Priest survey reveals more than just feelings …
By Anthony Barich
Analysis
It would seem from a recent independent survey that distrust of “authoritarian” and “out of touch” Church hierarchy and non-belief in core teachings are rampant among a very over-worked Australian clergy.
Charles Sturt University lecturers Chris McGillion and John O’Carroll sent a survey to every priest engaged in parish ministry in Australia – 1,550 in total – plus 160 retired priests. Of these, 542 were returned completed by mid-2009.
They then interviewed about 50 priests “chosen at random” from every State and Territory in the country.
The result is the book Our Fathers: what Australian Catholic priests really think about their lives and the Church, published this year.
While it is true that Australian priests are very hard workers and have a reputation as pastorally compassionate and sensitive, much angst reported by this new survey stems from the 1960s anticipated changes in core teachings – especially those regarding sexuality – that never eventuated.
The study shows that while 90 per cent of respondents said their life as a priest has been fulfilling, “what we discovered was a world rich in commitment but also in complaint, disillusionment and dissent,” McGillion and O’Carroll said in the book.
Twenty-one per cent of respondents disagreed with the statement that priestly celibacy should be optional, while more than half (58 per cent) felt the Vatican exerted “too much control over the Australian Church”.
Nearly three-quarters (70 per cent) said that the Vatican “didn’t always understand the nature of the Australian Church”.
A majority (63 percent) judged that the Australian Bishops were “too conservative in Church matters”, while only 84 per cent agreed that Jesus was born of a virgin, and close to half (40 per cent) held that it was not essential to believe Christ rose bodily from the dead in order to understand the Resurrection.
The survey, however, was not necessarily entirely representative. Including the Eastern rites in communion with the Pope, the current Official Directory of the Catholic Church in Australia says there are 1,948 diocesan priests and 1,137 Religious priests – and these figures do not include the many who have been ordained since across the country. Andrew Hamilton SJ wrote in the Jesuit online journal Eureka Street that, given ambiguities in some statements to which the priests were asked to respond, “I am not convinced that the survey reveals a widespread rejection by priests of Catholic moral positions. The question needs closer and more precise analysis”.
The defining issue from which much of the survey angst stemmed was Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (“Of human life”) on the regulation of birth. Just 19 per cent of the survey’s respondents agreed that it is always a sin for a married couple to use artificial birth control. Australian priests were evenly split on whether it is always a sin for unmarried people to have sex. They were also split on the question of whether practising homosexuals should receive Holy Communion: 36 per cent said they should not while 45 per cent agreed they should.
“There’s no doubt Humanae Vitae was a pivotal, critical moment – it galvanised many people who were struggling with embracing the Church’s teaching,” said Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Julian Porteous, Rector of the Archdiocesan seminary from 2002-2008 and author of After the Heart of God: the Life and Ministry of Priests at the Beginning of the Third Millennium (2009).
Bishop Porteous also noted that priests who have a jaundiced view of the Magisterium weren’t the only ones affected by the events of the 1960s.
“With student uprisings coupled with the ‘sexual revolution,’ priests were naturally caught up in this vortex of doubt and confusion and challenge to authority, and some of them have never quite recovered,” he said.
“They have stayed loyal as priests serving their people but have carried the effects of those times and have adopted an attitude of questioning the Church’s teaching on a number of issues.
“At the same time, there were many priests who went through that period and stood by the Magisterium, believed it was correct, and showed ongoing loyalty to the teachings of Popes John Paul II and later, Benedict XVI.”
Humanae Vitae reiterated traditional Church teaching condemning as immoral the use of birth control, but several Bishops’ conferences around the world – including those of Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the US – issued statements after its publication assuring Catholics that the issue was a matter of conscience.
Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop Peter Elliott, a Pontifical Council for the Family official from 1987-1997, confirmed that the Australian episcopal conference also fell into line with the others in 1974.
“After complaints to Rome, the statement was later corrected, but the damage was already done. The correction received little publicity. Through the secular media, Catholics heard ‘follow your conscience’, a green light for birth control and sterilisation,” Bishop Elliott said in Humanae Vitae: Personal Recollections, published by The Record on 8 April 2009.
He added that using dissent against the papal teaching became an instrument to achieve the radical goals of what Pope Benedict XVI calls ‘the hermeneutic of discontinuity’ or rupture – the belief that Vatican II threw out the past to usher in a kind of ‘new Church’.
Pope Benedict XVI has denounced this line of thought repeatedly. “Unfortunately, in the wake of Humanae Vitae, aggressive dissent seemed to freeze many Catholic leaders,” Bishop Elliott said, while many people did not read what Pope Paul VI taught but relied on “garbled accounts” of his teaching from the secular media.
Dissent reached the highest echelons of the Church. Bishop Elliott said he was effectively expelled from a prominent theological association for his support for Humanae Vitae as an infallible teaching and for not supporting a theologian who rejected the physical Resurrection of Jesus.
Bishop Elliott cited renowned Lateran professor, the late Fr Eremengildo Lio OFM, who argued in Humanae Vitae e Infallibilta (1986) that the encyclical is really an ex cathedra solemn definition, hence infallible. Shortcomings in seminary formation also appear to have played a role in some priests dissenting from or not understanding key Church teachings.
Fr John Walshe, 53, national chairman of the Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy which has 300 members, recalls that while formation methods in seminaries varied, “psychology was almost seen as more important than penance, prayer and discipline of life that had always been the backbone of the formation of a priest”.
These old “ideological hang-ups” do not seem to exist among Australia’s new generation of priests who are more open to the disciplinary ideas of what the Church is trying to teach, Fr Walshe said.
This is baffling the older generation of clergy. For example, in 2009, Canberra-Goulburn Bishop Pat Power said in a column in The Swag, the magazine of the National Council of Priests Australia, that he is “disturbed” by some young seminarians and priests who, “seeing themselves as ‘true believers’, want the Church to revert to pre-Vatican II practices and attitudes”.
Fr Walshe said some older clergy don’t understand this phenomenon and “say the (young priests) are too conservative, but they’re not reacting, they’re searching for something, and when they find something of value that’s good and true they hold onto it”.
Therefore, these young priests have “had to be very bold to stand apart from their peers to respond to the priesthood and they’ll do it on the terms of the Church, which they believe ‘can lead me into true and lasting happiness’,” he said.