Because Anzac Day fell on a Sunday, I found myself, at the end of a parish Mass singing Advance Australia Fair.
Reading both verses projected on the screen brought home to me for the first time how impossible it would be for Indigenous members of the community to identify with the text. ‘For those who’ve come across the seas, We’ve boundless plains to share’. But who are ‘We’? Presumably, ‘those who’ve come across the seas’ are the waves of immigrants since World War Two. But what about those who ‘came across the seas’ since 1788 and took possession of those ‘boundless plains’? Are they the ‘We’? I suspect so. But what about those who were here for tens of thousands of years before them and had those lands taken on the basis (terra nullius) that they simply didn’t exist? Can we coopt them into the ‘We’ simply by singing over and over these untrue and largely fatuous lines?
These questions turned my mind to the Plenary Council, a topic and a prospect on which John Warhurst has been providing informed and thoughtful suggestions of late in Eureka Street.
REGAIN TRACTION
There is no question that the Council has lost most of any traction it had in the minds and expectations of Catholics over the past couple of years. The biggest, albeit unmentioned, question among its episcopal promoters must be how to regain that traction to an extent sufficient to allow the meeting to respond at least in some degree to the aims originally set out for it.
My sense is that this will only be the case if a genuinely prophetic element enters into the agenda and if that prophetic call bears not on internal matters – governance, clerical celibacy, and so forth – but on pressing issues of Australia society as a whole. In the wake of the abuse crisis and the Royal Commission, the church will not gain credibility by focusing on itself. It will only win back respect by directing out beyond itself and its more domestic concerns the love – of God and of neighbour – that its Instrumentum Laboris speaks of again and again.
There is one concern that the Catholic community by its very nature is well equipped – indeed essentially equipped – to address. The ‘original sin’ staining the national conscience is the cost inflicted on the original inhabitants to gain possession of ‘those boundless plains to share’. The massacres, lasting well over a century, extending to every state and territory, are well documented; the evidence is uncontestable and digitally accessible for all who care to know. Genocide is not a term to throw around lightly and ought be carefully defined. But there is no doubt that expectations and in some cases hopes for the extinguishment of the indigenous race existed for decades, well into the last century.
No person living today bears guilt for what took place generations ago. Guilt is not the issue. In this sense to speak of an ‘original sin’ is inexact in terms of the classic theology of Original Sin, itself a doctrine sorely in need of credible reformulation.
NATIONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT NEEDED
What is required is national acknowledgment of the cost – the organised massacres, including women and children; the dispossession of land; the break-up of families and communities; the imposition of culture, albeit in some cases with good intentions. We possess our ‘golden soil’ and ‘wealth for toil’ at a terrible cost – a cost not paid by ‘we’ who sing the song but by those the song neither names nor includes.
In more than a dozen places the Instrumentum Laboris does call for conversion; in fact, conversion was the subject of one of the six thematic papers drawn up earlier in the process. But, when one is profiting, as all contemporary Australians are, from a great wrong that has been done, conversion means, at least as a first step, acknowledging the cost. The original cost cannot be repaid but its lingering virulent effects, all too well known, in the indigenous community, can be owned and, in consultation and dialogue, addressed.
Conversion, after all, is central to response to the Gospel, the presupposition for the advance of the reign of God that the Church is tasked to proclaim. If, as the Instrumentum regretfully acknowledges (§47), the sacrament of Reconciliation has fallen into desuetude, that is probably because its totally private focus over recent centuries and its preoccupation with sexual sin have ceased to strike ordinary Catholics, now much more educated, as in any way relevant to the eradication of evil on societal scale.
Yet reconciliation lies at the heart of Christian faith. It is the core business of the Church. God was in Christ, freely reconciling the world to himself (2 Cor 5:18), and the task of the Church is to proclaim that gracious and supremely costly offer to humankind.
LIVING RECONCILIATION
But reconciliation with God is not the end of the process; reconciliation, as made clear in the parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matt 18:21–35), is something the reconciled must live out and pass on. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount instructs the disciples, ‘If you are taking your gift to the altar and remember that your brother or sister has something against you, first go and be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift’ (Matt 5:23–24). We know our indigenous brothers and sisters have something against us. Can we go to our altars and celebrate our liturgies without first attending to that reconciliation or at least committing to do so? Would St Paul say to us, with the same devastating simplicity as he said to the Corinthians in view of similar social neglect, ‘It’s not the Lord’s Supper that you’re celebrating’ (1 Cor 11:20)?
The document does make frequent mention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, acknowledging the antiquity of their existence in the land, the richness of their culture and wisdom, as well as the suffering that has been inflicted upon them by those ignorant of the richness of their culture (§§39–40, 76, 80, 88, 100, 177). A major section towards the end (§§176ff) is headed ‘Renewing Our Solidarity with First Australians and All Those on the Margins’. The document goes on to quote at length Pope John Paul II’s address at Alice Springs in 1986, which still reads tellingly today. But one may question whether lumping indigenous people together with other marginalised groups as a problem to be attended to is respectful of their unique status.
At this point (§178) the document offers a promising, albeit tentative, suggestion:
‘Despite a range of successful initiatives with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by some dioceses, religious institutes and Church agencies, the Plenary Council may prioritise the question of how the Church can include and empower First Peoples to take their place more fully within Church and society’.
It is not clear to me how the two parts of this statement hang together – how the ‘range of successful initiatives’ might somehow make unnecessary the need for the Council ‘to prioritise the question’. But at least the suggestion that the issue might become a priority for the Council is a significant admission – as is the further statement (§179) that the Council ‘is an opportunity for the Catholic Church in Australian to make a public response to the (Uluru) Statement from the Heart, which called for … ‘a process of agreement–making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’’.
TRUTH-TELLING IS ESSENTIAL
‘Truth-telling’ is surely the essence of the matter, as it was in South Africa, Rwanda, and other instances of significant reconciliation. The Church has not found it easy to accept the truth brought home to us by the Royal Commission. Yet the Church constantly hears the Gospel reminder, ‘You will know the truth and the truth will make you free’ (John 8:32). Of all institutions, the Church should be the first to acknowledge the painful truth about the conquest and occupation of the ‘boundless plains’, especially who paid the cost. The Church that venerates the cost paid by Jesus in bringing divine reconciliation to the world is well equipped to take up the prophetic task of bringing home this truth to the wider society of our land.
There are reiterated calls towards the end of the document for boldness and courage, for speaking out with parresia – a further Johannine term (§§163, 197). The faithful are invited ‘to live fully the implications of their baptism in all dimensions of their lives … so that they might more effectively share in Christ’s priestly, prophetic and kingly office in the Church and in the world’ (§86). Of that triad – prophet, priest, and king – one tends to hear a lot more about the priestly and kingly than the prophetic. Yet if the Plenary Council is not prepared seriously to take up the prophetic dimension of Christian life, then it will itself be settling for the ‘life of mediocrity’ that, in the words of John Paul II, it deplores (§86).
‘Prioritising’ the question of ‘how the Church can… empower First Peoples’ (§178) will mean including it among four major issues that the Council must address if it is to have any credibility both within itself and in Australian society as a whole. I would list these as
- repentance for the legacy of clergy sexual abuse;
- the situation of women in church and society (including domestic violence);
- the environmental crisis;
- and, as addressed here, truth-telling about the original occupation of the land.
MAJOR AGENDA ITEM
The Council must be prepared to make hearing from those entitled to speak on these issues major items on the agenda, relegating more ‘domestic’ matters to secondary status.
Yes, in each case but especially in the last, it will be controversial and divisive. But that has always been the way of the prophetic from Amos and Jeremiah, to Jesus and beyond. To quote Paul again, ‘Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine’ (1 Cor 11:19). But at least controversy will stir interest and give hope of dispelling the apathy currently threatening to frustrate the enterprise as a whole. It may even help the Church regain some of the credibility that has been lost in spades in recent years.
Image: Preparation for an Aboriginal Smoking Ceremony – Getty Images