement seeks to sideline or make the witnesses of priesthood and religious life irrelevant – and this in a country which finds it almost impossible to imagine how they could be.
It could also be interpreted as saying that the renovation of the Church cannot be accomplished by priests, bishops and religious and that it can only be accomplished by the lay baptised. The second interpretation begins to approach the truth. However the real truth is no one section of the Church can successfully carry out the the very large task of renovation that is so clearly needed on its own, even if such a thing were possible to organise. The renovation of the Church can only come about through the unity of lay, religious and clergy living their respective vocations to the best of their ability. All are essential.
Nevertheless, what many in the Church appear to miss is that the lay vocation is essential to transforming the Church, in terms of what it is, how it is perceived and how it carries out its divine mission in Australian life.
Statisticians who study the Church and religion are in no doubt as to the trends that have been occurring in Catholic pews for decades. It is transparently clear that the young have been leaving the Church in droves. With relatively rare exceptions the greying of the pews, as the phenomenon has been occasionally referred to, is obvious. Published studies of the experience of the Catholic education process, to take only one example, show quite clearly that the overwhelming majority of all participants are nominal Catholics who are themselves an expression of the increasingly secular nature of our society.
This statement is not to apportion blame or to seek to pick a fight but to state openly what everyone knows to be true. These are excellent people but they are excellent people for whom – in the clear majority – the Catholic Church is hardly relevant in any imaginable sense. Given that the young are overwhelmingly attracted away from the Church and its profound spiritual realities because it does not seem as interesting or relevant in comparison to what a bedazzling culture dominated by affluence, possessions, status, technology and decreasing moral constraints can offer them really also speaks volumes about the experience they leave behind.
The departure of large numbers from the religious faith of generations may or may not be called a crisis. Perhaps a better and more accurate description would be to say that this phenomenon appears to be part and parcel of a wider purification of the Church. However if it is, it is a purification which is also occurring in a post-Christian society characterised by decreasing standards of behaviour towards everyone else, from the unborn up to and including the sick and dying.
The key to the renovation of the Church, the future and to the re-Christianisation of our society – which could quite conceivably take anywhere from 50 to 150 years – is to be found far less in formal programmes of evangelisation and in committee meetings than it is within the intimate confines of the family and of marriage. When this editorial began by saying that the renovation of the Church will come from the laity it meant that until lay Catholics are seeking to seriously live their vocations as family members, as spouses and as contributing members of society the Church will very likely be going nowhere. One can never, of course, predict Providence or seek to limit the action of God, but just as clearly God expects the members of the Church to carry out the work that is their baptismal responsibility according to his plan rather than waiting for Him to part the clouds and do it for us.
Faith is infectious. The young have no-one else in the world in the beginning of their lives to raise, guide and educate them in the most fundamentally important of things than their parents. For too long, the basket case that has become Catholic marriage in Australia today has relied on others, such as Catholic schools, to do its job for it. To successfully raise strong, free and independent children who will not be seduced by the merde that is television or the Internet and the like in Australia, Catholic parents must treat their marriage as if how they live it actually is vitally important. The good news is that as a greater understanding of the reasons for the departure of the young from Catholic family life and from the Church has developed, so have the resources.
One hour a week in an obligatory period of worship or attendance at Mass twice a year is a formula for disaster when it comes to children and families. The first antidote to a post-Christian society’s attempt to seduce our children, our families and our Church, is serious religious commitment from both mother and father, the living witness of their example, the demonstration that parents really do believe in prayer, the constantly demonstrated lesson that to these parents the Church is not an obligation but the happiest part of their lives and that following Christ, as Archbishop Chaput put it so eloquently last week, is not “a private idiosyncrasy that must be prevented from becoming a public nuisance.”
When Catholic marriages start taking their baptismal vows and the vows of marriage seriously, they will be unleashing the greatest force for good ever seen in Australia. It’s that simple.