Church Alive!: Pilgrimages in Faith, 1956-2006

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Church ALIVE!

Emeritus Professor GREG DENING is a world-renowned scholar in his chosen field of research and writing: the encounter between indigenous and settler societies. From his first seminal book, Islands and Beaches (1980), to his most recent, Beach Crossings (2004), he has had a global reputation in cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary scholarly writing. All his books are in the great libraries of the world and are featured in postgraduate studies across the USA, the UK and Europe. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992) was published by the History Book of the Month Club. Performances (1996) is much used in postgraduate courses and The Death of William Gooch (1996) is counted as a cross-cultural murder mystery written in near poetical prose.

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Church

ALIVE!

Pi lg ri ma ges in faith 1956–2006

GREG DENING

UNSW PRESS

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A Poet’s Prayer O God, who by the spirit in our hearts dost lead us to desire Thy perfection, to seek for truth, and to rejoice in beauty; illumine, we pray Thee, and inspire all thinkers, writers, artists and craftsmen; that in whatsoever is true and pure and lovely, Thy name may be hallowed and Thy kingdom come on earth. Lord, hear us. Direct and bless, we beseech Thee, O Lord, those who speak where many listen, and write what many read; that they may do their part in making the heart of the people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous. Lord, hear us. P HILIP J OHN TALBOT M ARTIN P OET

AND

PARISHIONER

28 M ARCH 1931–18 O CTOBER 2005

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A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © Provincial of the Society of Jesus in Australia 2006 First published 2006 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Dening, Greg, 1931– . Church alive!: pilgrimages in faith, 1956–2006. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 843 3. 1. St. Mary’s Parish (North Sydney, N.S.W.) - History. 2. St. Francis Xavier’s Church (Lavender Bay, N.S.W.) History. 3. Star of the Sea Church (Milsons Point, N.S.W.) - History. 4. Catholics - New South Wales - History. 5. New South Wales - Church history. I. Title. 282.9441 Design Di Quick and Ruth Pidd Front cover image The Bridge from North Sydney, 1939, by Roland Wakelin. Courtesy of Judith Murray, Leslie Walton. Back cover image Tuhbowgule Nangamay, Sydney Harbour Dreaming, by Deborah Lennis of the D’harawal people. Printer Everbest, China

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Contents A Prefatory Note 9 Prologue: The Spirit at Work 11 1 Living History 23 2 Triumph 1956 40 Reflection: On Religious Change 63 3 Hopefulness 77 Mystery 90 4 Breaking Bread 101 Believing 117 5 Word and Song 128 Celebrating 146

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6 New Church, New Priest 158 Priestliness 178 7 The Christ and Women 192 Calling 209 8 The Prophetic Imagination 224 Ministering 237 Epilogue: Pilgrim Parish 252 Acknowledgments 254 Notes 257 Notes on the artwork by Anne Kearney 270 Bibliography 276 Index 286

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A prefatory note Vatican Council II (1962–1965) brought an aggiornamento – a renewal – into the Catholic Church. This living history of three Jesuit parish churches on the North Shore of Sydney Harbour is a story of the hope and pain in that renewal. Church Alive! is a living history because it is, on my part, an ethnographic description of religious experience in times of change, 1956–2006. But it is living, too, in another way. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words/and nothing’s true that figures in words only, the poet Les Murray has written. You will find the hope and pain of the Church’s renewal dreamed out in words in the word pictures of many parishioners who describe their religious experiences as they are – not as they should be or as they are told they should be. As they are! Those word pictures are to be found as Mystery, Believing, Celebrating, Priestliness, Calling and Ministering. There are living images as well as living words in Church Alive! Anne Kearney, a parishioner and an artist who has exhibited in oils, pastels, collage and ceramics for over 20 years, and who is also qualified in Systematic Theology, undertook to take an unmapped journey of considerable risk and insecurity by providing her own creations to introduce our essays on sacred space and sacred time and the word pictures. I thank Anne and all the others for being willing to join me in writing a different sort of history, one informed by hope and love as much as science and art. By agreement, the word pictures are individually unnamed. The names of their authors are to be found in the Acknowledgments.

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Prologue

The spirit at work

Pentecost They come down from the mountain in a daze. They realise that the Lord has gone from them in a physical sense, that his appearances – ophte is the word they use, a word their Scriptures use exclusively for the ways Yahweh ‘made himself seen’ to Abraham and Moses – are as much a way of understanding as seeing. There is much to be understood. First, they must understand that a Spirit will support them in their ministry. Their ordinary human presumptions will have to be watched. They know somehow that these momentous days in their lives between a Passover that gave them a frightening freedom and Shavu’ot, The Feast of Weeks, when Israel celebrates the Covenant it made with Yahweh at Sinai, have been 40 days and more of their own pilgrimage – their own journey in the desert. ‘Go to Jerusalem’, they are told. Jerusalem isn’t far. It’s a ‘Sabbath walk’, Luke tells those readers who don’t know Jerusalem, just a mile or so, two kilometres. The traveller moves down through the rocky burial sites on the Mount of Olives, across the Kedron, with a glance to Gethsemane with its terrible memories of cowardice and betrayal, and around the Temple. Then she or he continues nervously past Caiphas’ Palace, past the memorial to David that Herod had created to assuage his guilt for having tried to rob the King’s Tomb (Peter would refer to it in his first sermon, reminding the Jews of Jesus’ royal lineage.) Finally, to the ‘Upper Room’.

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The Upper Room, Hyperion, probably belonged to Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a man of means. It was their meeting place of prayer and reflection. It will be their first synagogue, their first church. The room is large and equipped for prayer. There would have been a niche that acted as a library for their sacred texts. At this time, that niche was oriented to the north and the Temple. When it was rebuilt by Jewish Christians after the Romans had destroyed all of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the niche was oriented to the north-west, to the empty tomb and the site of the Lord’s Resurrection, a symbol of the new sacred spaces and sacred times of a new covenant. The Upper Room was on the edge of an Essene encampment on the south-west slope of Mt Sion. ‘Camp’ is their word. They are the spiritual purists of Israel. They live life with all the laws of hygiene and food as if they were still in Exodus. There is an air of intensity and fervour in this camp, of Torah debate and interpretation, of prophecy and history. We see much of it in their library, which has survived in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The city itself is intense. This Passover has been like no other. The Roman occupation lies heavily on it, mocking the insurgencies all around by crucifying ‘The King of the Jews’. Pilgrims from all over Israel and the known world are in Jerusalem to prepare for Shavu’ot. There are Jews in all their spiritual and political genres – Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes – and proselytes, and pagan converts who bring their own brand of intensity. They are all in reflective retreat. That is the chief demand in preparation for Shavu’ot. Prayer and reading sacred histories. The Upper Room is full of memories for this band of Eleven coming down from the Mount of Olives. The Lord had his Last Supper there with them. They gathered there in terror after the crucifixion. They interviewed the women telling them, in near delirious words, the story of the empty tomb. Thomas had tested his doubts there. They had heard of the bloody death of Judas Iscariot there, and the details of his 30 pieces of silver in betrayal. The Eleven make themselves Twelve again. They throw stones or die on the floor and let the Lord choose Mathias by lot. They are searching for signs and are certain that they will find them. Their numbers are growing all the time. In the end, there will be a 120 in the Upper Room, or, as Luke might be telling us, as large a number as would be representative of the twelve tribes of Israel. In any case there had been 72 disciples in Galilee who had gone out two by two on their ministry and we can name at least 30.

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There was Mary, the Mother of Jesus. If she had been a young woman of 15 or 16 at Jesus’ birth, she is 45 or 50 now, her face no doubt lined and the pain of these last days deep in her eyes. Her family is around her: Jesus’ brothers, Jude and James, and his cousins from the brother of his father, Joseph. The Eleven, now Twelve again, are prominent. They are there with their wives and children, if they had them. Peter, Andrew and James certainly did. Women are strong and prominent in this birth of the church, as are the married and the celibate. First, the women who ‘saw’ him – ‘saw’ as in a piercing, understanding look – and bore witness to his rising. There were the ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ who had wept for him. There were slave girls from Peter’s mother-in-law’s household. There were women of high rank, such as Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s servant. There was Mary Magdalene, and probably Martha. And the mother of the sons of Zebedee. We have to think that men and women were in nearly equal numbers. And there were Pharisees, like Nicodemus. Sadducees like Joseph of Arimathea. There were Hellenised Jews, like Stephen, Procurus and Nicanor. There were acculturated Greeks, like Simon of Cyrene. In these days, the Upper Room is full of stories. ‘Remember when …’ We have them still, sculpted, honed, steeped with inner meaning in the gospels. They scour the Scriptures, especially the prophets, Isaiah and Joel, looking for understanding of the present in the inspirations of the past. They pray in their Jewish manner. But the Lord has taught them a new prayer, too – ‘Our Father …’ And in their anticipation that the Kingdom to come would be soon, they would have moved easily into the phrase that swept the early churches, ‘Marantha tha’, ‘Lord, come’. And they sing. They sing the Psalter primarily. Psalms of praise; psalms of lament. Surely in this preparation for Shavu’ot, they sing Psalm 78: ‘Listen to this Law, my people, pay attention to what I say; I am going to speak to you in parable and expound the mysteries of the past’ (Psalm 78: 1–2). And the oldest of all the psalms, Psalm 90: ‘Lord, you have been our refuge age after age … Teach us to count how few days we have and so gain wisdom of the heart’ (Psalm 90: 1, 12). They are beginning to sing new songs, too – the Song of Mary: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’; the Song of Zachariah: ‘Blessed be the Lord, God of Israel for he has visited his people, he has come to their rescue’; the Song of the Angels: ‘Glory to God in the highest’; and Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis: ‘Now,

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Master, you can let your servant go in peace, just as you promised; because my eyes have seen the salvation which you have prepared all nations to see, a light to enlighten the pagans and the glory of your people Israel’ (Luke 1: 46–55, 68–79; 2: 14, 29–32). They sing. They read the prophets. They pray in old ways and new. In their new prayer, they pray to the Father, ‘give us our daily bread’. That word ‘daily’ is an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek word epiousios, and is nowhere else to be found in ancient Greek literature. It is a word they must invent to describe a new sort of bread, the breaking of which was a sign of the presence of the Lord among them. It was a special sort of memory. It bound them in koinonia, fellowship, and communion. The bread they offered in sacrifice at Shavu’ot (in distinction to the sheafs of cereal they had offered at Passover) was now a sign of a special sacrifice that makes them one mind. It is epiousios: eucharistic. There is a moment in communal action when song, rhythmic gesture and movement, words reflectively heard, personal witnessing of ‘seeing’, and chanted mantra act as a catalyst that frees the spirit. There was a moment on the fiftieth day after the most dramatic Passover in their lives that these men and women, married and single, disciples and apostles, Jew and Greek, slave girls and wealthy, doubters and believers, knew themselves as the people of God. They burst with desire to proclaim what they now understood and saw in each other’s eyes. ‘You are drunk’, observers said. ‘Before 9 a.m.?’ challenged Peter. No. It was Pentecost. They thought they heard a rush of wind. Such a wind came at those many moments in Israel’s history when the divine met the human. They saw the fire that had flashed in the cloud when Yahweh revealed the Law, and, in the faces around them, they saw the blaze that Moses had to veil when he finally understood what Yahweh wanted of him. They heard the meaning, saw the faith, grasped the truth behind words spoken in all accents and dialects. They knew, as it was promised, that the Spirit was upon them. They were the people of God. Their mission was to preach the Word to the ends of the earth. That is how the Spirit works. Sacramentally. In signs of communion that are communion. In songs that lament or praise or love. In the whole body’s movements. In words that float with meanings from age to age, from tongue to tongue. In metaphors that are always alive. In mysterious signs. In bolts of light. In doubt and certainty. In fear and courage. In spaces that are as small as an Upper Room and as large as the universe. In

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times always changing, always the same. In stories that have no closure. That is true, it seem to me, of this First and Pentecostal Church.

Vatican II The purple, black and red procession of nearly 3000 mitred and coped bishops takes two hours to file into St Peter’s. They don’t come down from a mountain, actually. More likely they come down from the small hills of their dioceses, where they each feel they can hear what God has to say without much consultation about what He (Yes! ‘He’) is saying. The plain on which they gather at the foot of this particular Sinai – the dome of St Peter’s – is two long lines of 12-tiered bleachers. When things settle after this momentous day, 11 October 1962, they will find themselves in numbered seats, ordered principally according to the date of their ordination as bishop. (That is a work of the Spirit that they will have to get used to after Vatican II. They are no longer ‘consecrated’ as bishops. They are ‘ordained’.) They will remember the number of their seats – say, 878, 791, 670, 630 – for the four autumn sessions of the years, 1962 to 1965. In those seats they belonged to a Church Alive! as it had never been in their spiritual lifetimes. They file into a Babel – Plymouth beside Pernambuco, Melbourne beside Madagascar, and Hiroshima beside Hobart. Yellow, black, brown and ruddy faces far outnumber white. They come from the extremes of the earth. Ironically, they will return to their homes confident that this Babel had been a Pentecost. They will go home knowing that their tongues, whether Swami or Tahitian, Aranda or Mandarin, are tongues of fire. They are tongues of a graced and inspirited human nature, finding expression of the Spirit’s work in diversity. But the miracle of this Pentecost will be that in the midst of this global glossolalia they will come to a common understanding of their living Church. The procession into St Peter’s ended with a rotund man seated uncomfortably in the sedia gestatoria, the pope-mobile of an earlier, more triumphalist Church. Twelve palafrenieri in red uniforms carried him aloft. This 81-year-old man is Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII. He is dressed up, as he said of himself, ‘like a Persian satrap’. He refuses to let them take him in the sedia gestatoria past the doors of St Peter’s. There he descends. Then, in an eager shuffling sort of trot, he moves along the whole length of the bleachers. These 2908 bishops know from his face, his body movements, and his whole demeanour that here indeed is graced human nature, eccentric,

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ordinary, energised by love. They know that, as he intones ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ – ‘Come, Creator Spirit, Possess our souls’ – and as they join him, that this occasion is more momentous than they had thought. As the bishops turned from the mass that followed to the first procedures of their Council, they witnessed a gesture that would give them focus every morning of their four years of meetings. The Book of the Gospels was solemnly, prayerfully, enthroned before them. This first morning, the rite of that enthronement was Roman. But in the mornings that followed, all the rites would have their theatre. So the Word in His histories, and in the interpretive understandings of early witnesses, would be danced or sung or flourished down that long aisle between the bleachers. They would know, if they did not know already, that a sign to be sacramental, to effect what it signifies, is a thing of colour, of smell, of raw air, water and fire. If emptied, by rote or by rubric, of immediacy, it is dead. When John gave his opening address, the hours had been long, and the strain of listening to so much Latin a little overwhelming. For many, the magic of his words only came alive when they returned to them reflectively, or when they were dramatised for them by the media reports, or when they made history for themselves of that first day over dinner or in the innumerable small group meetings that began immediately. Many said that the Spirit worked on them not so much at St Peter’s, but as they sat on the steps of their pensions and talked of their experiences, while Roman life bubbled around them in the cafes and shops, and in the talk over their heads from windows and balconies. They heard John say, they remarked to one another, things they themselves had thought but never dared to utter. Hope began when they read or heard others say something that they themselves were about to say. The winds of change blew more turbulently than the creative breath of the Spirit on those new beginnings. Three years after his election, John knew that he was caged in his papacy. He was given an insight into that even on this day of his triumph. Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican organ of information, threw, into the report of his speech, phrases he’d never spoken and de-radicalised his message. Nothing trivial could be changed, it seemed, because so many small people had so much invested in the status quo. No grand gesture could be made, because there was no audience free enough to see and understand. Those in control were always scrambling his means of communication. Those who had other meanings for his words were always filtering them. He himself had thought that his most creative act as Peter’s

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heir had been to announce an ‘Ecumenical Council’. He used the word ‘ecumenical’ in its broadest sense. His Council would not just be of the Roman church, but as far as he could manage it, of all the baptised. Those who caged him in, the Curia and all the relics of Pius XII’s 19-year reign, were surprised at his announcement but were confident that they could manage whatever the Council brought forward, and that John’s age would defeat him. They misjudged his intuitive insight into how the Spirit might work in a Church alive. John knew that he did not have much time. He would learn, almost as the Council began, that the cancer that had taken so many of his family had him in its grip. Expediency ruled. He urged the Curia, under the Secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (1890–1979) to prepare the schema – the discursive documents for discussion – as quickly as possible. It would take three years, they said. ‘Do it in two’, he replied. John knew what Ottaviani’s personal motto was and meant: ‘Semper Idem’, ‘Always the Same’. The four documents, ‘The Sources of Revelation’, ‘The Moral Order’, ‘The Deposit of Faith’ and ‘The Family’ were certainly semper idem. But John had one great insight that he knew to be infallibly true. The Spirit was a Spirit of freedom, and freedom was always revolutionary. John called his freedom movement, aggiornamento. Its usual translation, is ‘renewal’, ‘bringing up to date’, ‘growth’. But this doesn’t have the sparkle that was his meaning. A ‘refreshment’ maybe. A bracing plunge into cool spring water after some hot desert journey. Or if John had read Emile Durkheim – maybe he did – an ‘effervescence’, a bubbling up of life, a Pentecostal happening. That there was life to bubble up, John knew quite well, just as he knew, as pope in the Vatican, he had been cut off from it. The Church alive was blessed with as brilliant an array of scholars and thinkers as had ever been together since the high middle ages. It is a litany of brilliance – Gregory Baum, Yves Congar, Joseph Gelineau, Bernard Häring, Josef Jungmann, Hans Küng, Henri de Lubac, John Courtney Murray, Gerard Philips, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean-Marie Tillard, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Their knowledge and wisdom had seeded every seminary and Catholic university, every theological, liturgical, ecumenical, catechetic, moral, social justice, sacred music, literary and artistic movement of the Church. The 2908 bishops knew where that life was and would bring it here to Rome.

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The bishops would bring their pastoral experience to Rome, too – of horrendous violence, of the disappearance of faith, of sacrament and sign inextricably mixed with colonising power, of poor ravaged by church and state, of devotions decaying into magic. They knew of dead liturgies, scandal, the inability to confront the world’s evils with anything but an empty morality by the reduction of sin, in the Church’s eyes, to the bedroom. The Spirit is always at work, but not always marvellously. Rather, in minute, ordinary ways. In fact, some of the Council Fathers, as they began to be called, thought the first inspiration occurred when the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Norman Gilroy, no theological giant, rang his bell and called ‘Satis’, ‘Enough’ to a speaker who had overrun his allotted ten minutes. Many ‘interventions’, as speeches were called, became much more focused after that, and occasionally some colossus was cut down. There was something, however, that was counted marvellous, even miraculous. It was a procedural motion by the blind archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Joseph Frings (1887–1978). The Council itself, he recommended, should control the agenda of the Council, not the Curia, not those who had made the original schema. Let the bishops meet in their regional and linguistic clusters to discuss issues and educate themselves through the hundreds of experts who had come from afar or were in the various institutions of Rome. He was a hero for that, as was Bishop Emile-Joseph de Smedt of Bruges, who denounced the schema presented by the Curia as near sinful – with the sins of triumphalism, juridicism and clericalism. Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens (1904–1996), archbishop of Michelin and Brussels was another hero. He was an ardent defender of freedom of speech. They were in dialogue, he said, with the faithful, our separated brethren and the world. More importantly, he was the direct line between that scholarly and pastoral world beyond Rome and John. The Spirit worked, if not marvellously, then mysteriously. The Council proceedings were too voluminous to digest. The bishops needed its many dimensions reduced to story in some way, so that they could be understood. The world’s secular press did that. NBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, Time, each sent reporters. Time Magazine could be seen passing along the bleachers every Tuesday morning. But more importantly and more directly the theological experts (the periti) and the teams of episcopal assistants were delivering informed commentaries to the various national presses and a myriad of diocesan and regional papers. Australia was well served. The Advocate in

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Melbourne was being edited by Michael Costigan, who had been an assistant to the Coadjutor Archbishop of Melbourne, Justin Symonds. The Madonna, the Australian Jesuit journal edited by ‘Herbie’ Wilkins, SJ, published in full probably the most significant and influential document prior to the Council: the Pastoral Letter of the Bishops of the Netherlands. It also printed pieces by the most creative of the speakers at the Council on religious liberty, liturgical change and ecumenism. The secular press was reading the Council through leaked documents, liaisons with experts and participants, and by attending constant briefings and seminars. The story it told often reduced the Council to one of conflict and polarity. That’s all right. Many a Council Father said that one of their great discoveries was that the Spirit worked through conflict. There was no one who would not say that the greatest hero of all was John. In a second breath, they would point to Cardinal Giovanni Batista Antonio Maria Montini who became Pope Paul VI after John XXIII’s death. John set them free, the Council fathers would say. He saved them from the disastrous failure of their hopes. When the debate on the Curia’s document, ‘The Sources of Revelation’, dragged on – there were nearly 700 interventions on it and a majority supported its conservative impulse – the final vote (accompanied by wild cheering by these mitred conservative men), was reversed by John. He sent them all away to write a document on the Church, pointing them towards the wealth of modern learning and pastoral experience. Gaudium et Spes ( Joy and Hope), describing the Church as mystery more than as triumph, as the people of God more than pyramidal hierarchy, as in pursuit of holiness more than obedient to laws, would be the Council document that would come out of the freedom John had returned to them. The liberal minority cheered just as wildly from their bleachers when news came of John’s reversal of the vote. John was a man of faith. His death was witness to that, as he gave his soul to his maker. He was disappointed that he would not see here on earth the end of what he had begun. He had not let his people slip into that ineffable weariness that comes from endless debate. He told them to talk to their nearest pastoral experience, their liturgy. He urged them to profit by all that they had learned of worship in the modern world. He knew, by the time of his dying, that his one great, holy ambition for his bishops had been fulfilled. The Spirit had breathed on them. They would thank their God, give praise, beg mercy, and find Christ present among them with one voice in a thousand tongues.

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When all those who experienced the four assemblies through 1962 to 1965 are asked what it is they remember most, they tend to say that first day, 11 October 1962, when John opened the Council, and that last day, 8 December 1965, when Paul VI closed it. That first day had two events: John’s opening address, and then that evening when tens of thousands had gathered in St Peter’s Square beneath his window. At the centre of the crowd stood a human cross of young people, dressed in white, carrying flaming torches. They chanted and sang, urging John to come to his window and speak to them. He did. He stood at his window as their father and pastor, talking about what he thought had happened that day. He blessed them and said in parting: ‘Go home and give your children a hug and tell them that it is from the Holy Father!’ They had never heard a pope speak in that way. On the last day, 8 December 1965, Paul VI and the Patriarch of Constantinople embraced one another in an emotional ending of the schism that had begun with the Papal Bull of 1054. In this, each wiped out the anathemas the churches had poured on one another through 1500 years. Paul spoke to the 100 000 people that crowded St Peter’s Square, calling for ecumenical dialogue. In reply, 100 000 voices sang as one, in dozens of languages, the words and probably the music of the Lutheran minister of Ellenberg in Saxony, Martin Rinckart (1586–1649): Now thank we all our God. With heart, and hands, and voices, Who wondrous things hath done, In whom his world rejoices; Who from our mother’s arms Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, And still is ours today. Surely in that welling unified voice, there was the sound of a rushing wind, and those flaming torches looked like tongues of fire. In Gaudium et Spes, the Spirit had inspired the Council Fathers to say: ‘The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human

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fails to find an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community of people united in Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit in their pilgrimage towards the Father’s kingdom, bearers of a message of salvation for all of humanity. That is why they cherish a feeling of deep solidarity with the human race and its history.’ Women, who were so prominent in the birth of the Church in the Upper Room, were absent from this new Pentecost under the dome of St Peter’s. Some few seats were given to them as observers in the third and fourth sessions, but not even a flicker of tongues of fire came their way in these assemblies of the people of God. The Spirit had much more work to do, many believed, when Vatican II ended. If the Church was a mystery, as Gaudium et Spes had proclaimed, there was nothing mysterious about power wrongly exercised in institutions, whether they be secular or sacred. It would be wrong to say that hope died when Vatican II ended. Church Alive! is a story of hope that Vatican II seeded in many hearts. But, yes, elation waned and confusion grew. The People of God were largely uneducated to the changes that the Council Fathers had imposed. Their priests were nearly as uneducated as they and, worse, were reluctant or unable to enter the theatre of worship that their reformed liturgy seemed to demand. For those who had found their Catholic identity in the hard things that their faith demanded of them, it was difficult not to ask questions such as: what did those who were in Hell for eating meat on Fridays think now? For those whose lives had been ordered by the talk of sin and the arithmetic of their confessed sins, it was difficult to know what a conscience might now demand of them. For those married, who knew that being in one flesh was something more than conceiving children, Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 forbidding birth control of any sort shook their confidence in the magisterial voice of the Church. They knew that their consciences had broader reaches and could be trusted. Freed of their sense of sinfulness, as they had been accustomed to see it, they threw off many of the Church’s old shackles and came back to its sacraments with a new sense of freedom, maturity and hope. That story of freedom, hope, and of a new prophetic imagination is their living history.

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

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Living history A friend of 60 years, Peter Quin, SJ, asked me if I would write a sesquicentenary history of the Jesuit parishes of the North Shore of Sydney Harbour. ‘Wallumetta’, The First People would have called it, ‘The Other Side’. I am not a Sydney man. Perth and Melbourne are my hometowns. And, as an historian, I am not inclined to engage in celebrating the metric moments of institutions. ‘You had better see what sort of history I would write before you really ask me’, I said to Peter, then parish priest of the three Jesuit churches of the North Shore: St Mary’s (North Sydney), St Francis Xavier’s (Lavender Bay) and Star of the Sea (Kirribilli). So we went to Sydney, my wife Donna and I, and were accommodated comfortably, if monastically, in an apartment attached to the mansion of one of the pioneer families, which the Jesuits had acquired as a presbytery and parish centre at Lavender Bay. The corporate skyscrapers of the North Sydney central business district cast long shadows over Lavender Bay, especially when the winter sun goes north. Regrettably, the Word you see, as you look heavenward is Zurich, Optus and Philips. The spire of St Francis Xavier’s, proudly the highest marker on the North Shore 125 years ago, looks puny in the shadow of these materialist giants. But we knew we would stay for the years it would take to write a history, when we heard an old familiar sound in unfamiliar circumstances. It was three peals of the bells of St Francis Xavier’s at noon. Then three more peals. And another three. It was the ringing of the Angelus. ‘The Angel

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of the Lord declared unto Mary.’ ‘And she conceived of the Holy Ghost.’ ‘Hail Mary …’ ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ ‘Be it done unto me according to thy Word.’ ‘Hail Mary …’ ‘And the Word was made flesh.’ ‘And dwelt among us.’ ‘Hail Mary …’ The bells proclaimed a different sort of Word, we had to think. The Angelus rang a nostalgic note in our hearts. We remembered how we used to recite it at six in the mornings and evenings, and at noon. I felt mortified that I stumbled on its words. But I knew where I would find them. They would be in a small book, Alter Christus (Another Christ), given to us schoolboys more than 60 years ago by our Jesuit educators. I went to Alter Christus. The words of the Angelus were there, of course, together with all the prayers and devotions that a young boy aspiring to be another Christ would need: Memorare (‘Remember, O most loving Virgin Mary that never was it known in any age, that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession, was abandoned …’); Soul of Christ (‘Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Blood of Christ inebriate me.’); Take and Receive (Take, O Lord, and receive my whole liberty, my memory, my understanding, my whole will, whatever I have and possess. Thou has given me all these …’). Memories flooded back. Sad memories of guilt and scruple. Memories that made me ask: ‘Was that truly me?’ But thousands of joyful memories, too. Moments of discernment, of elevated vision, occasionally of a little breathless love. Why should I laugh at that in myself or in anyone else? Why should I turn it upside down and say it was the effect of something else? Of Freudian capers? Of Jungian mysticism? Of class self-interest? I have said to myself and to anyone who would ask, that I would like to describe religious experience as it is, not in terms of something else. Here was my chance. I would write a living history of religious experience on this North Shore. I would write a history responding to all the demands that a global discipline of the twenty-first century makes of its professionals, but suffused with the understanding that being a believer brings. I am not the mirror to all believers, though. They need not see themselves in me. I would need to find other experiences, other voices. A living history will always be of the actual, not hypothetical or the rhetorical, even if it is idealistic. Of the actual, I would need to persuade others to write me word-pictures of their believing selves. You’ll find these word-pictures in the text to follow. I am grateful that so many of the people of God of the North Shore entrusted their innermost thoughts to us.

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As we joined the small crowd of young men and women coming down for the noontime mass from those buildings called Zurich, Optus and Philips, we wondered what we shared with them – we who said the Angelus and prayed with all the paraphernalia of another time many years ago, we who worship now with them in such changed ways, we who believe without need of marvels, we who hope without real certainty, we who say our creeds selectively, we who have made sacred time and sacred space in so many different ways in the decades of our lives. ‘Yes’, I said to Peter Quin, ‘I will write your history, but it will be a living history. I’ll play the anthropologist as much as historian. And it won’t be so much a sesquicentenary history as a description of religious experience in times of great change within the living memory of many, the last 50 years of that sesquicentenary.’ Anthropologists observe with their cultural antennae fully extended. Movement and gesture, stillness and space, smell and sound, colour and texture, time passing and time frozen – all the sensibilities that make culture talk and a living story belong to the anthropologist’s observations. Historians read with passion. All the books, certainly, but more exhaustively the thousands of pieces of papers where the young and the old, the male and the female, the suffering and the joyful, have let their souls flow on to them in some way through their pens and pencils. The present in the past is scratched and scribbled on to paper, sometimes with an eye to the future, but more ordinarily in the instantaneity of the moment. History comes out of that moment, any historian will tell you. All history is living in the sense that it is written in and for the times of its creation. I wrote Church Alive! in the years 2003–2006. I wrote my history under the influence of all the movements in scholarly knowledge, secular and religious, of all the movements in literature and art that shape our times. More relevantly, the theatre of John Paul II’s dying and funeral, and the election of his successor, Benedict XVI, is part of these years. John Paul’s pontificate was brilliant in all ways save one. He left the administration of the Church in the hands of those who did not believe in the changes that Vatican Council II had brought to the Church, and who have done everything in their power to offset these changes. We have archbishops who say to their priests in conference that they are ‘at variance’ with Vatican II’s declarations on the Eucharist. As the people of God struggle to discover Christ’s presence in all aspects of their lives, they want to return Christ to the loneliness of the tabernacle.

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There can sometimes be more pain than triumph in a living history. But then again this living history is written in hopefulness. That hopefulness is born of recognising the prophetic imagination of the people of God. Whether they have prayed in Latin or in their native tongues, whether they have been confined in the arithmetic of their sinfulness or flown with the freedom the Spirit has given their consciences, they seek to change the world a little by infusing it with the love they believe Christ has given them. It has been an honour and a privilege to be with the people of God of the North Shore as they have lived out their hopefulness in so many ways through their 150 years.

Names, Places, Times So, I have a story to tell. It is a story of believing, hoping, loving and worshipping through 150 years, 1856 to 2006, in three churches on what we have come to know as the North Shore of Sydney Harbour. My story might seem to be nicely localised in space and periodised in time. But there is little that is really local in local history. A church, a world, a nation, a colony/state, and a city all impinge on these three churches. And what historian can say that a history begins in a specific year, 1856, when the memory of earlier generations and the past of millennia before 1856 suffuse every word, gesture and space of that year? Every Australian story has an added mysteriousness. For uncounted millennia – 60 at least – the North Shore has been inspirited with name, story and myth, has been danced upon, hunted on and owned. Wallumetta, The Other Side, is a name we cull from the millennia of names for the North Shore. And North Sydney would be Cammeray, Lavender Bay – Quiberee, Kirribilli – Kiarabilli. In token of the growing understanding of how these millennia enrich and liberate the theology of believing, hoping and loving in these three churches, the worshipping people in them, in their sesquicentenary year, have authorised me to begin my story with this acknowledgment: We, the people of God at St Mary’s (North Sydney, Cammeray), St Francis Xavier’s (Lavender Bay, Quiberee) and Star of the Sea (Kirribilli, Kiarabilli) have worshipped on The Other Side for 150 years. We happily acknowledge that our First People, the Cammeragal and their forebears, have sustained their spirits and their bodies in the abundance of this Land and, in their turn, have worshipped in these beautiful places for millennia before us.

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We hope and pray that we and our First People will be reconciled in the differences that have divided us in the past and that we will share the future with wisdom, grace and justice. Though we live and worship on The Other Side, there is no othersidedness in the Spirit. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor freeman, and there is neither male nor female, because you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3:28). The names of the three churches themselves bring the past into the present. St Mary’s is an ancient name that marks Mary, the Mother of Jesus, as one of the communion of saints. In that communion, she is Miriam of Nazareth, one of us, frail, unknowing of the future, witness at Pentecost to the beginning of the Church. On 8 December 1854, just two years before the establishment of the parish, Pius IX in his Constitution Ineffabilis Deus pronounced that the Blessed Virgin Mary ‘in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin’. St Mary’s, North Sydney, was one of the first churches in the world to be dedicated to Mary under the grace of her Immaculate Conception. Francis Xavier died on the island of Sanchin off the coast of China. We know Sanchin as the bare, bleak island that Taiwan and China have strafed with gun and rocket fire for decades. Sanchin wasn’t much more hospitable in 1552, as Xavier waited for permission to land on the mainland. China was his last missionary dream. He had been one of Ignatius Loyola’s original companions in the foundation of the Society of Jesus. Just two years after that foundation in 1539, Francis Xavier set off for Goa in India. He barely survived the 11-month voyage down the west coast of Africa and around the Cape of Good Hope. After three years in India he set off for Molucca from which he voyaged even further to Amboyn, Ternate and Batenawe, and perhaps even to Mindanao in the Philippines. He returned to India in 1548. Other Jesuits had followed him there. He set up a Jesuit novitiate and began more than four centuries of Jesuit engagement in the intellectual, religious and cultural life of a great civilisation. Xavier had brought back a young Japanese man from Molucca and with him set off for Japan in 1549. Two and a half years of prophetic pilgrimage through southern Japan left communities that still claim him as their apostle. China, the cultural sun of Japan at this time, lured him, but the extraordinary last 20 years of his life had taken their toll. Francis Xavier is the personification of a Jesuit passion for translation, the

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entry into the deepest metaphors of others. He responded with understanding to the goal of an Eastern spirituality to divest oneself of the material things. He had begun his own expression of a liberation theology – to see the world through the eyes of the poor and lowly was, for him, to see it through Christ’s eyes. Any community that believes, hopes and loves under his name will find that its prophetic imagination turns around compassion. The name, Star of the Sea, is elusive. St Mary’s was the original Catholic church on The Other Side. From the top of the hill in 1856, high above Sydney harbour, one could see across miles of bush to the Heads. It seemed natural that the first stone of the first wooden church would dedicate this place of worship to St Mary’s Star of the Sea. In the years to come, St Mary’s would lose its title, Star of the Sea, to a small chapel down by the harbour, looking over to Sydney Cove where the First Fleet anchored in 1788. The sails of the Opera House now mark that cove. For a moment, let us make a small diversion. We – in our mind’s eye – are on Mt Carmel. It is 3000 years ago, about 950 BCE (Before the Common Era). Hakkarmel, ‘The Garden’, is the Hebrew name for this mountain ridge that runs nearly to the Mediterranean in the north of Palestine. Prophets roam this Garden, though the landscape is not the bleak, bare desert landscape that we might associate with prophets. The ridge is luxuriant with evergreens – pine, prickly oak, myrtle, carob and olive. The air is scented with aromatic plants and flowers. On the heights of the ridge are leopards, wild cats and roebuck. And on this dramatic day that we are about to witness, The Garden is alive with prophets, 451 of them. They are prophets of Baal, close to hysteria, bloodied with self-inflicted wounds, wildly dancing, and one swift-footed and lean prophet of Yahweh, Elijah. He says his name: ‘Yahweh is God’. The tribes of Israel are here in force on this dramatic day. It is a climactic moment between Yahweh and the gods of Baal. The land has been desolated by drought and famine. But nothing is ‘natural’ in times of disaster. Elijah tells the tribes of Israel, and then their king Ahab, that the drought and famine is Yahweh’s vengeance on their apostasy. ‘No’, says Ahab. ‘You, Elijah, are the cause. I shall destroy you’. Elijah then issues a challenge. Come and see what the gods of Baal and Yahweh can do. On Mt Carmel, Elijah renovates an old altar of sacrifice to Yahweh. It has 12 stones as its foundation, representing the 12 tribes of Israel. He tells the prophets of Baal to build their own altar, put a sacrificial bull on its wood, and do their best to get their gods to light the fire. All day, the prophets dance, howl and wound

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themselves. They see no fire. Then Elijah tells the Israelites to dig a trench around his altar. Fill it with water and drench the sacrificial bull and the firewood under it. Then he makes his prayers. ‘The fire of the Lord fell and caused the holocaust, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust and licked up the water that was in the trench’ (1 Kings 18: 38). The Israelites were terrified. Elijah took advantage of their newborn enthusiasm for Yahweh and told them to slaughter Baal’s prophets. They did this, throwing the corpses in to the Wadi Cison. Then a cloud appeared over the sea overlooked by the Garden. They knew it was Yahweh’s sign – like the star before dawn – of what was to come. The heavens opened. Cison became a torrent and washed the bodies into the sea. Two thousand years later, Carmelite monks, who mythically understood themselves to be the sons of the prophets, built a monastery on this site. They named it, Star of the Sea. This is a disturbing and violent story, as Old Testament stories often are. It tests one’s interpretive skills and scriptural knowledge. It can even test one’s faith, as a vengeful, intrusive God, who inspires murderous massacres, does confront. Still, in a history not of the ordinary sort, as this one is, such confrontations need to be faced. Elsewhere and for 1500 years, the faithful have sung their hymns, chanted their litanies, and recited their prayers in praise of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, as the sign of the new dawn of salvation. Seamen, travellers and pilgrims have sought her protection and lit candles of thanksgiving in their harbour-side churches. ‘Star of the Sea’ has been, for centuries, a sign of hope. In 1881, a small stone church, opposite Sydney Cove on Milson’s Point was bought by the Jesuits. It had originally been built for Protestant worship, but its congregation, not liking the opinions of its pastor, one day walked out its doors and up the hill to St Thomas’. It later galled them somewhat to learn that Catholics had bought their church and, even more so, that it was Jesuits. This little church, with its entry overlooking the harbour, seemed to somehow appropriate the name, Star of the Sea. They put a statue of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, at the door of the church and illuminated it at night. Then, when this original church was demolished in 1978 in the expansion of St Aloysius College, the name, Star of the Sea, moved to the new church when it was built in Kirribilli. St Mary’s, St Francis Xavier’s, Star of the Sea – there is much in names. They give us direction for our narrative of believing, hoping, loving and worshipping through time. St Mary’s makes me ask what happens when either the

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divine or the human is overstressed in devotions and worship. St Francis Xavier’s lets me focus on language in all its expressions in song, poetry, prayer, sacred text, theological understanding, and dogmatic and moral definition. Star of the Sea will take us into the prophetic imagination and all the contradictions in living out the faith in as human an institution as a church.

H A noted Jesuit and parish priest of St Mary’s, Henry A. Johnston, SJ, (1888–1986), has told the story of the first 100 years of the churches that make up the three-in-one parish that I call Wallumetta, The Other Side. Johnston gave his small book the title, A Seed that Grew. A Hundred Years of Catholic Life on the North Shore, 1856–1956. It was his gift to the centenary of the parish. Johnston was nothing, if not a man of great certainties and strong opinions. He was an eager polemicist in public debates, whether on the radio of his day in the Catholic Hour, or in the pamphlets of the Catholic Truth Society. He could also be found on the soapbox down by the Yarra in Melbourne or in Hyde Park in Sydney. He was not a man to let an error go uncorrected or a prejudice unanswered. And he was not a man to let a history of his parish, that he thought not up-to-standard, be published. So when he saw the efforts of Richard Murphy, SJ, (1875–1957), perhaps one of the Jesuits’ best known parish priests and a man who had inaugurated the Catholic Medical Guilds, the Sydney Campion Society, the Catholic Chemists Guild, and is credited with playing a great part in the bringing of Alcoholics Anonymous to Australia, Johnston declared that ‘they would not do at all’. Six months before the centenary celebrations, ‘Henry’ – as he is always known in the innumerable stories about his aggressive righteousness – began his own history. ‘Spent five months in research and one month in writing’, he wrote, in the only apologising moment I have been able to discover in his letters. He had hurt Richard Murphy’s pride greatly (and knew it), but officialdom wasn’t likely to baulk at anything he did. Imprimi potest (It can be published), his Jesuit Provincial, Austin Kelly, SJ, (1891–1978), stamped on the first pages of his book. Nihil obstat (Nothing stands in the way), his Jesuit censor added. Imprimatur (Let it be published), the Vicar General of Sydney, R. Collender, approved. Let me acknowledge that I could never do what ‘Henry’ did in six months. (Let me use this moment, however, to write that this work of mine has no

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censor, no ecclesiastical approval. Responsibility for its words and opinions are mine, since I represent neither the Catholic Church nor the Society of Jesus. Mine is a gift to the parish and to friends of many years.) In Church Alive! I would like to claim the freedom to concentrate my story on the last 50 years of the parish’s history, leaving the earlier years to appear, as they are pertinent. No serious historian, of course, can shrug off his or her duties to describe all of the 150 years so blandly. So to fulfil my historians’ obligations, this book is preceded by a small booklet that gives a thumbnail portrait of the parish 1856–2006. Wallumetta, The Other Side. Faith, Worship and Life on the North Shore 1856–2006 (University of New South Wales Press, 2006) is its title. It is rich in images. Think of it as an image essay on 150 years of this three-in-one parish.

H Fifty years in 2000 years of church history are of little count. But 50 years for many is a lifetime – they have certainly been most of mine. So, if I tell you I would like to tell the story of 1956 to 2006, the last 50 years of this parish, you will know that I stand at no great distance from the events and people and feelings I describe. I am an anthropologist by professional qualification, and an historian by trade. As I have written, anthropologists observe. Historians read. For two years I have observed the People of God of this parish in their worshipping. I have been with them in their prayers and meetings. I have enjoyed the fellowship of their many different kinds of masses. The liturgical seasons of the year have been the dramatic backdrop to my thoughts. I have wept at their funerals, been happy to have my head anointed in the sacrament of healing or crossed with ashes on Ash Wednesday. I have been bored by some sermons but animated by most. I have processed the Stations of the Cross from high on the hill of North Sydney to the water edge of the harbour. I have said my creeds and sung acclamations. The mystery of it all has never left me. I haven’t found closure or looked for it. One thing has frightened me, though. These 50 years belong to the troughs and peaks of my life and spirituality. I have no desire to take anybody where I have been or to tell anybody where to go. ‘Anyone who is a scandal to the little ones who have faith in me would be better drowned in the sea with a millstone around his neck’, the Lord said (Matthew 18: 6). Let my own faith be on my own head.

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Historians read. What a privilege it has been to have two years to scour the archives and devour books of theology of all descriptions – transcendental, liberationist, moral, feminist, dialectical and political; and books of scripture, liturgy, sacred music and history. A favourite author of mine, the Jesuit polymath, Michel de Certeau, has written that reading is a creative act ‘full of detours and drifts across the page, imaginary or meditative flights taking off from a few words, overlapping paragraph on paragraph, page on page, shortlived dances of the eye and mind’. Yes, these two years of reading have been two years of dancing on the beaches of the mind. I hope your reading of these words of mine will be as much of a dance.

The First Years The boatmen, full of grumbles, row him from Dawes Point to Blue’s Point for threepence. The irregular steamer can take him, horse and carriage for two shillings and sixpence. He’ll row himself across the quarter mile of water, if necessary, and stable his horse at the Blue’s Point Inn. But the Catholics of the other side, the Pynes, Dalys, Larkins and others are beginning to want something more than the home masses Father John Joseph Therry is already saying for them. They even persuade some of the more socially elite faithful in Sydney to come across for Sunday picnics, so that they can boost their numbers and their case for a North Shore parish. Mr Daly, of the Union Inn, is eyeing the vacant two acres of Lots 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Section 16. They are cleared land on top of the highest hill nearest the harbour. All roads are just dirt tracks, but the shape of them is formed up from the harbour at Milson’s Point and Blue’s Point, beyond the high point of the proposed parish to St Leonard’s (as Pymble was called in those days). Catholics will come from far away for the comforts of their religion. The locals are confident, too, that their priests will come to them. It will be a big parish, this first parish on The Other Side. By the time it will have celebrated its centenary in 1956, it will have been divided into 24 parishes. The Rev. Dr Peter Powell makes many reconnaissances in these months at the end of 1855 and the beginning of 1856. He is a good horseman, and his sixfoot height makes a fine figure in the saddle. It is a smelly ride up the tracks that were Blue’s Point Road and Miller Street to Berry Street, itself a wide morass in the wet. Sewerage is a problem. Height is health when there is typhoid in the air. Berry Street is where Nicholas and Mary (Larkin) Pyne live. Powell often said mass there, on a black set of drawers that Therry used to use. (That old temporary altar is still to be seen in the sanctuary of St Mary’s.) The

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home masses, with their temporary and confined air, were precious. There was a touch of the secret about them, with memories of persecution and stories of escapes. Light-weight travelling vestments, an ‘altar stone’ of waxed linen, the awkwardness of gestures in such a non-ecclesiastical space, the enactment of rubrics bent to the occasion, a physical closeness to the more mysterious actions of the priest, nervousness at mistakes, apprehension that the candlesticks weren’t polished or the vases of flowers too close – these were experiences of beginnings that would last a long time in these families. Dr Powell had a liking for this ‘other side’. He was a man who preferred to keep his distance from authority. He was much-travelled. In 1855, he was ten years in the colonies and had already played the pioneering priest in four of them. He had arrived in Perth on 7 January 1846 from London after a 14-week voyage on the barque, Elizabeth. He was part of what many, in those days, would have called, with a knowing wink, ‘The Brady Band’. Bishop John Brady, Western Australia’s first bishop, had gone to Ireland, England and Spain looking for men and women to serve the 300 Catholics of his diocese and (as he thought) the two million Aborigines in the vast space of Western Australia. ‘The Brady Band’ consisted of 30 priests, students and Sisters of Mercy. Peter Powell was the only priest who spoke English. The rest were Spanish Benedictine monks. Bishop Brady had dreamed of three great mission stations for his two million Aborigines. New Norcia, miles to the north of Perth, and named for the Italian birthplace of St Benedict, was the only mission that survived. Brady was eccentric and litigious. His Episcopal ‘palace’, at this time, was a metre square base of a windmill. He was poor, too: £10 000 in debt. In Perth, Powell had immediately shown he was a charismatic preacher with a racy Irish humour. In a time of much church and school building and furnishing, this was a prized skill. Bishops would come to use his charisma wherever he went. He played a mean fiddle, too, had a fine voice, and was a handsome man. That helped. The trouble was that there was no money to be got in Western Australia. So Brady sent Powell off to Calcutta, India, on a begging mission. A grateful Brady then made him Vicar General and conferred on him a Doctorate of Theology. Such doctorates were the purview of bishops in those days, and in times when the title ‘Dr’ was handy in apologetic debate and priests were denied access to universities, doctorates flowered in the Australian Church. But no sooner had Powell become the Reverend Dr Peter Powell than his bishop suspended him. He had written a report to Rome critical of Brady’s governance. Critics were not something that Brady suffered patiently.

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We next hear of Powell in Sydney, 30 November 1848. His finances have improved. The colonial secretary adds his name to the official list of ministers of religion. Honoraria begin at £100 p. a. His first appointment is in the Clarence River district in New South Wales, where he is both pastor and chaplain to the Sisters of Charity in their work among the poor, orphaned and sick. No doubt his adventures in Perth attract the attention of that perpetual pest of bishops, but apostle of religious and political liberty, Archpriest John Joseph Therry. Or maybe Powell, himself, is attracted to pests of bishops. From that time on, he and Therry are friends. They are Irish, too; unfriendly to any English archbishops of Sydney who think that one of the graces of the British Empire is to bring civilisation to the world, especially to the Irish. Powell’s time in the Clarence Rive district is short – a year. Next he is in Victoria for four meteoric years under Bishop James Gould. Churches in Heidelberg, Geelong, Melbourne and Keilor all see him as their pastor. He becomes the first president of the seminary, inspector of schools and, perhaps in a move fatal to his career in Victoria, founder and prior of a monastery with the unlikely name of ‘Hippo’ in Campbellfield. Bishop Gould had been left £2000 to found the monastery. Presumably with a desire to spend the money more than any great sense of pastoral initiative, Gould buys a property and house. He sends to Powell as prior, a layman as a sub-prior, plus a cook. Meditation is not Powell’s line, in the pastoral calling. He leaves, but not without, as a contemporary called it, some ‘fireworks’ with Gould. Someone is defaming him, Powell says. And he is not above doing some defaming himself. Besides, he is passing ‘something like blood’. And that is his excuse to exit. Powell’s pioneering next takes him to a very famous place indeed. On 3 December 1854 he says the first mass at Penola, where Tennison Woods and Mother Mary MacKillop would one day thrive. He says the first mass at Mt Gambier a month later. He has baptised 34 infants and received high praise in local newspapers. Ten months later, he is gone again, back to Sydney. After three weeks there, he is hoping that Therry will lend him £10. Therry, himself a wealthy man after 30 years in colonies where land is currency and he a good investor in land, would be a good friend to Powell in his needs. Indeed, he would be a good friend to this North Shore parish. He will leave the £14 000 that will encourage the Jesuits to come. Powell was indeed a travelling man. In these ten years, he has sailed from London to Perth, Perth to Calcutta and back, Perth to Sydney, Sydney to

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Melbourne, Melbourne to Adelaide, and Adelaide to Sydney. And he is on horseback (more probably than horse and carriage) north and south of Perth, back and forth to the Clarence River district from Sydney, through the outlying towns of Melbourne – Geelong, Heidelberg and Keilor, into the Western District as far as Mt Gambier and Penola, and back to Adelaide. How many hours he spent in the saddle, how many miles on bush tracks, is hard to imagine. We have to think that the Catholic faithful would have accommodated him and fed his horses, but the scale of his travelling is expensive and wearing. Maybe he is ready to settle for a while. And he does settle, here on the north shore, for 11 years, the first 11 years of St Mary’s. Mr Daly, with some of the vagueness of these early days, began the application for a grant of land for the church – well, he made the application some time after the first church was built! (And somehow it was lost.) The grant wasn’t legalised for 24 years. There were terrace houses adjoining the land – they are still there. Dr Powell bought two of them. Then he put up a tent, and the parish had begun. The two acres were enough, in these early years, for a crop of maize for Powell’s horse. They would be enough – but never enough! – in the 150 years to come, for churches, presbyteries, school, halls and monastic quarters. Powell was a fast worker. Archbishop John Bede Polding, OSB, blessed the first wooden church of St Mary’s Star of the Sea on 13 March 1856. St Mary’s Star of the Sea was 12 metres by 6 metres. The walls were 3 metres high, and tree-trunk pillars supported the shingle roof. Wallpaper covered the roughness of it all. The floor was earthen, covered by rushes and bracken. There were three rows of pews – still to be found at the rear of the present St Mary’s – but no kneelers. It was prickly kneeling, and in those days there was plenty of kneeling. The roof did not do much of a job in a Sydney rainstorm. Then the floor became an estuary of muddy streams. The altar, against centuries of tradition in the Church, was at the western end. The entrance was at the eastern end, off Miller Street. Red roses bordered the path to the church. A shrine of Our Lady, on what would have been called the gospel side of the church, stood to the left of the altar against the back wall. Within four years, the parish had a bell, hung between two tree trunks. William Lithgow, Colonial Surveyor General, had an estate farm not far from the church. He had used a bell to summon his labourers for lunch. He left it with Powell. It could be heard in those machine-less days as far north as Pymble. It still rings the Angelus and the beginning of services.

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The World – The Church – The Other Side ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself ’, John Donne wrote in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. No parish is either. The years from 1856 to 1878 were the first beginning of the first Catholic parish on The Other Side, St Mary’s Star of the Sea. Peter Powell, as we have seen, was its founding pastor (1856–1869) and Dean John Kenny was his successor (1869–1878). The tent and a 28-metre by 10-metre Early English Gothic stone building were their successive churches. Their parish stretched to the Pittwater in the north, to Manly and the coast in the east, and to Lane Cove in the west. The population they served was 464 in 1856, and about 7000 in 1878. Twenty-one per cent of these were Catholics, 48.8 per cent of these Catholics were literate. Eighty-eight per cent of the population was under 39 years of age, 44 per cent under 14 years. Establishing schools would be a priority. They would start three, each of which would be nomadic through different sites as numbers grew. The Sisters of Mercy arrived in the parish in 1873. Priests tended to carry baptismal registers around with them as a sort of scorebook of their effectiveness. These are lost to us. Marriage registers were more legally important. Powell and Kenny married some 120 couples. More than half of these marriages were mixed religion marriages. That figure would have alarmed their bishops. The world is a long way from The Other Side from 1856 to 1878, but coming closer. The Suez Canal was opened in 1839. Telegraphic communication with Europe was operative in 1872. World events filled their newspapers and Church events were known and commented on in the Freeman’s Journal, an independent lay journal bent on ‘political and religious emancipation’ and freedom from clerical dominance. A Crimean War was ending in 1856, but an Anglo–China War was beginning. The Indian Mutiny was about to shock them. In Sydney Harbour, officials were completing Fort Denison, as nervous reaction to these world events. The American Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination told them something terrible about human nature and federations. Maybe Gladstone gave them assurance, though. The Paris Commune of 1871 told them that the Terror is never ending. For Catholics, at least, it would breed much apocalyptic piety. The global Church had their attention. Pius IX published the Syllabus of Errors in 1864 and called Vatican Council I in 1869. A future cardinal of Sydney, Patrick Francis Moran, wrote the definition of papal infallibility. The Franco–Prussian War frightened the bishops, however, and the Council left the Church dangling on half-formulated doctrines for nearly a century. Garibaldi

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began his marches. The pope was (dramatically) ‘prisoner of the Vatican’. The whole Catholic world confused Pius IX’s political intrigues with the Faith and came to his rescue. In 1858, a young 14-year old girl, Bernadette Soubiroux, had the first of 18 mysterious visions. The Virgin Mary will speak directly to many young girls in the next century. Within 50 years, 4000 officially witnessed miracles of healing had occurred at Lourdes. In Australia, 1862 saw the advent of the ‘Irish bishops’. They had little respect for the English Benedictine Archbishop of Sydney, Roger Vaughan, OSB, and he next to none for them. The Irish bishops came, via Rome, from an Irish church that was about to be ‘Cullenised’. This was an Ireland of home masses, hedgerow schools and religious practices from a deep Celtic past. Bishop (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen of Dublin would ‘Romanise’ the Irish Church first by building 1000 chapels and then flooding the traditional practices with an imported piety of novenas, sodalities, benedictions, processions and missions. Religious objects abounded – beads, scapulars, medals and holy pictures. The matrix of beliefs that had absorbed the traditional into the living religious practice in Ireland – archaic fertility and land rites, fairy forts, holy wells, bonfire nights, ghost stories, pilgrimages and wakes – did not fare well in the Great Hunger. Ireland was ripe for piety and for the building of churches, schools and presbyteries that would lift pride and selfesteem. It got both. The Irish bishops, and the priests that came to Australia with them and after them, spent £1 million on churches and schools in New South Wales between 1866 and 1879. (Let’s say $115 million in current funds.) Roger Vaughan was one such bishop. He doubled the number of churches and chapels in his archdiocese in ten years. There was a passion in the faithful that the priests and bishops were tapping. The generosity of these mostly poorer people was extraordinary. They felt beleaguered. They could see the sectarian hatred. And what did they know of the Enlightenment and the liberties and values that had come from the great revolutions of France and the United States? Sectarian religious Australia was ugly enough. Secular Australia became ugly, too. These were the years of the first colonial assemblies, of the establishment of the secret ballot, and the drive for the eight-hour day. How could education be entrusted, the secularist was saying, to those who follow a pope who decries freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the separation of church and state? And how, for that matter, could Catholics entrust their children to a system that seemed to breed such hatred

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of them. Yet to Catholics, their churches, their schools, and their presbyteries and halls were signs of the faith and symbols of their Catholic identity. And they were unendingly generous.

The Jesuits The Jesuits came to Sydney with drive. Father Therry made it happen posthumously. He left them £14 000, about two million dollars in current terms. Austrian Jesuits had been in South Australia since 1848. But Therry wanted Irish Jesuits. The Irish Jesuits would have made him proud. They sent out a talented 49-year-old man of vision and energy, Joseph Dalton, SJ, (1817–1905), to lead them. What Dalton does with that £14 000 is little short of amazing. It gives him credit with the banks to restore St Patrick’s College, East Melbourne, to buy 70 acres for Xavier College and begin its building, and to establish parishes in Richmond and Hawthorn. He came to Sydney in 1878 and immediately acquired 118 acres for Riverview College in Lane Cove, and St Kilda House in Woolloomooloo for the first St Aloysius College. He bought two acres of empty land at Lavender Bay and a small, empty Independent Church at Milson’s Point. He built a church-school, which we know as St Francis Xavier’s. Jesuits were viewed suspiciously by seculars and Protestants in these years. They had been expelled from a dozen countries. But they came to Sydney in triumph, as the Catholic Church’s greatest educators and apologists. That is what Archbishop Vaughan wanted: educators whose standards could not be questioned. He wants apologists and debaters, too, to fill the halls and argue against Protestants. The times were here, he knew, when the faithful were in need of more spiritual sustenance than the mere religious basics. They needed missions, retreats and devotions. The many congregations of religious women in the archdiocese needed spiritual counselling. He needed canon lawyers, theologians and spiritual directors – and he got them. Dalton brought James Kennedy, SJ, with him to Sydney and installed him as St Mary’s parish priest. He and Dalton set up a ‘presbytery’ on West Street, a shack half-made of flattened kerosene tins. Dalton and Kennedy began pastoral life enthusiastically. Dalton offered the 8.00 a.m. and 11.00 a.m. Masses at St Mary’s on their first Sunday. Kennedy said the 9.00 a.m. mass at the church-school they inherited at Pymble 19 kilometres away.

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There were devotions to Mary and benedictions in the evening. They began their work at St Mary’s with a fortnight retreat, with the first week for children and adolescents, the second week for adults. Mass and a sermon came in the morning, rosary and meditation in the evening. Almost immediately, the North Shore knew that, in the Jesuits, they were in touch with the worldwide Church. Brilliant orators from the United States visited them. They came in strength – at Riverview and St Aloysius, as well as the North Shore.

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Triumph 1956 In another world it may be otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. John Henry Cardinal Newman Christianity is not a theory, or a speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life, and a living process … Try it. Samuel Taylor Coleridge It is 1956, St Mary’s Centenary Year. Cardinal Norman Gilroy – later Cardinal Sir Norman Gilroy – is in his element. He loves the ancient ceremonies of the Church. Born in a Sydney working-class suburb in 1896, serving at Gallipoli as a telegraph operator on a troopship, and educated to the priesthood at the local seminary at Springwood and at the Propaganda College in Rome (an important qualification for Australian bishops well into the twentieth century, Cardinal Gilroy is both pious and shrewd. He is a strong believer in the Irish tradition that has shaped his spirituality. He will take the Sydney archdiocese into the Vatican Council II era, if not reluctantly, then a little hesitantly. Now on this Saturday evening – there were no Saturday evening masses in those days – he is engaged in a ceremony that had to precede his consecration of St Mary’s on the morrow, 22 April 1956. He is ‘verifying’ the relics.

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The relics of two canonised martyrs – actual parts of their bodies, not just pieces of cloth that had touched their bodies – were to be placed in a square cavity cut into the stone or marble altar. Three grains of incense and a parchment in a small crystal vial attesting to the consecration would be put beside them. Cardinal Gilroy would then anoint the altar stone that would seal the cavity. The ceremony takes him back to the infancy of the Church. The archaeological landscape of its first four centuries is scattered with stones inscribed Hic est locus, or simply Hic (‘Here is the place’ or simply ‘Here’). They are altar stones marking a place where martyrs’ bones rested and would have been places of pilgrimage. When he consecrates St Mary’s, he will recite the Introit (the Entrance Song, we say these days), ‘Terribile est locus hic’. They are the words Jacob said when he woke from a dream. ‘How awe-inspiring this place is. This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven’ (Genesis 28: 17). Jacob had used a stone as a pillow while he slept. This stone he anointed with oil as an act of worship. His stone is the doorstep to the Gate of Heaven. The assurance that martyrs were in ‘the snow-white number of the elect’ (Gregory of Tours 539–593) gave the altar stones that marked their relics the power of miracles. That Entrance Song that the Cardinal will sing contains the beautiful pilgrims’ song, Psalm 84. As they reached the Temple in Jerusalem, they sang, ‘How beautiful is your dwelling place, Yahweh Sabaoth. My soul is yearning for the courts of the Lord’. There is much history in these ceremonies of the martyrs’ relics and the altar stone, although the Cardinal probably only relished their antiquity. By establishing churches as shrines preserving martyrs’ relics, and soon making them the only proper places for worship, the early bishops were making a universal Church out of the many church-houses where early Christians were breaking the bread of the Lord. In verifying the relics, Cardinal Gilroy is making theatre of the lines that draw even the remotest altar to Rome. There is another force at work. Later analysts would call the rewards that a sense of pilgrimage brings a ‘therapy of distance’, a sense that one needs to discover, and can discover, faith outside the comfort zones of one’s self. The ‘Pilgrim Church’ would be a metaphor that Vatican II would embroider. In 2006, as distinct from 1956, there would be many parishioners who experience a therapy of distance as they travel to the Lavender Bay parish from 75 different postcodes, looking to hear the Word more pertinently to

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their needs and to worship in a mode that reflects the faith they live. The relics that Cardinal Gilroy verifies are those of a Polish Jesuit, St Andrew Bobola (1597–1657). Cossacks occupying Eastern Poland in a war between Orthodox and Catholics, Poles and Russians, literally butchered him slowly in mockery of the Passion. Bobola’s relics come to the parish in the middle of the Cold War. His body had been snatched from his Polish shrine by the Bolsheviks and exhibited in a museum in Moscow as proof that there was nothing miraculous about this martyr’s relics. (They are back now in Poland in a magnificent shrine, and ‘St Andrew Bobola’ churches are scattered all over the globe in the Polish diaspora.) Martyrdom probably always skirts the boundaries of politics and religion, an area where the Jesuit apostolate tends to focus. In the 150 years of the parish there have been 41 Jesuits murdered for their religio/political stands, 41 in 9 countries – China, Spain, Brazil, Guyana, India, Guatemala, Russia, San Salvador and Rwanda. Then there were the Jesuits among the ‘English Martyrs’, Edmund Campion, SJ, notably among them, and 33 Jesuits among the 253 Japanese Martyrs, all beatified during the 150 years of the parish. As we have seen, James Magan, SJ, parish priest at Lavender Bay, had large murals of the Canadian Martyrs painted behind the altar of St Francis Xavier. The issue is not so much one of piety but of a therapy of distance that joins the parish to Jesuits the world over, wherever faith confronts social injustice, poverty and class conflict. It makes demands for a more radical understanding, a ‘liberation theology’, no less. You can hear such a liberation theology almost every Sunday in the parish’s Prayers of the Faithful. Cardinal Gilroy’s Solemn High Mass of Consecration is long – 8 a.m. to 12 noon. It is followed by a daylong Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, ending in Solemn Benediction. It was all ‘very impressive’ according to the Historia Domus (‘The History of the House’) of the Jesuits. Henry Johnston, then parish priest, is absent in Rome during these celebrations, preparing for a new stage in his life as tertian master for the Australian Jesuits. He has had a new monstrance made in Ireland for the exposition, just as he had had a new pulpit of white sandstone erected and inscribed with the names of the founders of the parish: Dr Peter Powell and Dean John Kenny. The doyen of Australia’s gold workers, John Flynn, has crafted the chalice with which the Cardinal says the mass. The dozen consecration candles can still be seen on the church’s columns. Twelve pounds each, grumbled the minister, the Jesuit in charge of the material things of the parish.

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The consecration began a week of centennial celebrations. It was a very proper week – the dead remembered, the priesthood lauded, the Irish heritage cherished, the children inspired, the urge to dance and wear finery assuaged at the Centenary Ball, and the community identified in a large demonstration. There was a lunch on the Tuesday for the North Shore priests. They savoured the in-house wit of their many speakers. There were many stories of the best story-telling priests of the parish’s 100 years. There was the theologian, scientist and polymath, William Kelly, SJ, reputed to have been the most gifted Jesuit ever to have worked in Australia. Poet, linguist, controversialist and missioner, he had begun the Jesuits’ work in the parish in 1878 with elan. Thomas (‘Tommy’) Walsh, SJ, didn’t survive for the centenary. He had died in 1952. He had been 31 years in the parish. The parish lived, in a sense, by the ability of its priests to make theatre of everyday life, to discover spiritual meanings in the rough and tumble of life. The parish magazines and bulletins and the religious journals such as Madonna and the Messenger of the Sacred Heart always seemed to have ‘Father Casey’ stories of some semi-fictional priest and his housekeeper. These lunches and dinner – and communion breakfasts – had a ritual feel about them. There would be a march, say, of the ‘Men of the Parish’ from St Mary’s to Manresa Hall, banners raised. With a bit of luck, the Apostolic Delegate, who lived in the parish, would say Grace. There would be toasts to pope and king/queen, hierarchy and clergy, visitors and kindred societies, press, the ladies, and the spiritual director. And Faith of Our Fathers would be sung at the end. That was the Tuesday of Centenary Week. It ended with a Concert at Manresa Hall, full of Irish nostalgia. On Wednesday, the Jesuits offered a Solemn High Requiem Mass for all of the dead of the parish in its 100 years. As it was Anzac Day, there were other memories as well. The dead were much present in Catholic life. Family visits to the cemetery were certainly annual, sometimes weekly. Anniversaries were always recorded in the parish Bulletin and ‘stipends’, a gift of money to a priest to have a mass said, were a part, if sometimes an awkward part, of parish living. ‘Black masses’ were frequent in the parish churches and private chapels in the presbyteries. The income from stipends belonged to the Jesuits rather than the parish and went to the Arca, the fund that was used to train them in their novitiate, their philosophy and theology. On Friday, Peter Little, SJ, sang a Solemn High Mass for the children. There never was a more ardent enthusiast for religion than Peter Little, and,

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in a way, none so childlike. At this time, he was engrossed in Ricardo Lombardi, SJ’s Better World Movement. The Better World Movement was one of those ‘signs of the times’ that John XXIII would one day urge the Church to see. It caught the need that Catholics were beginning to feel a spirituality for all aspects of life, rather than a set of rules to measure their faith by. Peter Little’s Mass for the children would have looked forward to their future, rather than back to their history. Archbishop Carboni, the Apostolic Delegate, gave an enthusiastic account of the lay Catholic Action within the Better World Movement. These were the years of passionate divisions among Catholics. Rome, no doubt at the urging of Carboni, supported the Sydney (Gilroy) position over that of Melbourne (Mannix and Santamaria). Catholic lay action, as Catholic, was to be more spiritual than political. Sunday brought the Centenary’s culmination. If pilgrimage is a therapy of distance, then procession is a therapy of closeness and identity. Five thousand men, women and children were at St Leonard’s Park to process. In 1856 there was one church and one priest in the 200 square miles of the single parish. In 1956 there were 24 parishes, 32 churches, 131 priests, 400 nuns, 56 brothers, 50 000 Catholics and 10 000 children in Catholic schools. Carrying banners, the now 24 parishes of the North Shore led the procession around St Leonard’s Park. The Catholics of Sydney liked processions. As many as 20 000 would attend the annual Corpus Christi Procession at St Patrick’s Diocesan Seminary at Manly. Processions mapped out an order of things and gave witness to internal beliefs as outward actions. Processions were apologetics – plays in defence of a way of life, with a touch of the triumphant. There was much to be triumphant about in 1956. The centenary really began on Christmas Eve. The five confessionals at St Mary’s were filled from 3.30 p.m. to midnight mass. The twice yearly cleansing of the soul that the Church demanded was a very public thing to family and friends if one could not go to communion at Easter and Christmas. The two-week mission in Lent, given by the Marist Fathers, was also a cleansing of the soul in preparation for the centenary. The Marist Fathers attacked the World, the Flesh and the Devil with vigour and with a full program of sermons, instructions, devotions, benedictions and confessions. The Mission ended with a phalanx of men in the nave of the church overflowing into the sanctuary, the side chapels and the sacristy’s doorway. A solemn climax came as all held candles aloft, recited their profession of faith and gave, as one witness said, ‘a passionate denial of Satan and all his pomps’.

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The year 1956 seemed to be one of some triumph for both the Church and the Jesuits in Australia. The first of January saw the ordination of five young Jesuits at St Mary’s. Another 62 Jesuits had been ordained in the years 1941–1956. Each year, some 15 to 20 young men were entering the novitiate. In 1928 the Australian Jesuits had cut their umbilical cord with Ireland. They became an independent Vice-Province instead of an Irish mission. They were now responsible for their own education and training. Instead of sending their young men to Ireland, England or continental Europe for philosophy and theology, they had to establish their own institutions here in Australia. They began their own College of Humanities and Philosophy at Loyola College, Watsonia, Victoria, and of Theology at Canisius College, Pymble, New South Wales. There is always a special feel in the foundation days of an educational institution, a sense that one can create structures and syllabuses in relationship to one’s educational ideals rather than in obedience to ‘what always has been done’. The young Jesuits who experienced these early years at Loyola and Canisius inevitably enjoyed the freedom from the restraints of being Irish – even English or European – and, in some excitement, explored what it meant to be both Australian and Jesuit. These Jesuits were a generation, too, who were to be given their chance at postgraduate education in philosophy, moral theology, scripture and dogma in a post-war Europe that was enjoying the springtime to Vatican II’s summer to come. They were revitalising the sorts of labours that they would dedicate their lives to – teaching in schools; educating seminarians; spiritual counselling to lay people; pastoral work in parishes; chaplains to universities; giving the Spiritual Exercises to lay and religious alike; editing, writing and publishing a range of pious and intellectual journals; and promoting adult education in Catholic theories of social justice. They revitalised these different fields of their apostolate by recovering the roots of their Jesuit tradition. They went back to times when the spirit of prophecy inspired the Order, before the overlays of later routine smothered much of the life out of it. It was not the replication of a Golden Age. It was theatre enacted to catch the spirit that would infuse new and changed conditions. There was a feeling of playing a new–old role, of being at the forefront of something new rather than of guarding some museum-like treasure. The majority of them would go to other Jesuit apostolates rather than the eight Jesuit parishes in Australia, but, as we shall see, they had an important influence on the pastoral work in the parishes. Churches are great counters – of the baptised, the married, the dead, of

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communions given, confessions heard, sick visited, of members of pious societies and sodalities, and of Easter dues paid. The annual bishop’s visitations of all the churches in the world will keep recording angels on the Last Day hard at work for a considerable part of eternity. So a sesquicentennial story of the parishes on the North Shore will always begin with a register. Registers, mostly 40 cm long, 31 cm wide and 6 cm deep, 82 volumes in number, line the shelves of St Mary’s archives. They are precious and are carefully looked after by the parish archivist, Barney Mungoven. Over time, there will be thousands of requests to check a detail that will be important in someone’s life. Let’s begin with the first register, the Marriage Register for 1856–1868: On April 17, 1856, Bernard Daly, a 39 year-old, Irish-born widower with no children, innkeeper by trade, marries Catherine Collins, 26 year-old spinster, also Irish-born. Residences: North Shore and Pittwater. John Collins and Ellen Head are their witnesses. The registers will give their fathers’ occupations and their mothers’ maiden names, Bridget Geogheghan his; Catherine Roche, hers. All can sign their names. It will be a rare marriage in these early years; however, that doesn’t record someone simply signing with his or her mark (X). For Church Alive! diligent and generous friends, who would be embarrassed to have their names known, have counted 183 170 items in these registers. They tell us that there will be 14 600 marriages through the 150 years of the three churches of this first North Shore parish. So, we have the names, birthplaces (mostly Ireland in these early days), age (mostly in the mid- and late ’20s) and occupations (builder, stonemason, servant, cook, rope-maker, sailor, housekeeper or seamstress) of 29 200 men and women. And we have almost the same information for a further 29 200 witnesses and the same again for 58 400 parents. There is a total of 116 800. That is enough – but not here – for a social and cultural portrait of the parish. Our friends counted 21 107 infant and 1556 adult baptisms as well. More than 100 000 men, women and children would have called themselves parishioners through these years. And 133 priests served their sacramental and spiritual needs. Sisters of Mercy, of St Joseph, of Loreto, Marist Brothers and The Grail served their educational and social needs. The parishioners, in their turn,

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helped the religious build their schools, hospitals, orphanages and refuges, as well as eight versions of their own churches, all with unending generosity. These parishioners and their parish servants have lived their faith and worshipped through two world wars, several depressions, federation, and national and international turmoil. The bridge transformed the North Shore, and the Warringah Expressway divided their parish. A high-rise central business district took the heart out of their living space. Their parish priests once knew all their parishioners’ names and visited them in their homes. Now, as they move into their sesquicentenary, the parish is a parish without boundaries. There is another set of statistics, those prepared for the annual Episcopal Visitation. During the years 1922 to 1990, St Francis Xavier’s (SFX) and Star of the Sea (SS) were parishes independent of St Mary’s (SM), so for 1956 there are a double set of Episcopal Visitation figures. They tell us that the number of parishioners at SM was 3539 and 3000 at SFX and SS. There were 82 300 communicants at SM, 34 241 at SFX and SS; 152 infant and 30 adult baptisms at SM, 102 and 12 at SFX and SS; 55 ‘Catholic’ and 25 ‘mixed’ marriages at SM, 21 and 23 at SFX and SS. The bishops also wanted to know the membership numbers of confraternities, societies, sodalities and associations. It is not to our point to delay on these figures. Just let us note the multiplicity and variety of associations – Holy Name Society, St Vincent de Paul, Legion of Mary, Children of Mary, Sodalities of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sacred Heart, among many others – and the fact that at SM’s 50 per cent, and at SFX’s and SS 19 per cent of parishioners were involved in core activities of the parish other than the strict obligations the Church imposed on them as Catholics. These figures would be skewed somewhat by the fact that some individuals would be involved in multiple core activities, but, by the same token, membership of parish associations is no full measure of an individual’s faith. ‘Triumph 1956’ are our words to describe the centennial mood of the parish in that year. It is not a triumphalism, a trumpeting of the faith. It is more a comfortable confidence that the parish is part of a Church that has it right. The parish is comfortable in the religious world that the Catholic imagination has created. It gave them solace and strength. It gave them a sense that, in whatever way they failed as individuals to live up to the ideals they gave themselves, they belonged to an institution that spoke for God in the world and changed the world for good. There was one thing that today is disturbing.

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They would not have seen it or even believed it in 1956. Terrible things were happening in the Church in those years. We only know of them in these last decades. Satan’s sin, Pride, was at work in the Church. There has always been evil in the Church. There always will be. What was terrible was that the evil was covered up. Its victims were left unprotected and the guilty left to continue their cruel ways. In this respect, the face of the Church was deemed more important than its soul. That outward show should be more important than the inward spirit was a consequence of a misplaced belief that the Church was a ‘perfect society’. Along with pride, it flowed from a lack of faith in the precious guarantee that the Spirit was always with the Church, so long as its graces were discovered honestly and lovingly. Pride will always be an institutional sin when a sense of identity is confused with a sense of responsibility. Arthur Stone, SJ, parish priest at St Francis Xavier’s from 1954 to 1958, writes this piece in the Parish Magazine, November 1958. It suggests, perhaps, how an outward face might be thought to be more important than an inward spirit.

H

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Are You a Bashful Catholic? Religion is a man’s private and personal affair! So many claim. Yet Christ Our Lord orders us to let our light shine before men, to profess Him before the world, to give testimony to the Truth that is in us. So, for the Catholic, his Faith can never be a merely private matter. Indeed, Pope St. Pius X called this bashfulness about religious things, ‘the curse of Catholics’. Here is a test to let you see whether you are one of those who keep their religion to themselves – a bashful Catholic. In the 20 questions that follow award yourself five points for every ‘yes’ answer, and a nought for every ‘no’. 1

Do you raise your hat, bless yourself or bow when you go by a church?

2

Do you raise your hat or bow when you pass any Priest, Nun, and Brother?

3

Do you greet any Priest, Nun, and Brother with “Good Morning, How do you do?”

4

Do you say Grace in restaurants?

5

Do you have holy pictures or religious art in your home?

6

Do you have them in public rooms (not merely in bedrooms)?

7

Do you have a medallion of Our Lady of the Way or St. Christopher in your car?

8

Do you ever bring up the subject of religion in conversation?

9

When the question of religion comes up, do you join willingly in the discussion?

10 Do you belong to any parish sodality or society?

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11 Are you reluctant to join any obviously Catholic organizations and groups? [sic] 12 Do you wear a medal when you go swimming? 13 Do you leave Catholic papers in view when you have Protestant visitors in your home? 14 Do you read Catholic papers and magazines on public conveyances? 15 Are all your children called by saints’ names? 16 Do you carry your missal openly to Mass? 17 On Fridays, in company where meat is served, do you go quietly hungry, or at least ask if fish or eggs are available? 18 Do you always send out religious Christmas cards, even to non-Catholics? 19 Do you give or lend Catholic books or magazines to nonCatholics? 20 If a non-Catholic should ask you to go to an ‘Adults only’ film, would you not merely refuse but explain your reason? Not all the above questions are of strictly equal value. But if you have scored over 80, you are certainly not bashful about your religion. You are fulfilling Our Lord’s injunction to ‘let your light shine before men’. Stone went on, ‘If you have scored 70 or more, you rate a fair pass … If you have scored between 50 and 70, it could mean no more than that you are reticent and shy by nature. But a score of 40 or below indicates that you are not professing Christ … And if your score was 20 or below, you better ask yourself Question No. 21: If I were in the same situation as the Catholics in the Iron Curtain countries, would I have the courage to hold fast to my Faith? … The safest way to answer that vital question is to so live that I amend my “No” answers in some of the earlier questions’.

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H Arthur Stone is clearly trying to describe some of the ways his parishioners might display their public identity as Catholics. Let’s try to describe something else, their inner identity. Let me call this their Catholic imagination. The divine is mysterious, always out of reach of our minds. The divine always has to be imaged in some metaphoric way, always imagined. I would like to try and describe that Catholic imagination in the parish in these years around the centenary. To do that, let’s join Arthur Stone at mass. Let’s make it the Fourth Sunday in Advent, 1955. The mass is at St Francis Xavier’s. It will have to be an imaginary mass – shall we say a generic mass, one culled from a great variety of records rather than one specific occasion? But our description will be our gift to Stone’s memory. He spent the last 11 years of his life, from 1962 to 1972, paralysed, unable to say mass. That was his Passion. Stone was a good servant of the parish. In fact, he belonged to it more than any other priest who served it in its 150 years. He was educated at the Marist Primary School at St Mary’s, where he converted to Catholicism at the age of ten. Perhaps the zeal of the convert remained with him all the rest of his life. He had to be admonished at times by his Jesuit superiors for his strong words on what he saw as slackness in his parishioners’ religious behaviour. But, by the same token, he was truly ecumenical, years before his time, and he inspired many to follow him into the Church. Stone studied engineering at the University of Sydney after leaving school. He was a keen sportsman and played 1st Grade Rugby League for North Sydney. Rugby League, a working-class and battlers’ sport, gave him a lifetime’s feel for matters that affected the lives of his parishioners. These were the years in which families were emerging from two traumas: the Great Depression and World War 2.

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He leaves us two remarkable documents in the parish archives. Their printed title is: Liber Status Animarum – Book of the State of Souls with Alphabetical Index. Parochial District of – leaving space for Stone to write in ‘Lavender Bay, November 1951’. They are printed by E. J. Dwyer, ‘Catholic Bookseller and Publisher’. Liber Status Animarum is a columned register, street by street, household by household, of the families of the parish. The age of all in the household is given in the first column, then whether they are baptised, received the Eucharist, were confirmed, performed their Easter duties, came to mass, regularly attended the sacraments, were members of some association or sodality in the parish. There is an opening page of Directions, giving the symbols to be used: W – widower; P – Protestant; C – convert and c/38 for the year of the conversion. Since the information in the booklet is highly confidential there are instructions in Latin as to the symbols to be used when some judgement is being made – Crux (cross) X in affirmative; Zero 0, negative; Crux dimidiata (half cross)/ where there is some doubt; a small b rather than a capital B if there is some doubt about the baptism; m if irregular mass goer. Signs of improvement are to be designated by a half cross going on to a cross – /X. Remarks are plentiful: many entries of ‘excellent’, and a range of other comments – ‘father bigot’, ‘old, senile, careless’, ‘weak’, ‘wants cremation’, ‘baptised, never practices’, ‘drinks’, ‘promises to go’, ‘kind of fellow traveller of commos’, ‘old queen’, ‘wife niece of bishop’, ‘careless lately’, ‘promises to rectify marriage’. Ethnic origins are always noted – Yugoslav, Hungarian, Greek, Lithuanian, German, Dutch, Polish or Irish. There are 395 households registered, 888 adults and 431 children. Males outnumber females by 55 per cent to 43 per cent. Fifty-six per cent of marriages are ‘Catholic’; 44 per cent ‘Mixed’. Ten per cent are widowed, 19 per cent are single. The two Liber Status Animarum are unsettling documents. They tell us more than we want to know, and yet not enough. Well-intentioned no doubt, they put judgements into the hands of others that no one has the right to make. Forty-four per cent of the married couples in the parish would have experienced the humiliation of being married in the sacristy because they were ‘mixed’. Dozens were excommunicated because they can’t ‘fix’ a marriage that the Church deems improper, without destroying it. Many more deny themselves communion because they won’t repent in confession for behaviour that is not sinful in their conscience, but only in the eyes of the Church. Yet

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when Father Stone turns around, extends his arms, and says ‘Dominus vobiscum!’ (The Lord be with you!), he gives hope to hundreds in his congregation. Let’s discover why. So, it is the fourth Sunday of Advent, 1955. Father Stone walks from the sacristy to the foot of the altar behind two altar boys in soutanes and surplices. No procession here flanked by the congregation! There is much to be done in the next hour, and there won’t be much time for reflection. The mass is more to be attended than participated in. The Latin flows at a pace. Father Stone is wearing the purple colours of repentance of Advent and Lent. His square-backed Roman chasuble is a sparse and routine display of symbol. Vatican II will reignite the spiritual energy that colour and words bring. After it, banners and altars will exploit the inspiration that colours bring – the new life of green, the joy and hope of white, the red of the Spirit’s fire. The black of mourning the dead will have been bleached into the white of the hope of resurrection. Father Stone is vested in the full array of sacred clothing – an alb, amice, stole and cincture under his chasuble; a maniple on his left arm; and, on his head, a biretta – the curse of small altar boys who rarely can grasp the correct ridge of its three ridges when the priest presents it to them. (Stone had a liking for the biretta – he is always photographed in it. He wore it in the confessional, as he should have, the ritualists tell us, like a judge’s cap. He was a familiar sight walking in the church grounds, saying his breviary, doffing his biretta at the Lord’s name.) He will have said a distracted prayer over each one of these vestments as he puts them on. The prayers spell out their symbolic meaning – humility, purity, priesthood – and attach them to the instruments of torture – the blindfolds, the ropes, the bar of the cross – of Jesus’ Passion. We need to say something about reading signs and symbols. We have many to read. We humans are complicated beings, especially when we are in religious mode. Everything in our cultural environment conveys symbolic meaning to us – about gender in a colour, about class in a texture, about power in a shape. But the meanings are so profuse that we have to find a way of downloading them. We call that downloading, ‘ritual’, or in worship ‘liturgy – liturgos, ‘the work of the people’. Father Stone may have thought, as he put on his amice, ‘This neckerchief, that the Romans used to wear, would have been the blindfold that their soldiers used when they mocked Jesus, challenging Him to prophesy who had struck him’. ‘This cincture is the

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rope that held Jesus to the flagellation stone’. Maybe he had these prayerful thoughts, but it is unlikely. And it is even more unlikely that we had them, as we see him come fully vested onto the altar. We need to carve out some meaning-space to see such symbol-making. Even that is packed with many different, even contradictory, signs. We carve out a space to re-enact, in some way, the Lord’s Supper. We call it a ‘mass’. But even there the deep symbolic meanings of a word are hidden in their ordinariness. The word ‘mass’ is believed to have come from the dismissal: ‘Ite missa est’. ‘Go, the mass is ended’ is its usual translation. But, really, it is not just an ending. It is what we would likely call, in these days, as our ‘mission statement’. We are ‘sent’. We are the apostles, but only of another age. ‘Go, the Lord has sent you to spread the Good News’ might be a better translation. ‘Your mission isn’t ended. It has just begun’. In liturgy, there has to be a way in which such a mission statement is taken to heart, not just lost in a formalistic rattle of words. Whether we like it or not, we are all postmoderns now. We are experts in detecting ‘spin’. We measure sincerity all the time, and there are no moments when we value sincerity more than when we are at worship. Then we call on our priests to tell it as it is. Then we demand our sacred texts to be in a language that reaches into our souls. Anthropologists make a distinction between sign and symbol. A sign effects what it signifies immediately in its moment of signifying. Ex opere operato – ‘it works in the working’ – was an old theological way of expressing the immediacy of sacraments which were signs. A symbol does so more indirectly. We make a more notional assent to what the symbol means. When Vatican II wanted us to experience a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist that was fuller and more varied than just a ‘real presence’ in the transubstantiated host, they looked to the kiss of peace as one way of understanding His presence among us, bound-together by our love of Him. Now, Australians are culturally non-tactile. Italians and French and Arabs really kiss one another. Our personal space is more distant. So a handshake became our kiss of peace. Most of our handshakes are pretty good signs. They create the relationship they signify. We make congratulatory handshakes; sorrowful farewell handshakes; my-gosh-you-are-getting-married-handshakes. But we didn’t have a Christ-is-present-among-us handshake. For some time, the kiss of peace was awkward, as suddenly, in a Church in which we had been so practised in being private, we had to acknowledge somebody else. The kiss of

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peace was more symbol than sign. But symbols become signs as the ambience of the liturgy suffuses our gestures with meanings. Now, it is a moment of joy and hope and faith, as we give our ‘Peace’ beyond the ordinary boundaries of family and friends. Yes, we have to say, the experience of liturgy is kaleidoscopic, chaotic. But we are used to that in all the dramatic moments of our lives. We spend two hours in the cinema, and come out into the foyer, and tell, in a few seconds, what the story was, what it all meant. We reduce a 100 000-word book to a few dozen words. Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who had much to say about theatre, has given us a word that describes this process of meaning reduction. It is ‘catharsis’; ‘enlightenment’; ‘getting the plot’. Catharsis is not a piecemeal thing. It is whole. It is a reduction of complexity to simplicity in an instant. Rituals and liturgy, on the other hand, can be piecemeal, blaring, empty, contradictory or driven by different forces. Our experiences will be countless and distracted, but sometimes, not always, we will have ‘got the plot’ that God-Is-With-Us and we are Sent. Father Stone would have ‘got the plot’ of his vestments in some way other than by unravelling all its near-mythical stories. His vestments set him apart, and give him confidence to play his role as a priest. In his heart, he might have felt that a liking for ‘dressing-up’ was part of his vocation. But he will put them on with some humility for the respect that his parishioners will give him in them. And those who are in the pews? His robing triggers a beginning to our reflective thoughts, creates moods in us, hides the man in him, and tells them that their faith is bigger than the particular ways he displays his priesthood. At the foot of the altar, Father Stone genuflects and signs himself aloud in Latin. Then he says, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei ’ (‘I will go unto the altar of God’). And those men over 60, mindful of their drilling as altar boys, no doubt will almost reflexively answer: ‘Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum’ (‘To God the joy of my youth’). They will no doubt will also remember how they breathlessly, in a bent position, recited their Confiteor (I confess to Almighty God) and struck their breast three times: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault). And so the mass begins. Its Latin words flow over the congregation. By 1955 some liturgical reforms have begun. Some parishioners will follow the mass with new sorts of missals, I Pray the Mass, My Sunday Missal, or Saint

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Andrew Bible Missal. Some parishioners will have been introduced at retreats or in school to the Dialogue Mass and make the responses that the altar boys make. A far greater number will have pulled out their rosaries and begun reciting them silently. Or they turn to a favourite prayer book and are saying the prayers that give them most comfort. Many religions have special languages which only special groups – priests, prophets and shamans – understand. The story of how the Church used Latin as an instrument of power and control through the centuries is not a pretty one. But in 1955 it is not a great issue. Many are proud of the difference Latin makes to their Catholicism, and who could deny the richness of the cultural heritage of the Latin mass in our music? For most, Father Stone’s Latin words are a sort of mantra. They give a freedom to worship in private. The congregation is left alone with the mysteriousness of its beliefs. Many of their (and our) prayers are mantra-like – the Hail Marys of the rosary, the litanies and the creeds. They free the spirit to go where it will in sorrow, hope or love. Father Stone would have been well instructed in the liturgy. The bible of Church rubrics, The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described by Adrian Fortescue and edited and revised by another great Church rubrician, J. O’Connell is in St Francis Xavier’s presbytery library, stamped Bib. SJ Sydney ( Jesuit Library, Sydney). It has a used look. It describes the various voices with which the priest is to say mass – the loud tone to be heard by all, the whisper to himself, and the silent formation of sacred words. It says: ‘The prayers that are essentially sacerdotal and destined for sacramental acts – for the offering and blessing of the matter of the sacrifice and the like – are said secretly, for greater solemnity and reverence. They are the prayers of the priest acting alone, though in the name of all.’ Surely, this is what the people feel down in the pews. The mass is Father Stone’s more than theirs. He has his back to them. He whispers over his actions. His gestures of offering are all his. He is separated from the faithful by an altar rail beyond which half of them, the women, may not go. All are forbidden to touch the host; he alone may do that. What separates them from him principally is the ‘real presence’ in the tabernacle. Their focus as they enter the church is always there. A perpetually burning red lamp leads their eyes to the tabernacle. Their prayers are directed there, unless they are kneeling in the side chapels before the sweet and cliched statue of the Mary or the Sacred Heart, or if they are lighting

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candles for some intention. Their reverences are well practised. Nuns, brothers and our parents will have made sure that they make a double genuflection if the Blessed Sacrament is exposed or if they are leaving early during Benediction. Christ has a real presence in the tabernacle. We still have prayers that play to His loneliness there. That reality is burned into our images by all sorts of rules. We don’t bite the host at communion. We take it on our tongue. (Henry Johnston used to give detailed and sometime emotional instructions on how to put out the tongue – not too far, not too short, not too fast, not too slow.) The consecration is seen as the moment of climax in the mass. How Father Stone said the words of consecration we do not know. Some priests arch their bodies, round their lips, gather their spirits and imprint the words on the large white host in their hands – ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’ (‘For this is my body’). It is a logo logical moment par excellence. But are the words imprinted separately and individually – hoc (this) … est (is) … – or are the words a run-on sentence, ‘hocestenimcorpusmeum’, almost pushed into the bread as if the awesome power of being Christ and saying, ‘This is my body’, should not belong to ordinary men? It is a theatrical moment of the priesthood. Silence encloses worshipping gestures. Then the ringing of bells sends shivers down doubting and distracted spines. The congregation would have, as we do, absorbed the signs of the priest’s carefulness as he scrapes the altar cloth and chalice to ensure that no particle or drop becomes liable for some irreverence. We tell stories of ambiguous moments when a host is dropped, and we giggle at what happens when a host is dropped on a woman’s person. We see the priest join his thumbs and forefingers after the consecration so that, having touched the Lord’s Body, he touches nothing else. They and we are drilled in the rules of fasting before communion and have scruples when we swallow some toothpaste, or when we eat something four minutes after midnight. The most awful of our sins is to have gone sinfully to communion. Normally, a priest will be in the confessional till the offertory at mass to offset that terrible deed. Our imagination of God-with-us in the tabernacle is shaped both by love and fear. There is an intensity of engagement in the moment as we – Father Stone’s people and ourselves – return to our pew sand kneel in thanksgiving. Perhaps there is no prayer said more reverently at mass than that repeated three times over with a beating of the breast: ‘Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof; say but the word and my soul shall be healed’.

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They are the words of the Roman centurion at Capharnaum, pleading with Jesus to heal his paralysed servant with a word (Matthew 8:8). Father Stone’s mass, let us say, was not on one of the first Fridays. But they were important, together with the five first Saturdays for Our Lady of Fatima. In the seventeenth century, the Sacred Heart had given the promise to St Margaret Mary Alacoque that those who received communion on nine consecutive first Fridays would get ‘the grace of final perseverance, and that they shall not die under my displeasure, or without receiving the sacraments’. The Vision of Our Lady of Fatima had told the young shepherds of Ponteverdra, Portugal, in 1916 that all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, had fulfilled the conditions requested would be assisted at the hour of death ‘with all the grace necessary for the salvation of their souls’. Just in this year, 1955, the parish had filled St Mary’s to capacity at the visit of the Statue of Fatima on its world tour, and processed behind it in thousands at Monte Sant’ Angelo. On the Friday evening before the first Saturday, Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament began at 7.30 p.m. The women and children made their adoration till 11 p.m. From that hour till the first of the three early masses on the First Saturday, the men of the parish kept watch on roster. Perhaps there was an apocalyptic feel about these devotions. The apocalypse of the European revolutions and of communism is theirs to prevent if only they kept their promises. There was much talk of sin in their lives. Their rules of fasting and abstinence, of Sunday and Holy days of Obligation, of managing sexuality, these brought heaven and hell into the kitchen, the bedroom and everyone’s body and its relationships. Their talk of sins was full of worries – were they venial or, far worse, mortal. Saturday afternoon was confession time. Schoolgirl boarders make their way two and two in a crocodile to St Mary’s each Saturday afternoon – and if they were like many families, make a diversion to the local library. This was pre-television, and reading was their entertainment. Sometimes, because they were under instructions to go to confession by their parents or teachers, they had to invent their venial sins. Part of their sin-talk as Catholics was stories about the confessional – like that of the small boy who confessed to adultery because he hit his sister. Their talk of sin was an arithmetic of life – how many times they were uncharitable, had impure thoughts or missed Sunday mass. Every immoral act was a complete thing in itself – committed, examined, confessed and forgiven. The moral theology that their Jesuit priests learned in their seminaries

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was confession-oriented and magisterium dominated. It was a moral theology made for scruples, as the trainee priests were taught to explore the literalness of words. What really is ‘midnight’ (if I swallow something a few seconds, ten minutes, half an hour after midnight, have I broken my fast)? When is ‘wine’ made not-wine by pouring a little too much water into it and so making the whole mass invalid? When is the obligation of Sunday mass actually fulfilled (attending from the Offertory to the Communion)? In a rule-bound Catholic imagination, there was little room for the cultural humanness of their notions of time, and quantity and language. One of the Sydney bishops had a scruple about the words he spoke in ordaining the young Jesuits at St Mary’s. His scruple caused him much pain. He believed that the intended meaning of his words had to be in his mind as he spoke them for the sacrament to be valid. While the ordinands lay on the floor before him, he would be struck dumb for minutes on end. One of the freedoms Vatican II would return to the people of God would be to eliminate the element of fear in their sense of sacramentality. Father Stone’s mass ends in a rush, with all sorts of add-ons. He moves to his left, still with his back to his people, and reads the Last Gospel from the brass-framed chart on the altar. Perhaps he knows it by heart from reciting it over the years: ‘In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum’. The Last Gospel is those beautiful, mysterious words with which John the Evangelist begins his gospel. There will later be some nostalgia for that ‘Last Gospel,’ now that Vatican II has removed it from the liturgy of the mass. But the truth is that – even if Father Stone did not do so – it was usually rattled off with everyone thinking to leave. His people make a slight bend of the knees at the sentence, ‘And the Word was made flesh’ and they are off. But all the metaphors of their living faith are in that passage from John – Word, Light, Life, Witness – as well as the basic narrative of salvation and the wondrous understanding that in God-with-us we abound in grace and truth: In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. We might think that ends the mass, but it doesn’t. The 1955 congregation has what are called the ‘Leonine Prayers’. Father Stone goes to the foot of the

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altar and kneels there, the two altar boys beside him. He recites first the ‘Hail, Holy Queen’, and then the prayers for the pope’s intentions addressed to the patrons of Australia, Our Lady Help of Christians and St Francis Xavier. The Leonine Prayers were introduced in 1884 in some hope that the voice of the Universal Church might persuade God to resolve the ‘Roman Question’ – to help the ‘Prisoner of the Vatican’ somehow escape. When that seemed successful, the prayer was for the conversion of Russia. By 1955, the Church had turned the faithful’s intentions to the conversion of Australia. The prayer, in 1955, for the conversion of Australia – whether Australia wanted to be converted or not – is a reminder that we Australian Catholics were an isolated lot. Like us, few of them had entered a Protestant or Anglican church. It would have been a mortal sin had they worshipped in another church, with the same prayers with which they worshipped in theirs. This was more than a little sectarianism. There was not much generosity in their belief that there is no salvation outside the Church. That Church was the ‘Catholic Church’, not the ‘Roman Catholic Church’. They, like many of us as young people, were told not to put ‘Roman Catholic’ on the census papers. Catholic Truth Society pamphlets at the back of the church, Dr Rumble on radio on the ‘Catholic Hour’, brave apologists on soapboxes in Hyde Park, television entering living rooms as they celebrated their centenary, and the brilliance of Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, all these told them that faith and reason went together. We (alone) had it right. We had all the answers. St Peter, the joke went, when asked what was behind a closed door in heaven, said, ‘It’s the Catholics. They think they are the only ones here’. Father Stone’s mass is not ended yet. There could be more, if it was a novena, a mission or a special feast, Benediction. At Benediction, he would put on a large gold and white cope, wrap himself in a white, silken Humeral Veil with which to hold the monstrance with the exposed host, and bless those present. He makes clouds of incense from an intricate thurible. Those present sing ‘O Salutaris Hostia’ and ‘Tantum Ergo’ with gusto. At the words ‘Veneremur cernui ’ (‘Down in adoration falling’) and ‘Genitori genitoque (‘To the everlasting Father and Son’), Father Stone bows and incenses the exposed host. They recite the Divine Praises (and gain indulgences): Blessed be God. Blessed be His Holy Name. Blessed be Jesus Christ, true God and true Man. Then they wearily – and (not having had breakfast) hungrily – leave the church. Genuflecting, blessing themselves at the holy water font. It is a little difficult to have catharsis, ‘to get the plot’, when so much is

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unintelligible in Latin, when the messages of the liturgy are so diverse and disjointed. That will be Vatican II’s gift to the Church – to create a simple, direct liturgy that will enable us to get the plot. But many of us have experienced moments of joy, even perhaps a touch of mysticism, in the mass as Father Stone and our priests said it. Our God is awesome and intrusive. There are moments of aesthetic beauty and grand drama in our High masses. The divinity of the Son of God is more present to us than his humanity. We tend to be heretically Docetist in our devotions. Docetists believed that Jesus’ humanity was only an appearance. So, for us, burdened by our sexuality, grace is more a thing poured into our souls (as if into bottles), than a divine presence through all creation. Our ‘nature’, we must believe, isn’t a wondrous God-infused reality. It is more an obstacle in our way to the divine. Our time is measured more by the arithmetic of our sinfulness than by the long-term commitment of our spirits and the rhythms of our lives. Our faith can be very much a set of catechism answers, rather than an engaged intellectual, emotional and poetic search for understanding. Eamon Duffy, in Faith of Our Fathers, has offered a similar evaluation of his Catholic imagination for these years. For all its apparent narrowness it [Duffy’s Irish Catholicism] bore stronger witness than many modern forms of Catholicism to realities which have come to seem to me infinitely precious. Its ritual absolutes and rules look legalistic, rubric-mad today: but they spoke with a sure confidence of the sacramentality of life, the rootedness of the sacred not in pious feelings or ‘spirituality’, not in our heads or even exclusively our hearts, but in the gritty and messy realities of life, birth and death, water and stone and fire, bread and wine. The matter of fact ex opere operato confidence of our ritual world assured us that God was real, with a reality that did not depend on what we thought or how we felt about it. Let us make a jump from the parish’s centenary to sesquicentenary, from 1956 to 2006. John XXIII, as he opened Vatican Council II, urged the people of God to be prophets of hope rather than prophets of gloom. Yes, this ‘modern form of Catholicism’ that the people of God of St Mary’s, St Francis Xavier’s and Star of the Sea created is precious. But it is not precious in the sense that

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Duffy uses it; that is, as affecting fastidiousness in language or workmanship. That is his – perfectly legitimate, but mistaken – gloominess about a postmodern world. The Church Alive! is precious in this sense: of great spiritual, moral or non-material worth. The sacred is found in the ‘gritty and messy realities’ of a postmodern world, as it was found in the ‘gritty and messy realities’ of a prehistoric, ancient, medieval and modern world. Hopefulness belongs to the prophetic imagination that seeks the divine in whatever messiness the divine has graced. The people of God of the North Shore have made a postmodern Church in these 50 years, though many would be a little uneasy to read that they are postmodern prophets. ‘Live with it!’ John XXIII would have said, and continued: ‘Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by humanity’s own efforts and even beyond those very expectations are directed toward the fulfilment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church.’

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Reflection

On religious change

My story in Church Alive! is about the religious experience of ordinary people in a time of extraordinary change. For the parish that change comes from two directions: the Church itself and the Jesuits. The Church and the Jesuits were inspired by two prophets: John XXIII and Pedro Arrupe, SJ. Let me show how. For most of the ordinary faithful the change seemed sudden, dramatic and without foundation. Suddenly, they had to have a new language for their beliefs and, what was more difficult, to find new metaphors to replace metaphors that had served them so well. In fact, the changes that surprised them had started long before Vatican II. Theologians, scripture scholars and liturgists knew that. The ordinary faithful did not. They had no way of knowing that, for decades, the foundations of their believing had taken a paradigmatic shift. I would like to describe it.

Pedro Arrupe, The Transfiguration 6 August 1945 He kisses the altar and turns around. ‘Dominus vobiscum’, he says, extending his arms and joining the palms of his hands beneath his chin. He wears a Roman chasuble, straight across the shoulders, hanging in a softer shape in front. He looks a little like Ignatius Loyola as he is famously portrayed in the Gesu in Rome. The chasuble is black this day. Of course it is black. He has seen death

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and dying these last 24 hours, as he had never seen. It is 7 August 1945. Yesterday, The Feast of the Transfiguration, he had read the gospel (Matthew 17: 1–13) of the blinding light that Peter, James and John had seen transfigure Jesus on Mt Tabor. Yesterday, he had seen a light brighter than blinding, a light without flame that boiled living flesh in an instant. ‘Dominus vobiscum’, he says. But there is no ‘Et cum spiritu tuo’ in reply. Only moans and wheezing breaths. The chapel is filled to his very feet with bloody, blistered, broken bodies. He, and the young Japanese Jesuit novices he has the care of, brought home whom they could out of the maelstrom that was Hiroshima. He had been a medical doctor in an earlier life. Indeed, he had testified with his medical skills to a miracle he had seen at Lourdes. That had led him to the Jesuits. All this terrible day, he, and the young novices, had cleaned pus, burst blisters and cut out glass from flesh with a razor blade. The few medical supplies were gone in an instant in the cruel wave of suffering that overwhelmed them. The torrential rain that came from the evaporated water created by the holocaust doused the fires that engulfed the city. Their most awful memory of the night, as they carried home the injured, was of the screams and cries of the mutilated who had crawled to the riverbank to escape the fires around them and within them only to lie helpless as the tide rose. People from outside Hiroshima began to arrive, but they kept at a distance from the city. ‘It was an atomic bomb’, they say. ‘There’s a gas that kills for 70 years’. But faith, and the compassion that comes from it, brings strength. He goes into the city with his brothers, makes pyramids of the dead and burns them. He was the most modern man of us all. He had been at the dawn of a new day for the world. ‘Grant me, O Lord, to see everything now with new eyes’, he would pray. The Lord did give him new eyes. To see the world as the poor and the suffering, the refugees and asylum-seekers, and the raped and the pillaged saw it, gave him freedom, he used to say, the freedom to give and live for others. Their passion and the Passion of Jesus Christ were a dangerous and radical memory. Arrupe was elected General of the Society of Jesus in 1965, in time for him to attend the final session of Vatican Council II. Two things that the Council had said to the Church and the world charged his spirit. The first one – born of 80 years of reflection by theological thinkers such as John Henry Newman, Henri de Lubac, SJ, Yves Congar, OP, Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, Karl Rahner, SJ, and Edward Schillebeeckx, OP – was that

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salvation in Jesus Christ is universal. Universal, period! All of humanity is saved across all times, across all spaces. In anticipation of Jesus and after the fact of Him, God’s grace is ‘inculturated’ – that is the Council’s word – in all the expressions of humanity through all ages and into the future. So, the experience of the truth of that salvation in worship and faith is both full and never full at the same time. The working out of the truth of salvation is never defined by any one thing – not by a creed alone, not by a teaching alone, not by a way of worship alone, not by institutional structures alone. It is defined in the personal practice of all these things and much more. And that practice is never static, never frozen in one time. It is always imprinted with the past, yes, but it is always changed by the present. Tradition and faith are always being re-invented in the practice of them. That is the priestliness of the People of God. Without free-falling into faithlessness, they are constantly re-making themselves in hope. So, any description of this changing and always personal experience will forever be an act of wonder. It will not be a blind hind-sighted critique of its limits. It will be a humble display of its fullness. A history of believing, hoping and worshipping will be a pilgrimage through other people’s journeys. The second thing Arrupe heard from the Council was its call to the Church to live out its prophetic imagination and to use the freedom of God within the human spirit. Collegiality did not end with the pope and the bishops. Dioceses were to be collegial. Parishes were to be collegial. Religious communities were to be collegial. Collegiality demanded that authority be seen as service done with courage, generosity and hope, not empowerment. The great gift that the founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, had left his sons was his insight on the discernment of spirits, the prayerfully reflective ways of using the gifts of the Spirit in everyday life. There are seven of them. Remember? Wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear. Arrupe set his Jesuits to find them all in perhaps the most intensive self-examination the Society had ever made of itself. These reflections will imprint themselves on the three-in-one parish in these last 40 years. They will be an important part of our story. Pedro Arrupe was struck down by stroke in 1981. The last ten years of his life were a Passion of silence and stillness. John Paul II, who had refused, just before this, to allow Arrupe to give an example of self-disempowerment by resigning from his generalship, added to the pain and humiliation of the stroke. In an unprecedented move, he refused to allow the electoral process of the

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Society to go ahead and selected his own aged delegate, Paolo Dezza, SJ, to head the Society indefinitely. The Jesuits had embraced the ideals of Vatican Council II more enthusiastically than any other religious group. John Paul II’s actions did not augur well for relations between the order and his papacy, which they did not know then, had another 24 years to run.

H The summit of Mount Fujiyama is clear. The clouds that halo it won’t come in till 6 a.m. They had climbed all night to be there at this moment. Pedro Arrupe wants to say mass here in this holy place. It is 1939, early in his 27 years of life in Japan. The men are utterly alone. The blue sky above them was like some immense cupola in a temple, he writes later. He says his mass, using his missionary privileges: a waxed cloth instead of an altar stone, light travelling vestments, two candles flickering in the cold air, a screw-out chalice and a white wafer. He says the votive mass of St Francis Xavier, Japan’s Jesuit apostle. ‘There is no distinction between Jew and Greek. Because the same Lord is Lord of all, and is generous to all who call on him’, Paul tells the Romans (Romans 10: 12) in the epistle. ‘Come after me and I will make you fishers of men’, Jesus tells Peter and Andrew in the gospel (Matthew 4: 19). He stretches out his arms and says ‘Dominus vobiscum’ and thinks he is saying it to the 80 million Japanese before him. His hands tremble as he takes the Eucharist. There is tenderness in the moment, a touch of the mystical. We must, by the testimony of our lives, make clear to all the world that it is an integral part of the Christian vocation to bring about a social order ‘founded on truth, built on justice and animated by love’. Pedro Arrupe SJ, Witness to Justice.

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Angelo Roncalli – Historian Angelo Roncalli, just two years ordained, is priest-secretary to the Archbishop of Bergamo and professor of church history in the seminary. It is a dangerous time to be a professor of church history. This is 1905. Pius X is about to launch what Cardinal Ferrari of Milan, a mentor of young Roncalli, will call a ‘white terror’ in the Church. Pius X is on the hunt for ‘modernists’ and anyone who preaches freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. There are delators of gossip from presbytery tables and common rooms, and spies in the lecture halls. Roncalli is besotted by history. He has had an experience of discovery in the archives. Any historian will tell you what that means. He has discovered 39 parchment-bound volumes in the archiepiscopal library of Milan. They are entitled Archivio Spirituale – Bergamo. They are the papers of a giant of the pastoral church – Charles Borromeo, Saint Charles Borromeo. Borromeo was the apostle of religious renewal throughout northern Italy after the Council of Trent. Roncalli will spend 50 years of his life editing and publishing these 39 volumes. They tell him what a pastoral theology of renewal might be. Archives! The smell of glue, the touch of board and hide, the sight of discoloured paper, the sense that, perhaps for centuries, others’ eyes have not seen what is being seen now, the knowledge that every word and sentence has layers of meanings upon meanings, the realisation of the immediacy of a past’s present time is there, in the scratch of a pen, its anger, hate, love, pride and power – all these things make a humanist of every historian. The ambiguities and contingencies of living are imbedded on every scrap of paper an historian reads. So, an historian will have little patience with the imposition of this or that interpretation. These are the sorts of feelings Roncalli has, we have to think. He gives a lecture in December 1907; on the third centenary of the death of Cesare Baronius who was known, after Eusebius, as ‘The Father of Ecclesiastical History’. It is a lecture, really, on the place of historical scholarship in the Church. He has Baronius as the founder of ‘historical criticism’ and a patron of ‘renewal’ in Catholic scholarship. ‘He was a man of his times – we would say a “modern” man’ Roncalli says. Baronius had ‘intuited profoundly the needs of the Church and the society of his time’. That is just four months after Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi, a diatribe against historical criticism and modern times. There were those at the time, and since, prepared to argue that this censure of all free scholarship in the Church was infallible.

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Roncalli was clearly a mark for the delators. The Anti-Modernist Oath that all priests had to take came in 1910. ‘I submit and adhere whole heartedly to the condemnation and all the prescriptions which are contained in the encyclical Pascendi and in the decree Lamentabili, especially those that bear on the history of Dogma’. It was an oath that every seminarian would have to take before ordination until Giovanni Battista Montini, later Pope Paul VI, proposed to Vatican Council II that it be abolished. He quoted Matthew 5: 34–36 at the time. There Jesus is reported as saying to his disciples: ‘I say to you: do not swear at all … All you need to say is “yes” if you mean yes, “No”, if you mean no; anything more than this comes from the evil one’. The Australian version of the anti-modernist oath began: ‘I sincerely receive the teaching of faith as transmitted in the same sense and meaning right down to us, and therefore, I wholly reject the heretical notion of the evolution of dogmas …’. There was not an error on Pius X’s Syllabus of 65 Errors – that Roncalli obediently swore to reject – that did not contain some element of truth or was not subject to proper scholarly debate. He, and hundreds of thousands of others, would wear their anti-modernist oath as a mask over their inner selves. The young Roncalli, at the beginning of his ecclesiastical career, thought that he was unmasked in 1914. A cold fear gripped his heart. A cardinal in Rome, who had the making or the unmaking of him, said to him: ‘Professore, please be careful in the teaching of Scriptures’. After protesting to the cardinal that he taught church history not scripture, he got a reply that said, ‘according to information that had come my way’, he, the cardinal, had learned that Roncalli had read a book on the Index of Forbidden Books, Louis Duchesne’s History of the Early Church. Then Roncalli wrote the most terrible letter of his life – ‘grovelling’ his biographer Peter Hebblethwaite called it. Bending before the power over him, Roncalli denied whatever he actually believes in historical scholarship and freedom in learning. There were 60 years to come before Roncalli, now as Pope John XXIII, set the 2000 or so Fathers of the Vatican Council free with perhaps the most remarkable speech of a pope in modern times. He said, in part: In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons, whom though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion or measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but

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prevarication and ruin. They say that our era, in comparison with past eras, is getting worse and they behave as though they had learned nothing from history, which is, none the less, the teacher of life. They behave as though at the time of former Council’s everything was a full triumph for the Christian idea and life and for proper religious liberty. We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world was at hand. In the present order of things, Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations, which by men’s own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfilment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church. The 60 years of Roncalli’s priesthood and episcopacy were a preparation for this speech. As papal representative in Bulgaria, 1925–1934, Turkey and Greece, 1935–1944, France,1945–1952, and Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, 1953–1958, he was witness and agent to all the horrendous events of the twentieth century. There, as later, he sees conflict in the Church. Theologians and scholars of good will, whom he meets and reads, are banned from teaching in universities and seminaries. Now, he sees faith as a cultured thing – in language, sign and metaphor He would have gone back to his darkest days in 1908, when he sought the counsel of Bishop Gremia Bonomelli, one of whose pamphlets had been listed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Bonomelli told him, in 1908, what he thought might be needed: Perhaps a great ecumenical council, which would discuss rapidly, freely and publicly the great problems of religious life, would draw the attention of the world to the Church, stimulate faith and open up new ways for the future. Let me tell of one small incident in a remarkable life that is not ordinarily recounted. During his stay as papal representative in Istanbul from 1935 to 1944, Roncalli was the means of many Jews escaping the Nazis. One of them, Eric Auerbach, lived with Roncalli for some time. Auerbach was writing the great book of his life, away from his notes and books, but often in free conversation with Roncalli. Mimesis. Representation of Reality in Western Literature was its title. The story of Christ, Auerbach writes in it, ‘with its

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ruthless mixture of everyday reality and the highest and most sublime tragedy transformed theatre, poetry and song of Europe’. Auerbach and Roncalli would have talked long of the mysterious ways faith transforms reality. Perhaps Roncalli would have told Auerbach of a pilgrimage he took to the Holy Land in 1906. Here he is at dawn on a boat crossing Lake Tiberias. Let him tell us himself. I shall never forget the enchantment, the heart’s ease, the spiritual relish I discovered this morning floating upon these waters. Little by little, as our small boat stood into the lake, the first light of dawn lent colour to the water, the houses and then the surrounding hills. We did not speak, but our hearts were stirred. It was as though we could see Jesus crossing this lake in Peter’s boat. Jesus was before us and we could see him; unworthy though we were, we sailed towards him and our prayer silent though it was, was eloquent and spontaneous.

1913– 1962: A Paradigmatic Shift Between 1913, Roncalli’s self-betrayal of his own scholarly ideals, and 1962, when as John XXIII he set the Church free to be its modern self, there had been a revolution in the reflective, creative-minded Church. No, not an insurgency of theologians! The ‘white terror’ that Cardinal Ferrari of Milan feared in 1906 was still at work in 1950 in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis. All those theologians who would give voice to the Church’s modernity in Vatican Council II were silenced at one time or another and would obediently submit to their silencing. The censoring of their works did not matter. They, not the official Church, had authenticity. The truth of their understanding was percolating through seminaries, universities, convents and wherever young Catholics gathered to renew themselves in their faith. The revolution was a paradigmatic shift in understanding. What the Vatican condemned was believably true in this paradigmatic shift. The trick-words used to describe them – ‘relativism’, ‘modernism’ and ‘Marxism’ – had little application to the truths as they were known and practised. Thousands could take their anti-modernist oath because they could truly say it meant what they meant, not what the Vatican meant.

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Let me describe simply and directly these truths that begin to suffuse the believing, reflective Church from 1913 to 1962. They will be voiced at Vatican Council II and will transform the practices of religion on The Other Side, 1956–2006. We will return to them often in our story. Let me leave the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘where froms’ to the notes. Let me reduce to four these truths that had authenticity no matter what the Church in Rome said about them. First, the story of Jesus of Nazareth is the central truth of Christianity. That story has to be confronted and performed first, not reasoned faith, not creeds or Church – the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. That story is only to be known in the histories made of him. Those histories are infused not only with the language and perceptions of the times in which they were written, but with the thousands of years of reflections of the Jewish people of whom Jesus’ story is a part. And because we are readers nearly 2000 years after the events they describe, these histories are for us infused with what all the readings, art, music, theatre, theology, liturgy and sermons have made of them. Being a story, it will have drama and time. Being sacred to us, we will make sacred times of these dramas. There will be a season in our year for each part. Being important to us, we will repeat the readings of it over and over again, never fully leaching it of all its meanings. Being human, we will always tend to be – in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s word – ‘religious’. We will always be tempted to find the marvellous more believable than the ordinary. Strangely, we will always believe the divinity of Christ more easily than the humanity of Jesus. But being readers in almost every minute of our living, we will also know our own humanity and all its tricks. Second, Jesus of Nazareth and his mother, Miriam of Nazareth, are to be known in their most radical of words. For Jesus, take his ‘Sermon on the Mount’. For Miriam, take the powerful song she sang at the time she visited the pregnant Elizabeth, the mother-to-be of John the Baptist, her ‘Magnificat’ – ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord’. Jesus’ editors, Matthew, Mark and Luke, work hard on these blessings (beatitudes) of the Sermon on the Mount. We know them in total as eight. Blessed are the poor, those who mourn, the meek, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. Luke is the most radical of the editors: ‘How happy are you who are poor: yours is the kingdom of God’. And he adds a curse: ‘But alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now’. Matthew is a little more compromising: ‘How happy are the poor in spirit’, and leaves out the curses. He has

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an eye for those to whom he is writing. They all do, of course, but Matthew constructs the words of Jesus as steeped with referential meanings of sacred texts. His words aren’t words taken in dictation. They are a song, a poem and a prayer. They are an endless font of meanings for time and occasion. How happy are the poor in spirit; Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Happy the gentle: They shall have the earth for their heritage. Happy those who mourn: They shall be comforted. Happy those who hunger and thirst for what is right: They shall be satisfied. Happy the merciful: They shall have mercy shown them. Happy the pure in heart: They shall see God. Happy the peacemakers; They shall be called sons of God. Happy those who are persecuted in the cause of right: Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 5: 3–10 Miriam of Nazareth’s own song has inspired other songs for centuries. But it is the twentieth century, the century of war and oppression, the century of man-made disasters and holocausts, the century of refugees and abject poverty that has heard its radical thrust. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord And my spirit exults in God my saviour; Because he has looked upon his lowly handmaid. Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me blessed, For the Almighty has done great things for me. Holy is his name, And his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him. He has shown the power of his arm, He has routed the proud of heart.

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He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away. He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his mercy – according to the promise he made to our ancestors – of his mercy to Abraham and his descendants forever. Luke 1: 46–55 In her song, Miriam joins other women of Israel – Deborah, Hannah and Judith – who sang ‘dangerous songs of salvation’. But especially she joins with Hannah, proclaiming a God in solidarity with those who suffer. It is, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: … the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary … This song has none of the sweet nostalgic, or even playful tunes of our Christmas carols. It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about collapsing thrones and humbled lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind (D. Bonhoeffer, The Mystery of Holy Night). Regrettably, the Church has seemed ever ready to succumb to the temptations that Jesus resisted when Satan offered him all the kingdoms of the world. Or at least it has always seemed to find Matthew’s ‘poor in spirit’ more accommodating than Luke’s ‘poor’. Europe’s revolutions, the scandals of the struggle for the Papal States, the reshaping of priests’ mindsets in the total institutions of the seminaries, the bourgeois trappings of the clergy’s lifestyle, these gave Matthew’s ‘poor in spirit’ a touch of what a later generation would call ‘spin’. Mindsets, however, would only be liberated in ways in which they were made – by living the life of the poor. The priest-workers of France were the beginning of a liberation theology. But the twentieth century was the century that learned who the ‘poor’ actually were. They were those who were dying in their hundreds of millions from war, persecution, torture, famine, disease, and also the poor, in as many millions, suffering from sexual, social and cultural oppression. Theirs were the eyes through which Jesus and Miriam of Nazareth saw.

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Third, faith and tradition are clothed in the language and metaphors of the times in which they are enunciated. ‘Inculturated’ will be the word that Vatican II uses. Faith and tradition are both inculturated. How could they be otherwise? In 1923, deep in the Ordos Desert in Far Asia where he was discovering the earliest traces of human presence in China, Teilhard de Chardin wrote a mystic’s essay, ‘The Mass on the World’. ‘Since I have neither bread nor wine, nor altar’, Teilhard addressed God, ‘I will raise myself beyond these symbols … I, your priest, will make the whole earth my altar and on it will offer you all the labours and sufferings of the World.’ The Vatican and his brother Jesuits banned Teilhard’s writings after his death. He died in New York on 10 April 1955. He was in exile from his beloved France, whose fight for liberty he had served as a stretcher-bearer in World War 1, and in exile from Chairman Mao’s China. My professor of Palaeolithic archaeology at Harvard, Hallam J. Movius, a personal friend of Teilhard, urged me in 1964 to visit Teilhard’s grave at the Jesuit novitiate at St Andrew-onHudson, New York (now the Culinary Institute of America.) Tell the Jesuits, he said, that they have misspelt his name on his headstone. God loves a little irony, I think. Teilhard’s banned essay on ‘The Mass on the World’ inspired Pope John Paul II in his priesthood. The Eucharist, he wrote, is ‘celebrated in order to offer “on the altar of the whole earth the world’s work and suffering” in the beautiful words of Teilhard de Chardin’. (He quoted the phrase in his encyclical on the Eucharist, 2003). All through these years, from 1913 to 1962, the stories of the earth and humanity’s place on it were moving farther and farther back into deep time, growing older by the work of scholars like Teilhard. The universe was growing larger, the basic units of matter ever smaller, the human mind, body and spirit more layered. These were the years of Rutherford in nuclear physics, of Margaret Mead in anthropology, of Picasso, Einstein and Stravinsky in the arts and mathematics. These were the years of the philosopher Wittgenstein, the novelist Joyce, the artist Dali. These were the years in which faith and tradition were being inculturated in a universe as marvellous as it was mysterious, and the ways of knowing it were full of challenges, gambles, raptures and uncertainties. With a world so alive to discovery, how could any believer not be challenged to explore the metaphors of faith and tradition for new meaning? God’s revelations can only come in words that His (His?) people can find and hear. It is only the Word that is divine. All other words are human and as distant from the divine as from one another.

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So, these are the years of the beginning of an exploration of how the very human words of the creation story of the Garden of Eden have meaning at a time like ours, when, through the Deep Field Images of the Hubble Telescope, we think we can see to the edge of the universe 13 billion light years away. We began to live in suspended understanding and vague realisation of the realities of inexperienceable time and space. Leaps of faith into the metaphors of our sciences were many. Alongside those, do the metaphors of Teilhard de Chardin seem so preposterous: Now the earth can certainly clasp me in her giant arms. She can swell me with her life, or take me back into her dust. She can deck herself out for me with every charm, with every horror, with every mystery. She can cast me to my knees in expectation of what is maturing within her breast … But her enchantment can no longer do me harm, since she has become for me, over and above herself, the body of him who is and of him who is coming (de Chardin, The Divine Milieu). In these years, there was a growing understanding of faith. Faith wasn’t sets of closed beliefs. Faith wasn’t a creed or a catechism. In rite and prayer, believing was an act of the whole body, mind and spirit, a way of seeing. ‘Faith’, Eamon Duffy has written, ‘is a direction, not a state of mind; states of mind change and veer about, but we can hold a direction. It is not in its essence a set of beliefs about anything, although it involves such beliefs. It is a grateful openness to the gift of being’. The great discovery of these years in the believing, learning and reflecting Church was that the optimism that modernity inspired in the search for truths about humanity and the universe was an optimism that a student of scripture or of theology, in all its dimensions, could share. How could the Spirit be a prophet of gloom? That is what John XXIII would say. Tradition, too, was coming to be seen not so much as something handed down from the past, as the handing down itself. Tradition is the ever-changing, ever-being re-invented understanding discovered in the practices of the present, done in the light of the past. The magisterium – the teaching power of the Church – is just as living a process, as susceptible to change and mistake as any human institution, given the promise of the Lord. ‘It is not for you to know times or dates that the Father has decided by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you

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and then you will be my witnesses, not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judea and Samaria, and indeed to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1: 7–8). Tradition is the never-ending discovery, even at the ends of the earth, of what the Holy Spirit wants of the People of God. Fourth, People of God – these years before Vatican II were years in which the whole of the theological world knew that Vatican I had been unfinished business for the Church. It had defined the powers of the papacy in only one narrow respect, its infallible powers when it acted in special circumstances in the name of the whole Church. So, these years were devoted to much debate on how the Church should be defined in terms other than the triumphalist model that had evolved. Propositions that defined the laity as merely ‘non-clergy’ were clearly false. Suggestions that the laity was called to a sort of pass-degree in salvation while religious and priests were the honours students seemed to betray the radical nature of Jesus’ universal call to holiness. That the triumphalist Church reflected the Pentecostal beginnings was a betrayal of the faith and bravery of those humble years. The Lord’s gift to apostleship had been given to the Twelve and all the bishops who succeeded them, not just to the One, Peter. The history of the Church’s first centuries showed how both men and women shaped it with their practices and with the different ministries inspirited into them. The Universal Church made itself with God’s grace, and with little input from the one successor to Peter, until the Church itself became entangled with the politics of the Roman Empire. At Vatican II, the Dutch bishops, with a faith inculturated by a deep, centuries-old sense of republicanism in the Netherlands, gave an insurgent voice against the Roman curia’s vision of the triumphalist Church. We are the people of God, they declared. We have a covenant with the Lord. We are a Pilgrim Church. Power should go with the authority the people of God gives its bishops at the levels where the faithful live out the ambiguities of their beliefs.

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Hopefulness I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life, or something like it. I discovered later, and am still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman … By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ at Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith: that is metanoia. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Tegel Prison, 1944 Religions are poems. They concert Our daylight and our dreaming mind, our Emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture Into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words And nothing’s true that figures in words only. Les Murray, ‘Religion is Poetry’

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Religion is the poem, the song and the dance of hopefulness we perform in a world that is as marvellous as it is mysterious. I would like to think that my story of the parish from 1956 to 2006 is something of that poem, song and dance of hopefulness. Here is something of an overture, a prologue. In June 2005 a radical Christian philosopher, an apostle of the hopefulness of the word and a father of much of the mindset of Vatican II, died. His name was Paul Ricoeur. He is a hero to those who have discovered through him that truth is to be found in dialogue. They have encountered what faith might be in our irremediable ignorance, and how the otherness of the world is to be found even in ourselves. He had a favourite quotation. It was the ending of Georges Bernanos’ 1936 novel, Diary of a Country Priest, ‘It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself … The ultimate blessing would be to be able to love oneself humbly, just like any other suffering member of Christ.’ I would like to call my overture to a story of a parish’s religious experience in times of change, ‘Learning to love oneself humbly’. I come to that title from statistics in the parish archives that tease me. Those statistics derive from the Episcopal Visitations. At St Mary’s in 1968, communions numbered 102 000. In 1971 they numbered 150 000. At St Francis Xavier’s, communions numbered 49 500 in 1968. By 1976 they numbered 75 000. The dramatic increase in communions after 1968 is an indication how parishioners began humbly to love themselves. In 1968, of course, came the trauma of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, Humanae Vitae. It was the year of the beginning of a reputed exodus from the Church – no, it wasn’t. It was the year in which Catholics, certainly the parishioners of the North Shore parish, began to redefine themselves as Catholics. The exodus was from a Catholicism defined by Sunday mass attendance, obedience to formalistic Church rules, and an acceptance of papal infallibility where it did not reach. Humanae Vitae freed Catholics to love themselves humbly by delivering their most personal decisions to their own conscience. Hence, the great increase in communions. Many other things than its reproductive capacity measured love in marriage. The hypocrisy of banning contraception by any other means than ‘natural’ means, the humiliation of ruling a love relationship with a thermometer and a calendar, the patent evils in the world that a ban on contraception created – these all freed thousands from the confessional. They went to communion. Vatican II used the word, dialogue, 1300 times in its documents. As secular science is progressed by dialogue, as social conflict is reduced by dialogue, as governance is authorised by dialogue – so, too, theology (dogmatic, moral, liturgical and ecclesiastical) is advanced by dialogue. The will of God is discovered by dialogue; the

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communal life of Church, diocese and parish, is enriched by it. Paul VI had betrayed Vatican II’s notion of dialogue by refusing to listen to those whom he himself had appointed to advise on contraception. And the faithful knew it. The whole Church had been exposed to both a sociology and politics of religious knowledge in Vatican II. What that sociology and politics of knowledge taught was that infallibility is the original sin of institutions – all institutions, such as companies, governments and churches. Institutions can never be seen to be wrong. It is a loss of face. Triumphalism is their cancer. It denies their victims justice. It rewards the wicked. It leaves reconciliation to later generations. Neither the infallible nor the triumphant love themselves humbly. They love themselves proudly. To love oneself humbly means, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer suggested, abandoning oneself to a ‘worldliness … living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities’. It means ‘taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ at Gethsemane’.

H It is 28 October 2005. Pope Benedict XVI is at the window above St Peter’s Square where we had seen the terrible, yet inspiring, sight of John Paul II enduring the Passion of his slow debilitating illness. There are 50 000 in the Square below the white-haired figure of Benedict. He is celebrating the fact that, on this day 40 years ago, Paul VI ended Vatican II with the publication of a number of documents: Nostra Aetate (In Our Age), The Declaration of the Relationship of the Church to nonChristian Religions – recalling the special bond that existed between Christians, Jews and Muslims, and condemning religious persecution; Optatam Totius (Decree on Priestly Formation); Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of Religious Life), Christus Dominus (Decree on the Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church) and Gravissimum Educationis (Declaration on Christian Education). Benedict, as the young Dr Joseph Ratzinger, was one of the theological experts that advised Vatican II. He was there with the young Karol Wojtyla, and has stood by Wojtyla ( John Paul II), through the 28 years and the 14 encyclicals of his pontificate. The first of these encyclicals, Redemptor Hominis (Redeemer of Mankind, 4 March 1979), told the Church: ‘I chose the name John Paul II to express my love for the unique inheritance left to the Church by John XXIII and Paul VI. I wish to refer to that inheritance as a threshold, from which I intend to continue into the future, guided by the Spirit Christ promised and sent to his

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Church’. In the last of John Paul II’s encyclicals, Ecclesia de Eucharistica (On the Eucharist in its Relationship to the Church, 17 April 2003), he told the Church that, in the year of the millennium, 2000, he had celebrated the Eucharist in the Cenacle, the Upper Room, where Jesus himself had taken the bread and wine and said, ‘This is my Body which will be given to you’. John Paul then went back to the day of his first mass, 2 November 1946, in Krakow. ‘I looked upon the host and chalice representing the drama of Golgotha, revealing a mysterious “contemporaneity”; and recognising in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and who opened their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope’. Benedict and John Paul, standing in the same window over St Peter’s Square, have been the chief witnesses to the mysteries of the Church that Vatican II unfolded 40 years ago. Forty years ago, on the threshold of the future Church, 80 per cent of the parish weren’t born. That 80 per cent have been baptised into a Church that was learning to love itself humbly, and, perhaps, they don’t know how radical a process that was and is. They are not always interested in ‘how things used to be’; they are inclined to say ‘Live with it’ when the memories of the other 20 per cent are brought forward. Those memories belong to the history of these years, nonetheless. Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope) and Lumen Gentium (Light of Nations) were the two great documents of Vatican II that helped parishioners discover these new and old mysteries of the Church. They told the faithful, now the People of God, that they belonged to a Pilgrim rather than a Triumphant Church, that they must look to the world with a ‘realism marked by Christian hope’, and that they, the laity, were the Church, missioned by Christ, not so much to obey the commandments as to embrace the beatitudes. Joy. Hope. Light. There have seemed little of these in the 40 years. Instead, there was much pain and anger. Those who loved the Latin mass felt betrayed. They saw the changes in ritual as the banalisation of the transcendent. They had been strong in their stand against a hostile secular world, and felt that the Church had caved in to all the weaknesses of modern life. Many became a different sort of pilgrim church, as they travelled around Sydney to unromantic and dilapidated halls where they could hear a Latin mass. Among those who weren’t angry, there was a sort of spiritual dismay. On the one hand, they were still hearing cliche-ridden sermons that were neither honest nor true. On the other hand, there were priests who ran riot with the new rituals. And the language of worship that, in the Latin prayers they had learned and loved,

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had brought comfort in their rhythm and vocabulary became in the vernacular of the mass and the words of hymns, ugly and trivial. The Church had swept away a liturgy that had given them the comfort of silence and peace, and occasionally a touch of the mystic, and put it into the hands of priests who sometimes seemed scarcely to believe what they were doing and did not know how to do it when they believed. The dismay was deeply rooted. The people were confused. They had been made the Catholics they were by an education that was consistent in all its parts – its theological structure, its morals, its practices and its liturgies. Suddenly, everything is inconsistent. The theological structures now begin with premises with which they have no familiarity. These include the new moralising demands and independence of conscience that they have never been taught to use and at which they are frightened. The new liturgy demands, for its success, a personalised response and involvement in circumstances that seem near impossible. Some changes are imposed on the faithful in such careless and meaningless ways as to make them cynical and spiritually restless. At a time when they most need spiritual sustenance and an understanding education, they have grave difficulty in finding it in their churches. The parish was protected from much of this dismay by its Jesuit pastors and by the fact that its children were being educated by religious people – Mercies, Josephites, Loretos, Marists and Jesuits – who were better educated in and more attuned to the messages of Vatican II than many of the Church’s priests. Also, many parishioners were professionally educated at the University of Sydney and came in touch with a quite extraordinary Newman Society movement, the Intellectual Apostolate, and a quite extraordinary chaplain, Roger Pryke. In May 1965, the Thirty-First General Congregation of the Society of Jesus elected a most remarkable man as their twenty-eighth Superior General. Pedro Arrupe was his name. We have met him. He had been able to make an input into the last session of Vatican II from the area of his expertise – ‘inculturation’, and other metaphors of God’s presence in the world. In 1968 we saw him at the Latin American Bishops Conference in Medellin, Columbia. Medellin would turn the Church’s attention to poverty and political oppression. It radicalised Arrupe. ‘The mission of the Jesuit in the world’, he would write, ‘is the service of justice’ – an absolute requirement. Arrupe’s first direct statement to the Australian Jesuits was just as radical: Jesuits must be brought abreast of the world in which they breathe and are able to face with intelligence and love the world of tomorrow.

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Many Catholics are afraid of this new world when all that they were took for granted, that made human living so serene, have been questioned, turned inside out, subjected to radical revision. At the risk of startling you, let me tell you quite honestly: it is not this new world that I fear. After all, God is there – however difficult it may be at times to discover Him. I am rather afraid that we Jesuits may have little or nothing to offer this world, little or nothing to say or do in this world to justify our existence as Jesuits. I am afraid that we may repeat yesterday’s answers to tomorrow’s problems, take a way men no longer understand, speak a language that does not speak to the heart of living man. If we do this, we shall more and more be talking to ourselves; no one would listen, because no one will understand what we are trying to say. An article he had read in the Australian Jesuits’ in-house journal, Province News, April 1970, had prompted that statement. The article was written by Ambrose ‘Sam’ Byrne, SJ, and was titled ‘Do Jesuits and Parishes Really Mix?’ Sam Byrne was a farmboy from Nar Nar Goon, Victoria. He would one day carry his farm skills to the Australian Jesuit Mission in India, where he pioneered agricultural work at the Teachers’ Training Institute, Sitagarha. Poor health brought him back to Australia and eventually to St Ignatius, Norwood, South Australia, where he was parish priest from 1975 to 1987. The Australian Jesuits, at the urging of Arrupe, had begun an exhaustive – and exhausting – review of their apostolate. They began the task with the certain knowledge that their ageing (56 per cent of them were over 50 in 1969) and depleting numbers (only four candidates in any ten were persevering) meant that they needed to redefine what ‘Jesuit’ work might mean, when there were few or even no Jesuits in it. For years, official ‘Visitors’ from outside the province had told them that they were overworked and drained of their physical and spiritual energies. Their young men, radicalised by Vatican II and the decades of education to the inevitable directions that Vatican II would take, were demanding that their own education and training be pastoral. They wanted to take the gamble that working with the abject poor was more to the Greater Glory of God than educating elite middle-class Catholics. They had no patience with staffing boarding schools for dysfunctional families. And while some of their past Jesuit greats had fostered ‘Bodily Health and Spiritual Vigour’, they did not see that coaching under-14 football teams was very priestly.

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They were discovering that the love of learning, which their Jesuit training had burned into their souls, could not easily be eradicated. They had always gambled that faith and learning would not contradict one another. Now they saw that their fundamental apostolate was to reconcile the reality of living with propositions of faith through learning and liturgy. They saw that the instruments by which they could educate a world to its God-given possibilities were these: 1.

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola directed to every person’s discerning of a calling Christ made of them.

2.

Research and scholarship. Wherever they turned – to the refugee camps, the drug addicted, the social order – their steps would be guided, as far as they could be, by science as much as art.

3.

Education of themselves and of those that hunger for the theological, scriptural and socio-cultural knowledge they can give.

4.

Pastoral engagement. They did not want the albatross of institutions around their necks. They wanted to learn directly, from those they served, how they could serve.

In the lists of personal preferences for the apostolates that Australian Jesuits wished to pursue, parishes were eleventh – after two seminaries, secondary schools without boarders, retreats for religious and retreat houses, the Indian Mission, The Institute of Social Order, university colleges and chaplaincies, and the Port Moresby chaplaincies. That had triggered Sam Byrne’s question: ‘Do Jesuits and parishes really mix?’ He was not sure. The Province didn’t provide special training for parishes. Parishes, he wrote, ‘scarcely come within the ambit of truly serious Jesuit endeavour’. Jesuits were missing out on changed perceptions of what a parish might be when territoriality was of less concern, and when the notion of a ‘parish community’ surely had to change in modern urban life and changed working conditions. The Province had taken few steps to explore the changed notions of ministry and priesthood advocated by Vatican II. It had not looked to its global Jesuit experience to see what new notions of parish were at work. Arrupe told the Australian Jesuits: ‘Start talking’. They did. Indeed, the sceptical might say that they haven’t stopped talking for 30 years. But that would be unfair as anyone who has been engaged in the creation of a ‘mission statement’ for such things as school councils, business corporations, university departments or parent support groups might agree. It is difficult to really talk to one another, even more difficult to find words that express a group’s intentions, and even more

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difficult to convey the meaning of these words, experienced so intensely in the dialoguing group, to those who have not heard the exchanges. Those first discussions among the Jesuits engaged specifically in the pastoral ministry were very dispiriting. ‘How could we hope to make a parish community when we can’t make community among ourselves?’, they asked. ‘How can we experiment in new forms of parish, when to do so is to neglect our responsibility to the parishes we have? How shall we find a lay leadership that will replace our life commitment to the Church?’ Thirty years on, the conversations are more inspirited than dispirited. The talk now is between 30 or so men and women professional lay pastoral assistants, and 17 Jesuits in the parish ministry and migrant chaplaincies. And that Pastoral Ministry of the Province is fed by Pastoral Ministries in each of the Jesuit parishes across the country. The list of those responsibilities is impressive: Queensland, Toowong, two churches, a primary school; NSW, North Sydney–Lavender Bay–Kirribilli, three churches, a primary and a secondary school; King’s Cross/Elizabeth Bay, a church, a soup kitchen; Victoria, Hawthorn, two churches and two primary schools; Richmond, two churches and two primary schools; South Australia, Norwood, a church and a primary school; Sevenhill–Riverton– Manoora, eight churches, and one primary school. In the chaplaincies: migrant chaplaincies, ‘parishes without borders’; four Polish chaplains (Victoria); two Spanish (New South Wales); three Vietnamese (South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria); one German chaplaincy in Victoria; and six part-time chaplains (Filipino, Laotians, Cambodians, Italian, Korean and Vietnamese). The Jesuit ministry includes: Jesuit Refugee Services, Jesuit Social Services, Uniya Social Justice Research Centre, Ministries to Indigenous Peoples, Prison Ministry, Social Ministry Greenvale, five Jesuit secondary schools, six Retreat centres, a CLC Ignatian Institute, United Faculty Theology courses at the University of Melbourne, a Young Adult Ministry, one University College, and several men involved in the Intellectual Apostolate – for example, Jesuit Publications. These ministries are all in ‘prayerful dialogue’ – the phrase is John Paul II’s, to which we will return later. For now let us read, and analyse a little, the draft mission statement of the most active of those prayerful dialogues from Lavender Bay. In the name of Jesus and in the spirit of Ignatius, they declare themselves to be welcoming, outreaching communities, graced by the sacraments, sharing a lifelong journey. ‘In the name of Jesus’ – there was a time when Catholics tended to use the name ‘Jesus’ a little awkwardly. Perhaps it was a little too evangelical, and not ecclesial enough for Catholics, or a revelation of something very private. But times have

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changed since Vatican II. The Council’s message that Jesus Christ was the first encounter in the quest of us all for God has come through. ‘Jesus’ is not the embarrassingly sentimental figure of earlier statuary and holy cards. The Jesus of the Jesuits – the Society of Jesus – is a ‘Man for Others’, even as they purport to be, in their Ignatian spirit. ‘In the spirit of Ignatius’, ‘Ignatius’ is one of those code words that Jesuits use repeatedly and respectfully. ‘We make Ignatius’ spirituality and its insights accessible, assisting individuals and groups to become more open to the experiences of God’s actions’, the Parish Mission Statement explains. There is a certain mysteriousness about ‘Ignatian spirituality’, however, even in a Jesuit parish. In these days of a pluralism in spiritualities, many are unwilling to tie themselves to a set of concepts they are not sure of, and that seem to have a certain methodological stiffness about them. But Ignatian Spirituality Centres happily educate parishioners, and anybody else, to what Ignatian spirituality might mean. Certainly, a key element in Ignatian spirituality would be ‘discernment’, the recognition of the divine in one’s personal life. These are the first words Ignatius wrote in the Spiritual Exercises: ‘The structure of these exercises has the purpose of leading a person to true spiritual freedom. We attain this goal by gradually bringing an order of values into our lives so that we make no choice or decision because we have been influenced by some disordered attachment or love.’ The Spiritual Exercises will surprise those who read them for the first time. As a text, they are sparse, trimmed by the genius and experience of Loyola as he made them himself and gave them. They are in no way discursive. They can be read in 30 minutes, but they need 30 days to do. Their central point is decision. The making of that decision is in step with the developing drama of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Once the decision is made, the exercises are directed to commitment and fulfilment. Before the decision, the mood is collected and measured. Afterwards, it is free, Pentecostal and celebratory. Ignatian spirituality is neither the one – collected and measured, nor the other – free, Pentecostal and celebratory. It is both. ‘Welcoming’, the Lavender Bay–Kirribilli ministers write. They declare themselves welcoming to those who have been unwelcome in some parts of the Church – gays and those ‘excommunicated’ from the sacraments for life, by reason of one wrong step. Welcoming to the gift-givers – those with special talents and qualities to share. They are – they witness, too – ‘graced by sacraments’. Nothing is more important to the parish than its liturgies, its sacramental life. And, finishing, there is no more important metaphor in their faith-life than ‘journey’.

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This Mission Statement of Lavender Bay–Kirribilli emerged out of ten years of dialogue and 20 years of development before that. The last ten years of dialogue did not begin easily. The notion of a pastoral team as distinct from a parish Pastoral Council did not sit well with some. It seemed to promise competition with established systems of parish leadership. And, toward ordinary parishioners, would a ‘Pastoral Team’ have a ‘better-than-thou’ quality? How would it avoid becoming a separate elite? Hopefulness, however, exists in the real, and builds for the future. The North Shore–Lavender Bay–Kirribilli writers had such hope. If the ‘reality’ of the parish is the fact that parishioners come from 89 suburbs, that 64 per cent are female, that 60 per cent are over 40 years (compared with 47 per cent of the total population), that the primary reasons why people come to the parish are the sense of community it conveys, the music that lifts hearts, the Jesuit priests’ humaneness, and homilies that are lively and engaging, then the pastoral team, they know, needed to have an action plan to energise inclusiveness and ‘welcoming’. They needed to deepen relationships within groups – the young, for example – and between groups – the ‘churched’, and the ‘unchurched’, and the ‘differentchurched’ – to discover ways of involving more people in the ministries and liturgies, to discover the gifts parishioners want to bring to the parish. The future? As the problems of the Sydney archdiocese and its falling numbers of priests impinge on the parish, it is likely that the parish will grow territorially by amalgamation, and the proportion of priests to parishioners will grow smaller. As the age of the Jesuits, Province-wide and within the parish, meets crisis point – in what? ten years? twenty years? – the notion of ‘companionship’ will become more critical. Inevitably, the parish has to educate itself to a new sort of priestliness. That priestliness needs to be something more than ‘lay-leadership’. It has to be sacramentalised in some way. As I review the prolific papers of this intense pastoral dialogue among women and men committed in their hopefulness to a communion in Christ, it is clear that this is the slow path to a new priestliness in the Church. As John XXIII said: ‘It all happens in the parish’. At the beginning of these 30 years of dialogue an important change came over the parish. From 1971, the parish priests were both Australian-born and Australian-educated: James Dynon, SJ, Paul Coleman, SJ, George Belfrage, SJ, Joseph Sobb, SJ, Peter Quin, SJ, Anthony Smith, SJ, at St Mary’s; Kevin Staunton, SJ, Denis Sheridan, SJ, Robert Walsh, SJ, and Celso Romanin, SJ, at St Francis Xavier’s and Star of the Sea.

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None of these men would claim to be the intellectuals of the Province. Their community life would be full of self-deprecating stories of their intellectual achievements in philosophy and theology. They are a second generation of Jesuits, enjoying the freedoms from the restraints of being an Irish mission. They belong to a time of rediscovery and revitalisation of the Jesuit apostolate. It was a recovery of their roots of Jesuit tradition, a sense that they could rekindle in some way the spirit of prophecy that inspired the Order before the overlays of a later routine smothered much of the life out of it. It wasn’t just a replication of the golden age of Jesuitry. This was a feeling of being at the forefront of something new, rather than guarding some museumlike treasure. Although there was also a sense of self-satisfaction that they would find, they came a little nervously to their responsibilities to the institutional church and the Society of Jesus. They were a little unsure as to how to balance power and authority. So they were very careful in the beginning – and not very successful – in establishing Parish Councils, and making sure that the Councils were only advisory and would have no role whatsoever in discussions of faith and morals. There are men among them who know that they must know the name and face of each of their parishioners. There are men among them whose lives would be changed by confronting poverty and suffering face to face. There are men whose weakening sense of calling to the priesthood and the Jesuits is never a scandal to their people but a sign of hope. There are men who dig deep into their own humanity to show a parish or village the humanity of Jesus Christ. To start the dialogue of 30 years, the North Sydney–Lavender Bay–Kirribilli parish Jesuits needed to know who their people of God were. In 1976 they decided to conduct a survey of the parish. Henry Johnston had finished his centenary history of the parish, A Seed that Grew, with these words: The real history of the parish is still to be written. This book can be set down as a failure, but an inevitable failure. The real history of the parish is to be found in the souls of its Catholic people. The baptistery, the confessional, the altar; the Masses offered, the sacraments received; temptations overcome, virtues cultivated, the supernatural life fostered, the likeness of Christ formed in souls – here is the true history, but one which we cannot read. So the task undertaken has not been accomplished. The history of a parish cannot be written on earth, but in heaven.

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Johnston was not usually so modest. The Survey of 1976 was meant to open a window on the soul of the parish. It was not a behavioural poll – how often do you go to mass? Or an opinion poll – what do you think of the changes in the Church? It was a querying of ‘exemplary’ Catholics – those practising and involved in parish activities – and ‘ordinary’ Catholics, about their relationship with Christ. The survey was supervised by the best Jesuit statistician of the Province, Noel Ryan, SJ. It has a faintly unreal feel about it. Its vocabulary belongs to a very particular sort of spirituality mindset. The questionnaire seemed almost to have been set by a retreat director. No one is allowed to express herself or himself in their own words. A small sample: ‘Christ was present in their lives,’ 75 per cent of parishioners asked would tell them, but for 11.6 per cent ‘only in times of crisis’. 13.2 percent said they had ‘no sense of Christ’. Or: they ‘experienced Christ in the goodness of people’ (48.8 percent), ‘in loving others’ (22.3 percent), ‘though nature’ (24.0 percent) – but also ‘in doing their everyday domestic or professional tasks’ (15.7 percent), ‘in discussion’ (11.6 percent), ‘in the study of scripture and spiritual reading’ (25.6 percent), ‘in the spaces of a church as a building’ (14.9 percent). How these and the thousands of other figures affected the pastoral strategies in the parish is unclear. They were concerned with liturgy, prayer, education, leadership, the role of the laity, change, community, spiritual needs, communication, preaching, theology, the young, and small groups. The survey seems to have gone to the archives and stayed there. Indirectly, though, it was important. It got the parish to talk. I confess that I am not much for statistics. I accepted Johnston’s challenge about writing the history of a parish in way other than by survey. I asked parishioners to open windows on their own souls by making short narratives of their religious experiences. In that way, I hoped that I would make word pictures of the parish that were not my own. The first of these is on Mystery.

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Mystery ‘Mystery’; ‘mysterious’. These are words with thousands of years of meaning. At the heart of these meanings is an understanding that a mystery is the most complicated truth clothed in story or play or sacramental sign. There are no closures to mysteries, only another story to be told. The mysteries of faith are many. They all turn around the historical fact that the ‘Word was made flesh’. They all turn around Jesus Christ and his promise that all of creation was graced with the divine, which could only be experienced in love. This conjoined nature and super nature is only experienced ‘through a glass darkly’. The words that describe it and the actions that play it out will always be mysterious, but not unknowable for that. But that knowing is always a journey, always a pilgrimage, always ongoing. Here, in the first of our word pictures of Church Alive! are some personal witnesses to the mysteriousness of their believing, hoping and loving. It is not easy to bear such witness, to open windows on one’s soul. We thank them – and those to come, who will make their word pictures on their believing, celebrating, calling, ministering and priestliness. We bless them in their anonymity and assure them that the parish in its sesquicentenary wishes that ‘The Peace of the Lord be with you’.

H

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SIXTEEN C O N S E C R AT E D HOSTS Every Wednesday I drive to our church, The Star of the Sea at Kirribilli on the North Shore of Sydney Harbour. I have a key to the church and proceed to the tabernacle. After a few moments of prayer for the people I am about to visit, I place 16 consecrated hosts in a special large pyx Sister Loreto got for me some years ago. I drive to the James Milson Nursing Home to time my arrival at the third floor at 1:50 p.m. Lunch is well finished by then and the staff are bringing up the residents for the afternoon in the Recreation Room. There are 29 Catholics to visit, but of these only 16 are physically able to receive Communion. Most are in wheelchairs – a few with walking frames. I sit alongside each in turn, chatting about current affairs and the coming feast days and happenings around the parish. An Our Father, Hail Mary, Act of Contrition, reception of Communion and Final Blessing follow in that order. They are then asked to say their own prayers of thanksgiving quietly, not distracted by the activity around them. Then I move to the next Catholic and repeat the same procedure. Down on the second floor, the more advanced cases are nursed. In the Strokes Unit, there are three Catholics who, though conscious, have been unable to move or talk for several years. I assure that God loves them, that they are in a state of grace, that God is looking after them and that all their sins are forgiven. I talk in a soft repetitive voice and often place the pyx in their hands. Next to the Dementia Ward, where the doors are locked to prevent wanderers, I use the same approach as I do with the advanced stroke patients – hoping for a window of understanding if only for a few moments. One man was lying on his bed rambling constantly. He quietened as I spoke softly. His lips trembled and tears formed in his eyes. I felt he understood and remembered his past Catholicity for a precious moment. One lady for many months had never acknowledged my presence in any way. Suddenly, to my amazement, she blessed herself with a perfect, graceful sign of the cross. She never showed any response again. These visits are, perhaps, the last links these Catholics have with their Church.

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DEPRESSION IS LIKE SUGAR It was quite ridiculous to me. All these people gathered together at mass one Sunday evening at St Francis Xavier’s raising their arms and blessing each other: ‘May Yahweh bless you and keep you’. It would have been easier to ridicule the congregation if it was being led by the priest, but the blessing seemed to come from the people themselves. It would have been easier to brush off the power of the moment if the young children had not gathered around the altar during the Eucharist, with their elbowing, vying for position, and gazing at the ceiling. It would have been easier to dismiss the almost Presbyterian music if the people had not sung quite so heartily along with it. I knew that I needed to let go of my cynicism and logic and let these feelings in – if I didn’t there might be no turning back. Depression is like sugar: it is very sweet and often makes you crave for more. No matter that too much makes you ill. No matter that too much increases your lethargy and diminishes your zest for life. And no matter that you are filled up to the point where you don’t want a proper meal any more. Depression is sinister, and even if you have travelled a journey through therapy to overcome and overpower it, it still manages to sneak through areas in your life that surprise and challenge you. I can’t remember why I came to mass that evening with my wife and children. I can remember holding back tears that embarrassed me to the point where I hid them from my wife. I did not know why I was upset, though. Perhaps it was because it had been such a long journey to get better, and now I could feel again. I could feel the care and sharing these people had for each other. I could feel and smile at the children beaming in their glory, standing around the altar. It would still take me many months to begin joining the community. For the moment I was happy to observe and gradually feel comfortable in their presence. In time, the fear of saying the wrong thing, upsetting someone, or being misunderstood would gradually dissipate. The fear of being who I could be in the eyes of God would remain a little longer, as I adjusted to a sense of belonging. I can clearly remember my shame at one point during the hard work of therapy (and it is very hard work). I imagined turning my face away from God; I could not look at Him. I have heard some say that people only turn to God

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when they need help rather than when everything is going okay. It was the opposite for me: when I needed help, I could not face Him, yet when all was okay, I would gladly thank Him. It was very difficult for me to look Him in the eye and acknowledge that I would not succeed at my endeavours. I know that in many ways I will never feel completely comfortable belonging to a group. I seem to observe and think, then think some more. Yet, I felt that here, in this church with these people, I am able to relax and find a centre that has allowed me to smile. Perhaps that is why I was crying: perhaps I had just taken the first steps back to facing God. It is still ridiculous to me that I discovered this in a church filled with so many incongruities.

2 JA N UA RY 2 0 0 5 : FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY OF THE LORD 10.30 a.m.: The gathering of the community, St Mary’s, North Sydney. We wave to each other, smile, hug, speak of our week, our health, our weather, our plans. But we are subdued this morning. A tsunami has engulfed a circle of our near neighbours, causing destruction and loss of life on a scale almost incomprehensible. The first reading is from Isaiah, 60: Arise, shine out, Jerusalem, for your light has come; the Glory of the Lord is rising on you though night still covers the earth and darkness the people … At this sight you will grow radiant … since the riches of the sea will flow to you. Ours is a maritime city. We know the riches of the sea in our feasting and our play. The surf refreshes us, and cleanses our spirits, but it has turned deadly. How can it be that the Glory of the Lord is rising on us, this Epiphany, as the sea casts up the wreckage of thousands of human lives and hopes? Father Quin comes forward for the homily. He picks up our sense of incongruity in that promise of the riches of the sea. He muses on the stories we have

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read: of the baby who floated to safety on a mattress; of the mother reunited with the child whose hand she had let go, in order to save the baby in her arms; of this moment in time when the nations of the earth are finding a better way to relate than aggression and invasion. There is much talk in the media, some of it from churchmen, about God’s judgement on a wayward universe. But we think, here, now, with our priest who thinks along with us, gathering us directly into his own questions, his own reflections, of the Christ who lights the unpredictable and vulnerable experiences of our mortality. We find Him in this sacrament. We hold on to this hope, this trust. This is Father Quin’s last mass at St Mary’s. This afternoon he drives north to his new parish in Brisbane. He has managed to reduce his belongings to one carload. He struggles with the magnitude of the tsunami disaster, but he identifies with the lives swept on, with travelling light. Travelling with the light.

DANCING THE WORD My friend was one of three ordained that morning, and as a result the church was very crowded. We had been early and secured a seat well towards the altar, on the aisle. There was a festive mood to the occasion, with musicians, a large and expert choir, and a bishop from New Guinea to say the mass. He would later preach a memorable sermon, emphasising hope, inclusiveness and the acceptance of difference. In the meantime, my friend and his companions took their places (one was a young Korean missionary, the other one was Han Chinese) and the mass proceeded in the ordinary way. At the gospel, though, I sensed a hesitation, and the celebrant did not move to his usual position. All the busy noises and murmuring in the church fell silent, and people (some for the first time that morning) consulted their booklets for a hint of what to do. Looking back across my shoulder I could see a figure framed within the open doorway of the church. Silky robes, a brilliant green and gold, fluttered in the hot autumn wind. We were looking towards the light, so not everything was clear, but, by physique and stance and posture, the figure could have been an angel from Bellini or Caravaggio. A movement or a cloud resolved the scene and we could see: it was no angel, but a barefoot black man, a theology student out from Ghana, as the booklet told us, and in his hands a big red copy of the

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gospels. He took one step and a peal of music exploded from the drummers near the choir, and then went swirling through the church. He raised the book aloft and a miniature crescendo set the air vibrating to the roof-beams. And so began his dancing – in of the gospels. The church aisle is about 80 paces, but he made it five or even ten times that number. The dance took seven minutes by my watch, as the book was now offered, and displayed, and elevated to every set in turn of the congregation. Insistent rhythms from his homeland filled the church, and his movements married with their every beat. There was simply no escaping the idea that the gospel is a special word. There were other innovations on that day. A colourful replica of a Korean ceremonial gateway was carried forward at the offertory and fixed above the altar, where it remained for all to see. By virtue of the bishop’s sermon, these objects made an allegory whose reach far outdistanced any exclusiveness or confining limitations in the Roman rite. I don’t imagine we could make this mass the norm, any more than we could live by eating chocolate everyday. Soul and spirit soared on this occasion, yet often they do not. It is worth inquiring (as we experience the early years of the twenty-first century of the Christian era) why this mass was an effective sacrament. The reasons are not far to seek.

R E C O N C I L I AT I O N : L AV E N D E R B AY ST YLE We can all laugh at it now, still a bit nervously if the truth were told. There is a bond of understanding between us that we can acknowledge, us kids brought up in the 1950s. Scruples it’s called. Something our children have never experienced, nor are likely to. Not many of us escaped it. We learned to live with it. So when Father Emmet said, back in November, ‘only the scrupulous go to confession now’, we smiled in gratitude that we had been released from the telling. Still, old habits are difficult to completely shrug off. At Christmas, urged on by the thought of an impending plane trip, coupled with too many doctors’ appointments, I find myself in the back of the church. Christmas reconciliation. Twenty grey female heads are scattered about. Twenty. Second rite it is. Third rite and complete anonymity would be

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preferable, but that is officially extra mura now. Second rite will have to do, but my husband has refused to come. Father Des drones on, so it is somewhat effortless to go with the flow. ‘One aspect of your life …’ Be quick and join the queue for a personal absolution. A gentle glance and touch of forgiveness for that ‘one aspect of your life’. But what about the other aspects? No opening of the lid here on the Pandora’s box of dilemmas that face us in 2004. Stem cell research? Lavender Bay daughters work in that field. DNA testing? Our children will be subject to it. Withholding treatment for the terminally ill? Our parents, too, are in nursing homes. That ‘morning after pill’? Some of us are pharmacists and doctors in Lavender Bay. No guidance; no help. These are hard decisions. And if we make the wrong ones, will ‘one aspect of your life’ cover them? Will God really understand and forgive through Father Des’ gentle gaze, or are we heading back to the bad old days of confessing to people who don’t understand the decisions involved, who only see the black and white of the letter of the law. Their law. That is what we seem to be swinging towards. Us 20 who are left. What of my children who are now completely alienated from the institutional church? They still consider themselves to be Catholics but are completely distrusting of the majority of its pastors. Will their occasional forays to mass be enough to secure their redemption? No, if you believe the fundamentalist preachers. Yes, if you think back to the times when they did go to church, were pleased to have gone and were grateful to have had a third rite blessing given. You could see the joy. I haven’t the courage to tell them that it won’t be like that again. So, along with the other 20 penitents, I accept the absolution and gratefully skip penance, hoping God does understand what is in all our hearts and forgives. ‘One aspect of your life’ is fine by me. For now. There are no alternatives in 2004.

T WO ANGELS ‘Joy to the world, the Lord is come!’ The St Francis Xavier, Lavender Bay community breaks into song, filling the church with their praise and joy. It is midnight. The Christmas celebration of the Eucharist begins. A woman holds in her arms a six-day-old baby boy; the father protectively places his arm around them both. They lead the priest and the acolytes as they walk slowly up the aisle and take their place on the altar steps. The mass begins.

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Gloria in Excelsis Deo, we continue our song. The priest searches the body of the church, as if hoping there may be some children who will join him, the parents and their baby boy. His eyes fall upon two young girls who seem to be about ten and 12 years old. They respond eagerly to his invitation and rush to take their place with the young family. Their black skin glows; their large black eyes sparkle; they are dressed all in white. They take their place on the steps of the altar and smile. A mysterious atmosphere develops and there is a feeling of being invited into a special event. The priest seems unusually nervous as he creates the frame of this Nativity scene. He is taking particular care as he gently moves his actors, developing the shrine in which the Gospel will be reflected. The mother holds the baby; the father beside her; the two girls on the side. The music begins and we sing: ‘O come, all ye faithful’. The priest is not yet finished. He takes the baby from the mother, walks towards the older girl and reverently places the infant in her arms. It is then that we are taken into another dimension. The young girl’s face breaks into a beautiful smile; her black eyes become larger; her mouth opens wide and her jaw falls. We see expressions of awe, wonder, surprise and delight as she gazes at the infant in her arms. She can’t take her eyes away from him. We witness this extraordinary event. The mass is over and I greet the priest. He asks: ‘Did you see the miracle?’ I respond ‘I did’. The priest continues: ‘I don’t know who they are, I have never seen them before. They came as angels.’

W E E K D AY S AT S T M A RY ’S ‘The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary’, the woman in the pew behind me intones. A bell tolls in the distance. It is midday mass at St Mary’s, which always begins with The Angelus. It is something I hadn’t heard since my schooldays, over 30 years ago. I ask my daughter about it; she has just finished high school at the convent down the road. I get a strange look. ‘Is it some sort of prayer?’ she replies. I wonder what they teach in religion these days. We are fortunate at St Mary’s in having three masses each weekday. They are different from the Sundays masses, in many respects more intimate and personal. The congregations aren’t large, usually between 20 and 50. Each of us

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regulars secures her or his own space, and we feel disappointed when a visitor encroaches on it. For some strange reason it seems to be the left-hand side of the nave where people tend to congregate. I wonder why? At midday mass a few office workers from the anonymous glass buildings seek refuge; in the evening a group of nuns from the local convents. Otherwise, there is a smattering of the middle-aged and elderly, the lonely and the sick, the occasional student, and sometimes a family group celebrating the anniversary of a deceased loved one for whom the mass is being said. St Mary’s doors open just before the first mass of the day and remain open until just after the last mass each evening. It is a busy church throughout the day, with its peak during the morning, masses for the local schoolchildren; funerals; weddings; and a constant stream of people visiting for a few moments’ prayer, reflection or solitude. Many visit the small chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Way. I came here frequently, a few years ago, after being diagnosed with depression. This space became important to me. I found refuge, together with a nearby coffee shop and a local park, where I would walk the family dogs. I didn’t pray formally, I have to say, but sat towards the back of the church for hours at a time reflecting, talking with God, and thinking over the stages of my life. I always felt much better each time I left the church and re-entered the busy world as I walked out onto Miller Street. ‘The Lord is with you’, says the priest as the last mass of the day concludes. Soon the church will close and tomorrow will bring a new day’s journey with God.

GOD OF SURPRISES When our sons were growing up, I said on many occasions: ‘There may be times when you feel you cannot fit with the Church, but be careful not to confuse the institutional church with the Eucharistic community’. I often feel despair about the institutional church, but, within the Eucharistic community, I am sustained and I find hope and nourishment. In our Parish Conversation two months ago, someone opened the theme of magic, and I immediately began to think about the magic of the Eucharistic community. In my childhood, I would watch in awe as the rabbit appeared out

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of the magician’s hat. Now as an adult, I feel in awe when I encounter the God of Surprises within the community. For me, it is when something happens unexpectedly, when something, which is ordinary, becomes sacred, and I know beyond doubt that this happening has to do with God. These are the times when I feel most connected to the community and experience that hope and nourishment which sustains me. It is always a very simple event. One such experience was some time ago, at mass, when I watched two young gay men bring our gifts to the altar. I felt overwhelmed with feelings of excitement and hope that this could happen within our community. After mass, I said to the priest celebrant, ‘Were you aware of what happened at the Offertory?’ He said, ‘Yes, I was’, and he added, with tears in his eyes, ‘you have a wonderful community here in which this can happen’. I knew he was saying that we were a community that was open to the spirit. I contacted one of these men – who now lives in another state – and asked for his permission to refer to this incident. I was touched when he said that there were many times when he felt surprise that there was a place for him as a full member of our community. What do I hope for in the parish? A parish that can celebrate our youth. A parish that can recognise the gifts our youth bring to us – particularly their creativity and their energetic and compassionate response to suffering in the world – and humbly asks them to show us the way. ‘The Body of Christ’, the Eucharistic minister says to me. I bow to her and she to me. ‘Amen’, I say. ‘It’s time.’ We are the Body of Christ.

LENTEN REFLECT IONS, 2004 Ash Wednesday, 2 February 2004 I have realised in recent years that I love the season of Lent. Today I realise, driving away from midday mass with my forehead ‘ashed’, how happy I feel and, upon reflection, how I am reminded of being pregnant … a stirring within, anticipation. Later I identify that Lent, in being time-limited, helps me focus and use this time intentionally. Like when I was pregnant. I became energised around fitness, body, mind and spirit.

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I recall past Lents when I was able to add to my life a regular evening meditation or a midday mass. Later, it came into my year-round practice. I could sustain the effort with the support of the Lenten events. Monday, 1 March Last night my son was reluctant to be at mass. I am sad that my children increasingly do not share my joy at being part of this parish. It leaves a sense of fragmentation. I wonder what would make the parish attractive to them? At their age, I was similarly disinterested. It confuses me. Thursday, 4 March Attended midday mass yesterday. I reflected that Lent often coincides with summer softening into autumn. Father Emmet seemed to glow as sunlight shown directly on him. Was this an intention of the architect? Our Stonehenge! There’s a timelessness about it – him in white vestments, the purple of the stole, and the banners hanging behind, the Angelus repeating, in just a few minutes, the story of the Annunciation. And then, ‘Pour forth we beseech thee O Lord …’ And in the evening, seven of us come to the presbytery at St Mary’s for meditation before the evening program, experiencing a profound silence in the midst of Miller Street’s traffic noise. Over the month I delight in the resonance of all this within me. It was not always thus, and I did not expect that I would ever find my spiritual needs met within the Church. I was, I thought, finished with it, and my search for truth and meaning would be elsewhere. I recall my surprise and delight when Father Quin gave me the freedom to find my place in the parish slowly and to really choose to belong.

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Breaking bread The Eucharist is the weakness of God, the silence of God. One needs really strong faith to understand the impotence and defeat, which the Eucharist represents and which is today what the impotence and defeat of Calvary was yesterday. And yet, this powerless Jesus, nailed down, is the God of the Impossible, Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end. Carlo Carretto, Selected Writings, 1994 We are at our Easter Mass, joy and hope in our hearts. How could it be otherwise, as we catch the excitement of the children watching the white and gold clusters of balloons reaching high into the nave of St Mary’s? How could it be otherwise? The theatre of our faith of the past three days has reached a climax. Hundreds – thousands – have filled the three churches of the parish through Holy Thursday evening – and the moving symbolism of the washing of the feet, and the empty bareness of the stripped altars and the open tabernacles – to Easter. There was no room in the church on Good Friday morning, as the older parishioners relived moments of sorrow and reflection in the traditional Stations of the Cross. ‘We adore you, O Christ and we bless You, because by your holy cross You have redeemed the world’, they prayed at each station. And

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they sang a verse of Stabat Mater: ‘At the cross her vigil keeping, / Mary stood in sorrow weeping, When her Son was crucified’. Five or six hundred people from all denominations on the North Shore made a nearly silent Way of the Cross – down Miller Street to the water’s edge on the harbour. We followed a variety of ‘Christs’ – young and old, male and female, disabled and healthy, Caucasian and Asian – a light bar draped with a purple sash over their shoulders, one after the other. We celebrated the unity of our baptisms down by the water and sang St Teresa’s Prayer: ‘Christ has no body now but mine, / No hands, no feet on earth but mine. / Christ has no body now but mine. / Let me be Christ, let me shine.’ It seemed slightly unnerving to be in church at 3 p.m. on Good Friday afternoon. We, like others, are never at worship at that hour. The crowded church is hot in Sydney’s Easter warmth. We make a mantra of the Good Thief ’s words, ‘Lord, Remember me when you come into your kingdom’, as we bow or genuflect before the black wood of the cross. We are taken back into the mythical soul of humanity by the rituals of fire, water and light of Holy Saturday. So, yes! Somewhat exhausted and unused to such ritual intensity, we’ve come with joy and hope in our hearts to Easter. We hear the women’s story of the empty tomb, and know that our world has been changed forever by the message that the ‘The Lord is risen’. Faith is a tenuous thing, though. We break bread and know that the Risen Christ is present among us. How can that be? And behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him. And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went, and he made as though he would have gone further. But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them. And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to another. Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? And they rose up the same

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hour, and returned to Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were with them, Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon. And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was known to them in the breaking of bread. And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you (Luke 24: 13–16, 28–36, King James 1611). We catch them as they are walking to a spring of water, Emmaus. Maybe any spring of water. Water, new life, Jesus – their memory held these three together. They walk listlessly, drained by the last terrible days. They are too preoccupied with their lost hopes to hear what the women were saying. They heard hysteria in the women’s voices. They make their way westward out of the troubled city, probably by the Gate of the Essenes, a short distance from the Upper Room. The sun is about to set over the sea behind the ridge in front of them. Yahweh has inscribed the story of all He has done for His people in these hills. To the right edge of the ridge is Nebi Samuel, the place of sacrifice at the old tabernacle in the prophet Samuel’s time. Samuel is buried there. There, too, David’s son, Solomon, asked his God for only one gift as King of Israel, the gift of wisdom. To the left edge of the ridge is Kiriath Jearim, where Abinidab had sheltered the Ark of the Covenant holding the tablets of Moses, the visible sign of Yahweh’s presence among his people. How often had they heard Jesus say there is a new commandment to be written, not on stone, but in hearts. A commandment of love. The scriptures are all around them in these parts. They know it, and the Stranger, when he comes up with them, reminds them of it. They have a nearmystic experience as he speaks. ‘Didn’t our hearts burn within us?’ Hearing the words of God, spoken to them by the Word of God, they have renewed hope. They are ready to see signs. He gives them one. He breaks bread with them. Their eyes are opened to see Him really present with them. And He is there, as He always will be, in the breaking of bread. So this second celebration of breaking bread, like the first and all the rest to come, is steeped with memory, stark on this occasion for being only days old, of their Lord’s giving to them the gift of his life. They, and the other followers, set about a lifetime’s search of the mysteries of this gift. They begin to shape the signs they see in the breaking of bread so that they will always see their Christ present in his moment of sacrifice, bringing peace.

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They don’t have a name for this mystery yet. For Luke it is ‘Breaking Bread’. For Paul it will be the ‘Lord’s Supper’. Didache (the teaching manual of the early Christians, c.80–90, CE) sees it as ‘Eucharist’ and ‘Thanksgiving’. They don’t have a name, but we can see them making liturgy (liturgos), the work of the people – shaping the ways in which the words, gestures and spaces will make their Lord present again. Listen to Paul, first making theology of the Lord’s Supper, and then castigating the Corinthians for not getting the point. This is in about 57 CE: On the same night that he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread and thanked God for it and broke it, and he said ‘This is my body which is for you, do this as a memorial of me’. In the same way he took the cup after supper, and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Whenever you drink it, do this as a memorial of me’. Until the Lord comes, therefore, every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death (1 Cor. 11: 24–27). He had already chided the Corinthians’ for some of their practices: Now that I am on the subject of instructions, I cannot say to you that you have done well in holding meetings that do you more harm than good. In the first place I hear that when you all come together as a community, there are separate factions among you, and I half believe it – since there must no doubt be separate groups among you, to distinguish those who are to be trusted. The point is that when you hold these meetings, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you are eating, since when the time comes to eat, everyone is in such a hurry to start his own supper that one person goes hungry while another is getting drunk. Surely you have homes for eating and drinking in? Surely you have enough respect for the community of God not to make poor people embarrassed? What am I to say to you? Congratulate you? I cannot congratulate you (1 Cor. 11: 17–22). Paul is saying to the Corinthians that they must work hard among themselves to re-enact the Lord’s Supper. They must make space for its celebration in

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special places and within themselves. The Lord’s Supper must make community and breed charity. Doesn’t he say to them that the greatest of all gifts of the Spirit is love? Doesn’t he, Roman of a colonising empire, find, in the scandal of the cross, his own liberation theology? The voice of the crucified is the voice of the poorest poor. See now as another witness, Justin Martyr (c.100–160 CE), described how this breaking of bread was being shaped into a liturgy. And on the day called Sunday an assembly is held in one place of all who live in town or country, and the records of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as time allows. Then when the reader has finished, the president in a discourse admonishes and exhorts us to imitate these good things. Then we stand up together and send up prayers; [when we have ended the prayers we greet one another with a kiss] and as we said before, when we have finished praying, bread and wine and water are brought up, and the president likewise sends up prayers and thanksgiving to the best of his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and the elements over which thanks have been given are distributed, and everyone partakes; and they are sent through the deacons to those who are not present. And the wealthy that so desire give what they wish, as each chooses; and what is collected is deposited with the president. He helps the orphans and widows, and those who through sickness or any other cause are in need, and those in prison, and strangers sojourning among us; in a word, he takes care of all those who are in need. Vatican II would call this liturgy, this work of the People of God of the early Church, a ‘noble simplicity’ and urge the Church to return to it. That noble simplicity – scriptural readings, a homily based on the readings, prayers of the faithful, a sign of peace, the presentation of gifts, the prayers of thanksgiving, communion to all present and to those who cannot be there, compassionate charity – is a very complicated thing to achieve. How the Church reduced the liturgy of the mass with its many duplications, accretions and lateral pursuits to a four-act mystery play – Entrance Rite, Liturgy of the Word, Liturgy of the Eucharist and Mission – can be learned elsewhere.

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The Easter Mass moves forward. In his last encyclical of his papacy, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (On the Eucharist in its Relationship to the Church, 17 April 2003) John Paul also wrote, as I am writing, about what must have been and extraordinary experience for him. ‘During the Jubilee Year 2000 I celebrated the Eucharist in the Cenacle, where, according to tradition, it was first celebrated by Jesus Himself ’. John Paul wonders whether the Apostles knew what Jesus meant when he said ‘This is my Body … This is the cup of my blood.’ He reflects that the ‘mystery of Jesus’ passion and resurrection is – as it were – gathered, foreshadowed and concentrated in the Eucharist, making it perennially present all through the centuries in an amazing way. That amazement should always fill the church at its celebration. ‘Amazement’ is a beautiful word. Being amazed means tapping the imagination, letting it break with what is supposedly fixed and become free to glimpse what might be. We don’t leave our humanity at the door when we are amazed; we are ready to sense new metaphors for living and discover new critiques for ourselves. So let’s be amazed at the Children’s Easter Mass, 2005. There is a joyful sort of chaos in the church. Already, small children are beginning to crawl about the aisles and beneath the pews. Parents are opening their ‘mass kits’ – storybooks, paper and crayons, soft toys, and maybe packets of sultanas. They are seating their children tactically, to avoid sibling conflict. Four children – ‘Mary’, ‘Mary of Magdala’, ‘Peter’ and an ‘Angel’ – are rehearsing their lines of the Gospel reading. The choir is practising. Father Tony Smith, SJ, the new parish priest, is trying to get the under-15s to cry, ‘He is Risen’ and the rest of us to answer ‘And we are risen, too’. The Pastoral Associates are testing microphones and organising children to prepare the gifts of bread and wine. All the candles in the Shrine of Our Lady of the Way are alight, and the visitors at prayer are constant and many. The family rostered for this big occasion had welcomed us at the door and given us our hymnbooks and the parish bulletin. It is the Bristow family. Kerry Bristow is in charge of the Family Ministry Liturgy, rostering families to lead the liturgy, hosting the tea and biscuits after mass. The Family Liturgy Ministry has been at work in the parish for 30 years now. They are well practised in what they do. It takes a little while for the choir to overcome the hubbub, but piano and violins win through first, then the children’s voices come through sharp, clear and challenging. Gather Us In, they sing:

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We are the young, our lives are a mystr’y, We are the old, who yearn for your face; We have sung throughout all of histr’y, Called to be light to the whole human family. Gather us in, the lost and forsaken. Gather us in, the blind and the lame. Call to us now, and we shall awaken, We shall come at the sound of our name. Gather Us In is the signature tune of the Family Mass. Fresh young voices in a lively beat move us deeply. The universality of the call to worship and the petition that we be called as we are, in all our differences, is a sign that this ‘work of the people’ is about communion, presence. The Book of the Gospels, is held high and leads the procession of priest, servers and perhaps a dozen children to the altar steps. There they turn and face us. ‘Lord have mercy’, they sing to us. ‘Lord have mercy’, we reply. (‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison – Greek words in a Latin mass. Will these children ever know, I muse, the mass that coaxed the geniuses of Christendom such as Mozart and Haydn? Will a younger generation ever ‘know’ what an older generation thinks they should?) But they have passed me by. They sing: ‘Glory be to the Father! Glory be to the Son! Glory be to the Spirit! All Glory to our God!’ To each of these phrases, we (unlike them) clumsily, then with practised coordination, extend our arms forward, raise, cross and loop them. Perhaps nothing marks our postmodernity better than this. Here it is assumed that our bodies (with all their movements, stillness or emotions), our minds (with their logic, instinct and imagination) and our souls (with their quiet, flights and storms) are one in all we do, whether we write, think or pray. If the ‘work of the people’ is to make the presence of the Risen Lord among us, then we have to enter the personal space of one another by touching, or looking, by being loud, being silent, by gesture, by standing, sitting, kneeling, walking, even dancing.

H I have a further distraction. These young people of God are awakening their souls to see the Risen Lord in their Eucharist in this sesquicentenary of the parish. We should, I think, hope and pray that they will be celebrating the bicentenary of the

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parish in 2056. It is not for those of us, who certainly won’t be there, to say what their believing or what that bicentennial parish will be. It is clearly the hope of many of those who believe that the Church was devastated by Vatican II, that, whatever the remnant of the faithful will remain in 2056, it will be a ‘purer’ (if smaller) discipleship missioned to reconvert the world. Just as clearly, it is the hope of those who see Vatican II as the aggiornamento that John XXIII and the Spirit meant it to be, that the People of God will have found, in John’s words, that ‘Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by humanity’s own efforts and even beyond its every expectation, are directed toward the fulfilment of God’s superior and inscrutable designs. And everything, even human differences, leads to the greater good of the Church’. Or, in Pedro Arrupe’s words, that the Church will have found in the Risen Lord its Christian vocation to bring about a social order ‘founded on truth, built on justice and animated by love’. Or the People of God will have found, in the priestliness that Vatican II saw in them, their ability – in Teilhard de Chardin’s words – to have raised themselves beyond the symbols of bread and wine to the ‘pure majesty of the real itself ’. Whatever the case, in 2056 the parish is unlikely to be the ‘Jesuit’ parish in the way we know it now. Actuarially speaking, there are unlikely to be enough Jesuits to supply all the apostolates to which they are presently committed. The optimist, or dreamer, in me tells me that there will be a parish, but it will be in the priesthood, of both married and celibate, male and female, who will have found a communal responsibility for all the pastoral roles that the parish requires. Whether that communal priesthood will see itself in some companionship with the Society of Jesus depends on whether the Jesuits themselves in the next ten or 15 years find the same prophetic imagination that their founder, Ignatius Loyola, had in such abundance. I am musing on the future because, beyond this mass, I am observing the parish educating its young to recognise the presence of Christ in the breaking of bread – their First Communion, and educating them to examine their consciences and seek healing within themselves, with others, and with God in their First Reconciliation. The parish bulletins and parishioners’ memories are full of both joyful and alarming stories of First Communions and First Confessions in another era. New white communion dresses and veils, gifts of rosary beads, holy pictures placed on small altars, and much practise of pious postures and reverential gestures are what are remembered. Absorption of the sacramentality of the moment was intense and efficient. The signs of Christ’s immediate and bodily

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presence were many. The eyes of communicants easily misted over to see Christ in the host. ‘Transubstantiation’ is not a word that the First Communicants of 2005 are likely to learn, though it is to be found in copies of their Catechism: ‘By the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.’ ‘Transubstantiation’ is a word that comes to us as doctrine from the Council of Trent. It came to the Council of Trent from the ontological perceptions of ‘accidents’ and ‘substance’ of Thomas Aquinas – the ‘accidents’ or appearances of bread and wine remained, while their ‘substance’ was converted into the body of Christ. That ontology doesn’t sit easily in the mind in an age of molecular science, and many are reluctant to enter the current debates about the issue. They prefer to find strength in the mysteriousness of their beliefs. It is an awesome responsibility that the parish has to educate its First Communicants to the traditions of the millennia in the idiom of their own day. It has to discover the capacity of these young people to move between the otherworldliness of their believing and the this worldliness of their daily living. With God’s grace, they will celebrate the Easter rising for ‘fourscore years and more’ and will break bread thousands of times. That doublevisioned talent of seeing Christ in the host and in themselves and their neighbours will have to enrich them their whole lives long. ‘There is a season for everything, a time for every occupation under the heavens’, The Preacher of Wisdom said (Ecclesiastes 3: 1–8). ‘A time for giving birth, a time for dying, a time for planting, a time for uprooting what has been planted.’ There will be times of believing and times of unbelieving as well, times when holiness is ‘spread … over the surface’ of things, and times when it will be hidden. ‘We live in all we seek’, Annie Dillard has written in Time Being. She also writes: The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children, have long since become oblivious. What a hide out: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like colour.

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Christianity, David Torevell agrees in Losing the Sacred. Ritual, Modernity and Liturgical Reform: … in itself is founded upon the performance of story. Such performances are central to the life of the Church. Never able to defend themselves against other stories by reason, Christian liturgy enacts its own distinctive tale again and again in the hope that others will be drawn in … It cannot be established by reason, but only presented as a radical alternative, as something else altogether. I find the parish is trying to educate its First Communicants to this life-giving, lifelong talent in two principle ways. First, it educates its young to a sense of parable, the creative imagination to see meaning in texts and living. Second, the educators are not specialists in religious behaviour and knowledge, but, rather, their parents, called like all the people of God to holiness. ‘The trouble with fundamentalists is that they have only one window’, a famous liturgist, Jake Empereur, SJ, said. The parish is not fundamentalist but is educating its First Communicants to a reflective interpretive talent, which sees both the sacred texts of our faith, and the dramas of everyday life as parable, multiple windowed, richly meaningful and available for a lifetime of enlarging. They do this by letting the young (as on this Easter Sunday) learn how to immerse themselves in liturgical time. They do it by letting them practise how to enhance the meaning of everyday actions and gestures, and to make them worship and receive a spiritual dimension, by persuading them that any giftgiving, especially of self, is sacrifice, by letting them experience the sort of personal presence that remembering creates, by letting them learn how much of living is story and what sort of critical skills they will need to have in order to see the meaning of life’s stories. There is nothing that we do in the breaking of bread that is not paralleled in everyday living. So the children are alerted to the value-added elements in the Eucharist of welcoming, farewelling, belonging, sharing meals, telling stories, gift-giving, singing, stillness and movement, and critiquing what we see. Their theatre of believing and loving in the Eucharist is matched by the theatre of believing and loving in everyday life. We, like them, are constantly entertaining ourselves – ‘entertain’ from the Latin enter tenere, to hold in between. We are constantly creating the social space and social time to focus on the meaning of what we do. There is, of course, a theatre of education

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as well. There is not a moment in the parish’s education of its First Communicants when what is being learned is not enhanced by song or dramatised reading or enactment. It is interesting to read the children’s ‘homework’. Some of it is in the archives. ‘My family makes me feel welcome at home by when I come home they give me kisses and cuddles’. ‘My favourite story teller in my family is my grandpa’. ‘My favourite story is how my mum and dad got together.’ ‘Every Sunday night we have a family dinner and we say grace. Every Sunday night when we have a special dinner we tell each other what we did in the week, what we did on the weekend and something special we are doing the next week and after that we do the quiz.’ ‘A meal that Jesus shared was the “last meal” or “Last Supper”.’ Reading these pages in the archives, I had wondered why I seemed to associate Communion and sin. I went back to the Penny Catechism to see why. Lesson 23. On Holy Communion. ‘3. Q. How must we be prepared for Holy Communion? A. To be prepared for Holy Communion we must be in the state of grace, and we must have a right intention. 4. Q. When is a person in the state of grace? A. A person is in the state of grace when he [sic] is free from mortal sin. 5. Q. What do we mean by a right intention? A. By a right intention we mean that we must approach the Holy Table, not from vanity or human respect, but to please God, to be more closely united with Him, and to obtain strength for our souls. 10. Q. What do you mean by receiving unworthily? A. By receiving unworthily I mean receiving the Blessed Eucharist in the state of mortal sin. 11. Q. Is it a great sin to receive unworthily? A. It is a most grievous sin of sacrilege to receive unworthily. 12. Q. What must a person do if he [sic] be in mortal sin? A. He [sic] who is in mortal sin must obtain pardon in the sacrament of Penance before he [sic] goes to Holy Communion.’ The focus of the parish’s education of the young to their First Reconciliation is, on the contrary, love, that love that Jesus said was the first commandment. Belonging is the first sentiment the young are meant to experience. The Communion of Saints is not of canonised saints but those who live the beatitudes, those ready to be ‘poor in spirit’, ‘to mourn’, ‘to be meek’, ‘to hunger for

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righteousness’, ‘to be merciful’, ‘to be a peacemaker’, ‘to have courage’. There are plenty of heroes – Mother Teresa, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas Merton, John Paul II – to admire for their courage, prudence, temperance and justice (the ‘cardinal virtues’, if one must), their faith, hope and charity (the ‘theological virtues’). Admiration is the virtue these young are first called to – of others, of themselves. And examination will begin with what they discover as loving in themselves, before they look to the not-so-loving. The ‘not-so-loving’, they are told, ‘is what the Church calls sin’. Their little program for the First Reconciliation – one can find a copy in the archives – tells that to them. And where have they been not-so-loving? At home? At school? Before God? One by one, a child will read a prayer of reconciliation, a sort of litany of what wrongs she or he might have done – disobedience, meanness and bad temper. They then sing: ‘Jesus, heal us, Jesus; Jesus, hear us now’. In the program there is not much talk of the Seven Deadly Sins under their old names or new: pride (cruelty), envy (adultery), anger (bigotry), sloth (dishonesty), greed (hypocrisy), gluttony (greed) and lust (selfishness). But they have a whole lifetime to exercise their consciences on not being loving in a world more prone to be creative in evil than in love. The children’s parents are witness to all that they are being called to. In an older Church the task of educating these young initiates was in the hands of the religious committed to holiness, a quality of spiritual perfection in ways to which most of the people of God did not see themselves called. Vatican II declared that the whole Church is called to holiness, not just a few. The chief educators of First Reconciliation and First Communion in the parish in 2005 are the children’s own parents. It is a hard call to give witness to one’s holiness to one’s children. Otherworldliness has a very worldly quality in the eyes of the innocent. The children at our mass have brought to the altar the gifts of bread and wine and the collected offerings of the congregation. They have crowded around it. It takes a little time for them to become focused. Some are looking back to their families. Inevitably, a candle topples on a little girl. (But there are plenty of doctors and nurses in this parish. She is rushed off to the sacristy. No harm done.) Some priests are more expert than others in directing the children’s attention to what they are doing together, laying out the bread, pouring the wine and water. Father Smith’s slow and reverent gestures, and his stillness of soul, begin to stage a scene as he prepares to say those most dramatic of words:

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The day before he suffered he took bread in his sacred hands and looking up to heaven, to you, his almighty Father, he gave you thanks and praise. He broke bread, gave it to his disciples and said: ‘Take this all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you’. When supper was ended, he took the cup. Again he gave you thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said: ‘Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.’ As Father Smith raises the bread and then the cup, those young, slight children at his side raise their arms and stand on the tips of their toes. With him in his vestments, bread and cup held high, and the children reaching to heaven, the scene is frozen in our minds like some carefully choreographed ballet dance of the Last Supper. ‘Let us proclaim the mystery of faith’, he says. And we do: ‘Dying you destroyed our death, / Rising you restored our life, / Lord Jesus, come in glory’. For 1500 years, the doxology – the ‘words of praise’ – has ended this intense ‘work of the people’, this eucharistic celebration. We easily join it, but in no antiquarian spirit. This is the catharsis, the moment of enlightenment when we proclaim the presence of the Lord in the breaking of the bread. ‘Amen, amen, amen’, we sing. ‘Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is Yours, for ever and ever. Amen, Amen, Amen.’ Hand in hand, we sing the Lord’s Prayer. We hug and kiss, offer handshakes of our ‘Peace’ and Easter wishes to one another. The Communion lines are long, and the Eucharistic ministers are many. I see what I take to be a gay couple. The younger man is reluctant, the older man urging. I give thanks in my heart, and follow them to acknowledge, ‘The Body of Christ’, ‘The Blood of Christ’ with my ‘Amen’. Parents bring their infants and their children who have not made their first communion to the priest for his blessing. That is a comfort, too. We have the right to think that we are served by men of God and that their blessing counts. There is a certain eagerness among the children to be blessed and missioned. Already some balloons have escaped and are clinging to the ceiling. But our recessional hymn is strong and vigorous:

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Go Out to All the World, Go out to all of the World and tell the Good News. Go out to all of the World and Sing Alleluia! Praise the Lord all you nations, Glorify God all you peoples. Steadfast is God’s Love to all people, And the promise of God endures forever. It takes a few minutes to see that each child has a balloon and then it requires some discipline to see them all out of the church into the sunshine and waiting for the general cry of ‘He is Risen’. It is a beautiful sight to see these hundreds of white and gold balloons soaring into the blue sky. The wind takes them over the Bridge and towards Sydney. ‘Happy Easter, World!’ the parish is saying. Just before daybreak Paul urged them all to have something to eat. ‘For fourteen days’, he said, ‘you have been in suspense, going hungry and eating nothing. Let me persuade you to have something to eat; your safety is not in doubt. Not a hair of your heads will be lost.’ With these words he took bread, gave thanks to God in front of them all, broke it and began to eat. Then they all plucked up courage and took something to eat themselves (Acts: 27: 33–37). They had been at sea for nearly six weeks. First they travelled in a small coastal vessel from Caesarea up the Syrian coast, along the southern shores of Asia Minor to the great trans-shipping port of the Mediterranean, Myra. There they boarded an Egyptian grain ship bound for Rome. The ship is large. There are 276 passengers, and probably a cargo of corn of between 200 to 300 tons. The trade between Egypt and Rome – this is 60 CE – is vast, 50 000 tons of grain a year. They are late in the season. The captain is taking a gamble when he leaves Myra, and he will lose. He is driven south to Crete and is working westward against a north-west wind. They miss a chance; or rather don’t take it, to winter in a Cretan port. Winter prices of corn in Rome are good. The captain is greedy. No sooner do they go on their way than they are hit by a gale – the Euraquilo, the sailors call it, a north-easter. They turn their vessel into the wind

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and let it drift westward. For 14 days they drift the 476 miles to Malta. At midnight on the fourteenth day, they sense that they are dangerously close to land. They are. Then, they see the waves crashing on Koura Point. Their anchors hold in the heavy clay of the bottom of what is now called St Paul’s Bay. In the lee of Salmonetta Island, they pull in the small boat they are towing, create a mast out of their two steering oars, bind the hull around with rope, and embed their slightly flat-bottomed ship in the clay. With the surf crashing over them, the sailors are in panic. Paul, however, feels destined for Rome. He has spent the last two years in prison in a sort of protective custody from the ‘fanatics’ in Jerusalem, who are opposed to what he and his gaolers call the ‘Way’. Felix, the Roman Procurator, was expecting a bribe, which he wouldn’t get. Paul mocked him. ‘I am born Roman. I didn’t have to pay for my citizenship.’ His next gaoler, Festus, happy to be rid of him, said: ‘You appeal to Caesar, to Caesar you shall go’ and sent him under guard to Rome. So here he is on the verge of shipwreck, but still absolutely certain that his Lord will see him to Rome. Actually, Paul seems a rather bossy know-all, saying ‘told you so’ on a number of occasions. But the dangers are real – from the sea, from panic by the sailors, from the soldiers threatening that they should kill their prisoners lest they escape in the surf. It is then that Paul tells them that their survival depends on them eating. He uses the Greek word, soteria, for survival. In Christian parlance, he means ‘salvation’. He gives thanks, and breaks bread – ‘in front of them all’. By now he is practised in his priesthood. On a shuddering ship about to break up, in the crashing of waves on its decks, Paul makes his Eucharistic prayer. No church here. No assembly, save his frightened companions, Luke and Aristarchus. How many times since this has bread been broken – in prisons, in gulags, in concentration camps, on battlefields, in holocausts and catastrophes, in priest holes, in the silent spaces of Far Asia with Teilhard de Chardin, at the bedside of the demented and dying, among the homeless, and on the kitchen table. This is the mystery, then. The Risen Lord is recognised in the breaking of bread, whether on the way to Emmaus, or on a sinking ship off Malta. He is recognised with children on tip-toe around an altar, amid the ancient formalities of ritual, or face to face with living realities. There is no closure to that mystery in my stories or yours.

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Believing All humanity is believing. All humanity has answers to questions that can never be answered. All humanity has an ultimate metaphor for what is. That metaphor might not be explicit – on the surface of things or easy to see – but it is there. Being ecumenical, being Catholic in my beliefs across cultures and times means entering that ultimate metaphor, translating others’ metaphors into my own metaphor. Hearing the silences in others’ metaphors, so that I can hear the silences in mine. It is a very humbling thing to discover that all our ultimate metaphors are equidistant from reality. It is humbling to discover that the location of all our spiritualities lies in a questioning that has no answer other than: ‘Here I am. Here is my believing self.’ My believing self is not my beliefs. Beliefs are static, propositional, products of closure. Believing is actual, ongoing and changing. We stand together and recite ‘by heart’, but more than that. ‘I believe’; ‘We believe’. There is debate in the ‘official church’ about which phrase should be used. ‘We believe’, let’s say (and resolve the debate), ‘in One God …’. ‘We believe’, but there is much we don’t understand. Maybe we whisper those bits. Maybe we drop out parts, such as ‘He descended into Hell’. They take too much manoeuvring to make any sense of. Whatever we do, that often-distracted moment of saying the Creed is a performance of all the unbelieving, ambiguous, ignorant, memory-filled, wondering, loving elements of our believing selves.

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–

CREDIBILI T Y AU THORI T Y FREED OM

–

In the 1940s and 1950s I grew up as a member of a Presbyterian parish and as a secondary school student at Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne. The message I took from this 15-year exposure was a challenge to be like Christ. I did not realise then how positive it was and how fortunate I was. Sin and damnation were not part of my religious or family background. We were encouraged to pray to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. My parents encouraged me make my own choices. My father, for example, would not let me sign the ‘pledge’ to abstain from alcohol as many in the Methodist tradition supported. He was a very intelligent man, and world wise. Within my local parish community in my teenage years, however, I was unable to find good role models. The young adults tended to wear lace-up shoes and hand-knitted cardigans and were ‘wimpish’ rather than fullblooded and real. They did not fit with my aspirations and needs at the time, were not intellectually curious like my university friends, and lacked personal credibility in my eyes. With my university friends, I started exploring charismatic groups before moving on to the Anglican Church to which my grandmother belonged. The few Catholics I met at this time were unable to discuss aspects of their faith until they had ‘asked Father’ for the answers. This only confirmed my worst fears and prejudices about Rome. In 1957, I met my future husband, who was a Catholic, a daily communicant and highly intelligent. This was a new challenge for me and led to my two-year exploration of the sacraments. The authority of Rome, the absence of real collegiality and the distrust of many in the Church of the primacy of individual conscience was something I could not accept. I still do not. The priest whom I consulted accepted my attitude, and I became a member of the Church in 1959. Authority continued to be a problem for me over the next ten years. Confession was a new sacrament to me. For years, I had been searching my conscience regularly and praying for help and forgiveness to the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit. But I had never done so in front of a priest in a formal and structured way. On the first occasion, the priest challenged me about my pride, as I clearly did not confess enough, despite the fact that I had just explained to him that this was my first opportunity. The second time, many

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years later, the priest shouted at me as I entered the confessional, ‘Can’t you see that the red light is on!’ I gave up the traditional practice after that, but not my own self-examination. Authority, credibility and freedom are issues that continue to challenge me. The creed is an example. I can no longer assent to the Nicene Creed. I explore the creative creeds of the faith of writers and thinkers I admire, and attach my believing self to them in whatever way I can. It is my growing relationship with God and how it is reflected in my life that is paramount. This is the wisdom I seek.

BELIEF: 2004 That is what we are all seeking at this stage of our lives: belief. In the face of a doubting and often hostile world, we seek belief in the Resurrection. We hope for the promise of seeing our loved ones again. The previous generation seemed to go to their deaths clutching rosary beads and a sure hope. Why are we so betwixt and between? Is it the cynicism of our children, those who voted with their feet against the institutional church and now rarely darken its doors? Is it the privately and publicly expressed doubts of a variety of religious? Is it the spate of biblical scholars who deconstruct the gospel without substituting any other evidence of the presence of God? It tends to leave us in a cold and lonely place. And so I listen to the sermon to check for sincerity. I listen for understanding and to fuel my belief. A priest who prays for us to have courage – he understands. The one who mentions fears, he understands, too, and can be trusted in his belief. The priest who demolishes the validity of St John’s Gospel is no help at all. He hasn’t offered any substantive alternative, no straws to clutch at. They are protecting themselves, avoiding the maelstrom, and moving directly to Christ’s command to ‘love one another’. They may not attend mass but they work with refugees, chat to old men at the RSL, and give up lucrative jobs to take ones that ‘make a difference’. Is that a form of belief? There is certainly love for each other in the households they share. Microcosms of love in a whirlwind world. A potential for renewal, given the chance. Belief.

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A PERSONAL S PA C E It is not easy to get to St Mary’s since I’ve relocated to Chatswood from Cremorne. Yet I still feel strongly drawn to this church – for mass and other events, such as last year’s Women’s Spirituality Evening and the Lenten talks. Sometimes I go to mass with Dad at Avalon or Mona Vale. And I’ve been to masses at St Mary’s Cathedral and the church at Chatswood. Comparisons are unpleasant, but I feel a special benefit at St Mary’s that I don’t feel elsewhere. I don’t really know anyone personally at any of the churches. I go alone to mass. I joined the North Sydney parish several years ago. My Dad had attended mass here with his father in the 1930s and 1940s. Without links to friends and family attending the same mass, it’s not a social attraction that I feel. Indeed, at Avalon, going to church with Dad is lovely and we meet longstanding family, friends and neighbours for a brief talk afterwards. Yet I don’t have the sense of belonging that I experience at St Mary’s. And that is odd, because Avalon has the oldest connection to place that I currently have in Australia. What I think I’m responding to is an understanding and definition of community that is offered by the central participants in the parish. This understanding derives, I think, from the Jesuits’ singular history and philosophy. The highest expression of this welcome to our participation is the children’s mass. I would love to see its spirit catch on throughout the church universal. In it, the path to Christ’s table is not cluttered with culture-centric rules and evidence of hierarchy. Celebration is real and meaningful, with the children (and their parents) lifting their hands in blessing with the priest. The children are not simply tolerated but positively welcomed. They are encouraged into the space around the altar, translating into action a spirit that Christ intended. At the end of one of the Lenten talks, I wandered across the church to speak to the priest. Someone asked me if I would like to blow out the candles. Yes, I’d like to. On another occasion, someone asked me if I would like to make a symbolic gesture by putting incense on the hot coals. Yes, I would like to make such a symbolic gesture. A space exists here where I can be very open to my personal experience of Christ. I wonder how long it has been like this.

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A N D YO U W I LL BE MY WITNESS During 1980, I became involved with Catholic Charismatic Renewal and commenced attending an ecumenical prayer group that met one evening each week in a schoolroom at St Mary’s Convent School in the parish. It was at this prayer meeting that I first heard people praying aloud, spontaneously praising God and singing in tongues that sounded so beautiful. My wife and I were welcomed by members of the group. I discovered the Bible and began devouring it with excitement. The aim of the meetings was to praise God. The people present would share a passage from scripture, sing songs of praise, present teachings as a means of increasing our faith, pray for specific intentions, relate their personal experiences of association with God, and proclaim prophecy from the Lord. Meetings would finish with a cuppa and socialising. It was so good to become aware of the presence of the Lord in my life. ‘Anne’ and ‘Peter’, ‘Margaret’ and ‘John’, and ‘Dorothy’ and ‘Elaine’ would come from Mosman. ‘Clare’ came from Northbridge; ‘Lyn’ and ‘Peter’ arrived from Castlecrag. We would collect ‘Edna’, a multiple sclerosis sufferer, from Crows Nest. ‘Noel’ came from North Sydney; ‘Colin’ from Chatswood; ‘Roy’ from Fairfield. Sister Jeanine exercised the gift of the Holy Spirit called Word of Knowledge. Father Paul Becks, who was chaplain to the Latvian community, came occasionally. Local people from the area’s halfway houses would sometimes attend the meetings and be prayed over. None of the clergy at St Mary’s showed interest in the group, and it received no support from the parish. The group functioned for about ten years. Then, members began attending meetings more geographically convenient to their homes. How exciting it was to discover that we had the power of the Holy Spirit, as mentioned in Acts 1: 8: ‘You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses’. How exciting to participate in the Life in the Spirit seminars and receive Baptism in the Holy Spirit and sometimes experience Resting in the Spirit. I am divorced. I continue to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. I regard myself privileged to be able to do this. Common sense and conscience go together, a priest of the parish told me.

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LOVE, N O T P R A G M AT I S M My memory of being young in the 1930s is that whatever we did was wrong to some degree. We lived in a culture of guilt, with no one saying how to live, how to approach the day-to-day things. More than that: how to make the most of life. Later, I reflected on the following words of Christ: ‘I have come that you might have life – life in all its fullness’ ( John 10: 9–10). Here was a positive way of thinking about living. Life was not meant to be gloomy, guilt-ridden and negative. Life was meant to be enjoyed. Yes, I thought. But how do you make the most of life? Christ said, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important commandment. And the second is similar: ‘Love your neighbour as you love yourself ’ (Matthew 22: 37–39). And Christ also said: ‘Love one another’ ( John 13: 34). In other words, give yourself a fair go, and give the other fellow a fair go. Think ‘we’, not ‘me’. Do your best to give deference to others – this is the hard part but be of good heart because Christ is with you. We have to be fair in life – to the poor, the hungry and disadvantaged, to those in marriages that don’t work, to the unborn. I was married in 1962 and, during our honeymoon, my wife and I attended an audience with Pope John XXIII at the Vatican. We realised that we had come face to face with a pope who was conscious of applying Christ’s teachings to today’s world. ‘Open the windows and let the breeze blow through’, he said. The pope was one of us! We were all part of one family. We remember feeling at the time that we were all moving ahead into an enlightened world, going forward to a new and joyous way of living in Christ. The spirit of love, as distinct from pragmatism, is surely at the heart of Christ’s teaching.

C AT H O L I C I T Y – DIFFERENCE IN UNITY Then and now. I’m the same person. But different. Once I believed the world would be as I imagined it should be – that everyone thought as I did, and that all we had to do was to correct what was wrong and everything would be what Jesus wanted. I believed that the meaning of ‘Catholic’ was the celebration of

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difference, bringing different peoples into harmony and unity. You needed only to develop an environment where differences could coexist, where tolerance allowed plurality to be accepted. Now I know that I was just being a child of my own sociological era. Vatican II burgeoned into flower for me. It corresponded with where I was in faith. It was wonderfully good news. As a young Josephite, I thought it was important that the ‘primary educators’ of children (their parents) should be absolutely on fire about what the Council documents were saying. They would see it as good news, too. By focusing on the gospel, the church was freeing us, helping us to form a healthy conscience, treating us as adults. We all had a responsibility for the mission of Jesus. All we had to do was get to it! Every month at the high school where I was teaching, we held parent sessions explaining what we were going to teach the children in religion lessons for the following few weeks. I remember my shock when one of the parents challenged what I was saying. But, I thought, the Council said it! Couldn’t he see that? And why was he attacking me? I didn’t know then about the tactics of ultra-conservatives and so-called ‘liberals’. Now? I still believe in the catholicity of the Church. But we have to fight to maintain it, given the divisionist trends in the Church today. I’ve learnt about how people (including myself ) cope with change and how we need to have compassion and patience as we travel this pilgrimage we call life. Everything else fits into that perspective for me now. I see there is hope as we develop partnerships between lay people and those in religious life. This keeps me going and keeps me believing.

COMMUNIT Y OF LOVE, F R E E I N FA I T H Vatican II defined the Church as the people of God. A community of love. The Church, it said, should be a church of hope, a church of service, a church of joy, a church able to recognise its own being and go out to meet the deepest longings and needs of our age. The council encouraged the Church as local community to be a community of love, a community free in faith, a community manifesting the grace each of us has personally received in baptism. The Church should be a community in which faith can mature in a personal way.

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The parish priest at St Mary’s during the 1960s and 1970s, Father Paul Coleman, SJ, emphasised this love that God has for each one of us. Vatican II spoke of the Church as a pilgrim. In North Sydney, our parish priest encouraged everyone to be involved in the ministries of the community. The parish was a-buzz with the various groups that were formed – scripture groups, men’s discussion groups, meetings for young married couples and youth groups, activities directed to the love and care for families, neighbours, and friends. There were nights of prayer in which he led us – not formal prayers (although we had those at other times), but the talking to God as our friend and lover. Vatican II gave us our conscience back. It was during the 1960s and after Vatican II that, as Catholics, we began to think for ourselves, inform our consciences and make decisions according to them. We started to mature.

HOW T O P R AY ‘May we share a table with you?’ he asked after mass one Sunday night in October 2000. Previously, I had exchanged greetings and ‘the kiss of peace’ with this man and his wife, but I had never been involved in conversation. I knew that he had a malignant condition. I felt delighted that they asked to join with us at the dinner to celebrate Father Quin’s 50 years as a Jesuit. At the same time, I experienced surprise and gratitude – gratitude, because it felt like an invitation, a reaching out from this couple to sit with them. The night came and we talked over dinner about community and our families. It was time to leave and I was startled by his question: ‘How can I learn to pray?’ I remember my response: ‘Well, there are helpful books, try the parish library. Father Quin may have some ideas about what you could do. It is worth asking him.’ Three weeks later and from nowhere came the memory of this exchange. I heard my lack of sensitivity to his request, as well as my words in failing to respond to the invitation to share in the man’s desire to seek and to deepen his relationship with God. I became energised by his question, ‘How can I learn to pray?’ Reflecting on my feelings, I found within me Jesus’ words, ‘For where two, or three are gathered in my name I am there among them’ (Matt: 18. 20). By the end of the day there were seven members of the Lavender Bay

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community who wanted to be together in prayer, to seek God and deepen our relationship with Him. Nine days later, we began our fortnightly meetings. We have all remained committed and have continued meeting for more than four years. For me it is a group founded in the Holy Spirit, who dwells within our community. It is a group whose life began with the call of a sick man who shared his yearnings, and invited me to share in this with him. Consequently, for me it is a group in which I touch and know something of my vulnerability and woundedness, and bring them to God, our healer and our comforter.

FA I T H JOURNEY I like the notion of ‘journey’ as a way of understanding the meaning of my life. The highs and lows, the pain and sadness, the hopes and dreams encompass the key events in my life. The journey is the people, places, choices and decisions I have made. I am now in the second half of my life and I am happy. My daily routine for the past few years has been meditation, then walking to 6:30 mass and home again. This daily pilgrimage has given purpose to my day, so much so that I’ll always live in walking distance to St Mary’s. This area is fortunate to have daily mass and I consider myself blessed. I remember the first time I came to St Mary’s. A girlfriend told me to take my children and go to the children’s mass at 9:10 a.m. It was, she said, wonderfully alive with joy. I had three young children, and where I was attending mass, the older population would turn and stare whenever one of them cried or moved. Now I was overjoyed at finding this church that celebrated kids. Father Paul Coleman, SJ, and Sister Clare Koch were warm and full of energy. They had a natural gift for involving people in the life of the parish. Father Paul was offering prayer time with Sr Marnie Kennedy, and Jackie Forsyth was caring for the children. I couldn’t believe my luck, as my prayer life was almost non-existent. I arrived on the day advertised at the presbytery, slightly worried that I might not actually be in the parish. I said this to Father Paul on greeting him. He set my worries aside, saying that everyone was welcome – come in. That experience of generous acceptance was one of overwhelming relief and gladness, a beginning, a signpost for the traveller: no

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turning back. The memories of a dark curtain-drawn and musty presbytery, where one felt a nuisance, were a piece of the past. Sister Marnie introduced us to St Ignatius, a practical way of praying, and the relationship between prayer and everyday life. I met other like-minded people who invited me to join the family liturgy group. I felt at home; I wanted to contribute and be a part of this community. We worked together on many ‘projects’ and I became a primary school catechist. I was given so much encouragement and support. I always loved returning to St Mary’s after the summer break: it was a real homecoming. In this parish, I know God is leading me to the next step. I am very grateful.

WHERE I AM IN THE CHURCH T O D AY The Church was a different institution when I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. My responses to it then and now are very different. There were rules laid down and suggestions for extra devotions. I was very faithful at keeping all these. I felt that to be loved by God I, had to be good, keep the commandments, and do as many extra deeds as I could – not too much thinking or feeling, just doing. Recently, in the parish bulletin there was a quotation from Ronald Rolheiser OMI: ‘The second half of life, just like the first, demands a journey. While the first half of life is very much consumed with the search for identity, meaning, self-worth, intimacy, rootedness and making peace with our sexuality, the second half has a purpose. We have first to shed many of the things that we legitimately acquired and attached ourselves to during the first half of life. The spiritual task of the second half of life, so different from the first, is to let go.’ I feel that my life now is very different. Earlier, life was a matter of supporting a husband in business and bringing up six children. While I always found time to do a little for others, helping out in Kew Cottages as well as being involved in all the school activities, life was pretty much physical and not mental. Now in my 70s, there is not too much physical activity and I find it difficult to immerse myself in ‘the language of silence’. I find the ‘Church’ very different today. We are encouraged to think for ourselves. St Mary’s gives us many opportunities, with Lenten programs organised.

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Woman’s nights have seen the church packed. Men’s nights were not as crowded. These events and learning experiences have changed my views from complete obedience to the rules of the church to a prayerful consideration of what is important and especially what is important to God in the situation in which I find myself. The most important thing in my ‘being religious’ now is to constantly think of God’s unconditional love for me. This is diametrically opposed to my earlier thinking. Now everything I see and hear is measured against this knowledge.

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Word and song It is no accident that worship requires seeing, hearing, gesturing, moving, inhabiting space through time, and doing things with words. Above all, it requires the human heart at full stretch in the senses, in and through the language. A first starting point might well be that we need this beauty. We start with creaturely things. The sudden graceful gesture of a child fresh home from a ballet lesson, or an innocent child’s hand waving, wherein everything is contained. A graceful daffodil in a simple vase. The unprompted thank you. A passage of music that captures your attention and haunts you, perhaps your whole life. A piece of poetry. A scene from a play that gives you language to say what you’ve always wanted to say. And for us, in the Christian assembly, the language of Scripture made real. We have been so fashioned that, indeed, our hearts are restless until they find places where we know again the deepest language of the heart. Don E. Saliers, ‘Sounding the Symbols of Faith’

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The Christian liturgy was born singing, and it has never ceased to sing … Christian worship is the public proclamation of the mirabilia Dei and of the good and joyful news, an act of thanksgiving, praise, and blessing for the freedom won for us by the resurrection. It is an Amen, an unceasing Alleluia (Rev. 19. 4), a Yes to the new covenant, and a hymn of glory to God the Father. J. Gelineau, SJ, ‘Music and Singing in the Liturgy’

‘In the beginning was the Word ’ ( John 1: 1). The Spirit hovers over waters and land and breathes names into all that is. The Spirit breathes life into the dust of the soil and gives that dust power to see and name. That seeing, naming, enlivened dust is humanity – ha-adam, ‘Adam’ (Genesis 2: 9–10, 19–20). Forty thousand years ago, maybe 60 000, perhaps even 100 000, in the creation myths of our first people, ancestral spirits breathed life into this land to which we, with our own creation myths, came more lately. The First People celebrate that created life in name, story, song, dance, sand sculpture and ochre paint. Every rock, river, mountain, hill, camp, track and ritual spot from the northernmost to the southernmost, from the easternmost to the westernmost part of the continent has had a name, many names. Language has filled the land for millennia. Language brushes the land with metaßphor. Language gives the most deserted place a history. So, words and story have been imprinted on every rock, spring, hill and shore of this parish, this Wallumetta, this Other Side, for 53 000 to 60 000 years. Sydney Harbour was then just a deep river ravine until, 6000 years ago, the melting of the ice made Tasmania and Papua New Guinea islands and made the present shoreline. The Eora Nation, the descendants of the First People, who had been here many millennia before them, have danced down at their Good Fishing Spot, Kiarabili (Kirribilli), refreshed themselves at Spring Waters, Quiberee (Lavender Bay), and harvested the abundance of the heights of Cammeraygal (North Sydney). The catastrophe of a smallpox epidemic nearly wiped out the Cammeragal, a strong vigorous people. There were terrible scenes here, as the dead lay unburied. There simply were no survivors to make sacraments of their passing. For the 150 years of the parish our First People barely survived on the margins of our ‘civilisation’. They came to their dancing

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grounds at Kiarabilli for ‘command’ and ‘gala’ performances. ‘Corroborees’, the first settlers called them, from garaabara, a word of the Dharuk language of the Sydney region, referring to a particular style of dancing. ‘Corroborees’ were very political, as the dancers mimicked and mocked the colonial settlers, and, in their turn, the audience possessed the dancers by freezing them in their primitiveness. The Deep Time imprinted on this land by the words of our First People makes our Australian experience almost unique in the world. It reaches into our everyday lives as a moral, even a theological, reality. Our First People identify themselves locally, in the first place. They are more Tharawal (in Sydney), Wanjuk (in Perth), Kaurna (in Adelaide), Yuggera (in Brisbane), Wurundjeri (in Melbourne), or Ngunawal (in Canberra) than ‘Aboriginal’. Identity, in their experience of their own aboriginality, is always local. The most painful wound of the ‘stolen generation’ is always seen to have been the loss of local identity. But in the diaspora of Redfern or Fitzroy, they weave a network of relationships that bind them together through the whole continent in one aboriginality. Despite the loss of their local languages, they make words in translation – ‘family’, ‘friends’, ‘community’, ‘country’ – that reach into their Deep Time across the whole land crossed. We, bound together with them, also reach into Deep Time with words that are the same, but different. That is our privilege. That is our responsibility. Jesuits in the Parish, from 1878 and the decades following – when priests like Duncan McNab, and Donald MacKillop, SJ (brother of Mary MacKillop), were vocal critics of government and society, as well as advocates of Aboriginal land, legal and language rights – to 2006 through Frank Brennan, SJ, and Uniya, the Jesuit Social Justice Centre, have alerted the parish both to that privilege and that responsibility. Uniya, meaning ‘meeting place or bend in the river’, was the name of the Jesuit Mission on the Daly River in the Northern Territory, established in 1886. McNab and MacKillop both learned at Daly River the impact Deep Time had on Aboriginal lives through languages and stories. Uniya, of course, is a place of words and song, dialogue and dance, of corroboree. This is not the place to review the stirrings of conscience of the people of God concerning our First People, or, as John Wilken, SJ, has put it, ‘the primal (or original) sin of the Australian people in the injustice done by the European settlers to the original inhabitants of this continent’. But we can reflect on the creative power of the Word in our religious experience and how,

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on the solemn issue of our First People, the Word has been used to seek justice and peace. John Paul II, in his Address to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders at Alice Springs in 1986, told the First People to take heart in what the Word had done in this land. ‘Take heart’, he told them, ‘from the fact that many of your languages are still spoken and that you still possess your ancient culture … Your “Dreaming”, which influences your lives so strongly that, no matter what happens, you remain forever people of your culture, is your own way of touching the mystery of God’s Spirit in you and in creation.’ He went on to praise the work of men like Archbishop Bede Polding who, in 1869 and with all the Australian bishops, wrote a Pastoral Letter that said: We have dispossessed the Aboriginals of the soil … In natural justice then, we are held to compensation … the fathers of this council … desire solemnly to lay upon the conscience of all who have property in these colonies the thought that there is blood upon their land, and that human souls, to whom they are in so many ways debtors in the name of natural justice, and in the name of the redeemer, are perishing because no man careth for them. Frank Brennan, SJ, has addressed this guilt which our forefathers had in this way. It is on Aboriginal ‘dispossession … that we have constructed the monolith which is Australian society and its prosperity. … That is not to argue that we must pay for reparations for the sins of our forefathers perpetrated on other’s forefathers. It is to say we have a duty to share the fruits of those sins with those who suffered by them and continue to suffer.’ Frank Brennan is correct. The Word has bound past and present together in this land, but it is only the present for which we are responsible. It is only the injustice of the present that we can heal. As John Paul said in Alice Springs: ‘Let it not be said that the fair and equitable recognition of Aboriginal rights to Land is discrimination. To call for the acknowledgment of the land rights of people who have never surrendered those rights is not discrimination.’

H

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It is the Thursday before the third Sunday of Lent. The pastoral team – the seven priests of the parish, the three Pastoral Associates, the officers of the parish, secretaries, managers, sacristan – are having their weekly meeting in preparation for the coming weekend’s liturgy. There is business to be done – rosters for the different masses, previews of coming events (Women’s’ Spirituality Night), reviews of past events (the Lenten Reconciliation Lectures), policies to be proposed (ecumenical dialogue, a Parish Mission Statement, youth ministries), responses to be given to various archdiocesan proposals, and information (about meetings of the Deanery of North Shore parishes, the parish web site, books and articles pertinent to the pastoral task). But most importantly, these two hours are a short time for spiritual retreat and communal inspiration. The prime task is to reflect prayerfully on the Word of God in the scriptural readings for the third Sunday of Lent. Each of the pastoral team will have to bear witness in some way to their personal response to these readings – the priests to expose the Word in their homilies; the Pastoral Associates to integrate the hymns, prayers and responses of the liturgy into some sort of unity so that its dramatisation is clear and simple; and the officers to infuse their parish tasks with a spirituality that is both rewarding and edifying. ‘The parish is where everything happens’, John XXIII told the Fathers of the Council when he missioned them to spread the word of what the Spirit had done to them. He was right. From the beginning, the parish, the local assembly of the people of God, has been the Church alive. Corinth, Ephesus, Hippo, Milan, Ars, the Brompton Oratory and St Mary’s have been where the Word is translated into the living present and tradition is invented. The Word of God comes to the Church through scripture and tradition. Both, scripture and tradition, The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, ‘make the mystery of Christ present and fruitful in the Church’. Scripture and tradition are both living things. To think of them as caught forever in the superficiality of their literalness is a fundamentalist form of death to the Word. ‘A kind of intellectual suicide’, the Pontifical Commission on the Interpretation of the Bible (1993) has called fundamentalism. Fundamentalism disregards the essential human dimensions of scripture and undervalues its true gift in the ‘divine condescension’ that the Word of God is in human languages. In those most human skills of reading and listening, our minds and spirits breathe over the texts as the Spirit breathed over the waters and lands, and we infuse them

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with the life of their meaning. Reading and listening are humanity’s most creative moments. Neither scripture nor tradition are just bodies of texts handed on from generation to generation. They are both the process of the handing on as well. Tradition is the creative skill of each generation continuously translating the language of faith, doctrine and practice into the present. The parish is where the continual enlivening process takes place. So, we are at our pastoral meeting for the third Sunday of Lent. This is year A. In response to Vatican II’s call in Dei Verbum (The Word of God) to renew itself in its catechetics, worship and witness by first confronting the Word, the Church provided a three-year cycle, A, B and C. These are divisions for the scriptural readings for its liturgy and its Lectionary of the Hours – once monastic and priestly, now universally the Church’s prayerful scriptural and traditional day and night watch on creation. Thus the three-year cycle of some 500 scriptural readings reinforces the truth that the Church’s faith is historical, bound in time, full of stories and is mysterious. From childhood to old age, in all the triumphs and trials of living, through all the stages of educational development and personal maturity, these images and stories of the Word bring, week-in, year-out to each believer, each pilgrim, reassurance in their familiarity and repetition, refreshment in the new understanding of a living tradition. Who could describe, in a few words, the processes by which we are liberated from the factual contradictions and disturbing language of the hundreds of different texts of the Bible and the ways the texts reach the mythical element in our souls, allowing us to see their relevance to the contemporary issues that concern us – ‘the rights and responsibilities of the human person, the value of human life from conception to death, the need to protect the created world, the search for lasting justice and peace for all peoples?’ I quote from The Gift of Scripture: A Teaching Document of the Bishops Conferences of England and Wales, and of Scotland. The statement does what we must hope many bishops’ conferences will do: offer spiritual counsel rather than magisterial rule. That is their prophetic role. Who can describe how nearly 2000 years of art, architecture, reflective thought and history, as well as the years of prayerful reflection on our own part, have imprinted on our souls the myriad images of the gospels in such a way that we just have to hear such words as: ‘A man had two sons …’ (Luke 15: 12), or ‘Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted

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by the devil’ (Mt. 4: 4); or ‘A man was once on his way down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell into the hands of brigands’ (Luke 10: 30), and find we are thrust into our deep memories of death, life, forgetting and loving, losing and gaining again. In year A, the gospel of the third Sunday in Lent is John 4: 5–42, the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well. At the pastoral team meeting, they (and I among them) first observe the order of the liturgy and then someone reads the story, slowly and reflectively. Jesus came to the Samaritan town called Sychar, near the land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s Well is there and Jesus, tired by the journey, sat straight down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. His disciples had gone into the town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him: ‘What? You are a Jew and you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?’ – Jews, in fact, do not associate with Samaritans … Jesus replied: ‘If you only knew what God is offering and who it is that is saying to you: Give me a drink, You would have been the one to ask, And he would have given you living water’. ‘You have no bucket, sir,’ she answered, ‘and the well is deep: how could you get this living water? Are you a greater man than our father Jacob who gave us this well and drank from it himself with his sons and his cattle?’ Jesus replied: ‘Whoever drinks this water Will get thirsty again; But anyone who drinks the water that I shall give Will never be thirsty again: The water that I shall give Will turn into a spring inside him, welling up to eternal life.’

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Many Samaritans of that town had believed in him on the strength of the woman’s testimony when she said, ‘He told me all I have ever done’, so when the Samaritans came up to him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed for two days, and when he spoke many more came to believe; and they said to the woman, ‘Now we no longer believe because of what you told us; we have heard him ourselves and we know that he really is the saviour of the world’. At the pastoral meeting, one by one we overcome the first silences. Then randomly as the thought comes to each of us, we pull out a word or a phrase that we might come back to – ‘tired by the journey’, ‘give me a drink’, ‘Samaritan woman’, ‘living water’, ‘you’re right, you have no husband’, ‘worship in spirit and truth’, ‘I am He’, ‘my food is to do the will of the one who sent me’, ‘look at those fields ripe for the harvest’, ‘we have heard him ourselves’. We read the scripture passage again aloud, slowly and reflectively. Then we return to the phrases we’ve highlighted, taking off from them, adding to them, or just savouring them. These are precious moments of trust. There is a certain nakedness of spirit, as we expose our ignorance or our superficiality. The sounds of the presbytery surround us – the rattle of the kitchen, the constant doorbell, voices asking for someone or something. But we need this quiet time with one another. The parish needs both our strengths and our weaknesses. There is something very much of the Jesuit that is happening here. I spoke of Ignatius Loyola’s, Spiritual Exercises. Let me return to them in detail, because we have them, perhaps only indirectly, in mind as we proceed. They provide us with a methodology for meditating on the Word. First, put yourself in place, Loyola says. See, hear, smell and touch the place you want to go to – Calvary, the Empty Tomb – Bir Ya’qub ( Jacob’s Well). Then tell yourself what you want to happen to yourself by being there. You want to love Christ? Know your sinful self? Understand what believing costs? Then make a small play in three or four acts of the narrative you are reflecting on, your ‘points of meditation’. Play it out till you find yourself loving, sorrowing and believing. Ignatius’ first prelude, as he called it, involved the Composition of Place. He encouraged entry into the living presence of Jesus, and of the landscape of his ministry. It was not just a trick-of-the-trade of spiritual counselling. Jesus in his humanity is us. The Word joins Him to us in his humanity. Here Jesus sits on the rim of Bir Ya’qub, in the shadow of Mt Gerazim, perhaps the most anathematised place in all Palestine. He is talking in public to a woman (which no Jewish man would do), and to a Samaritan woman at that. The Samaritans were, of course, a bastard gipsy-like people despised by the

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Jews for their desecrating ways. He is tired. He has been walking for several days from southern Judaea. Perhaps he is frightened, too. Herod has just imprisoned John the Baptist and the Pharisees are beginning to plot how they will be rid of Jesus. Jesus’ disciples have just experienced revivalist-type scenes, as they see the crowds going on a pilgrimage to John the Baptist on the edge of the desert and seeking from him his rites of purification. Jesus has missioned them to do the same but now, with John gone and knowing how he had prophesied that he was only the preparer of the way for Jesus, they have a sense of denouement. For the first time they are confronting those they meet with this new ‘Way’. They are puzzled, too. They are not sure how to use the freedoms that this new Way has given them. Their lives, which had been so completely defined in all its parts by the Jewish Law, have now another law. At every moment, Jesus is teaching them his Way – ‘living waters’ that have a new sort of life, ‘food’ of the spirit and of truth, a ‘harvest’ of souls, and how to treat with respect a woman with ‘no husband’ because she has had five husbands. Bir Ya’qub is the well Jacob dug for his son Joseph. It is a deep well, 73 metres deep in 670 CE and 41 metres in 1935. Underground springs – ‘living waters’ in Hebrew – feed it from the 869-metre heights of Mt Gerazim. Anyone wanting water from this well will have to bring a 25 metre-long rope and a jar. Jacob is the immediate ancestor of the 12 tribes of Israel. Sit on the rim of his well and a myriad of stories will come to mind – of the ‘mess of pottage’ and his ruse to get his land, of his dream of Yahweh appearing to Abraham here on Mt Gerazim, and of his son Joseph, and his many coloured cloak and triumphs in Egypt. Joseph is buried a few metres from the well. Gerazim ( Jerusalem) is the other Jerusalem of the Samaritans. It is 80 kilometres north of David’s Jerusalem. God enlivened the dust on the slopes of Gerazim, it was said, into ha-Adam, humanity. In the account, Jesus’ apparently sardonic remark about five husbands could be a reference to the fact of the Samaritan miscegenetic origins from five pagan cities, or to the fact that they adhered only to the Pentateuch (the Five Books of Moses) as the Word of God. Allusions like this did not escape the early Christians or contemporary Jews. They will elude us, however. Should the pastoral team’s plans take note of this? Ignatius’ second prelude asked exercitants to reach for understanding. As members of the pastoral team, we have to enter all the living presents of the text from the time it was made to the time when we, as readers, will perform it. It

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is not our point to unravel all these meanings, or to debate the issues of authorship and the time and place of the writing of the text. The contradictions, ambiguities, uncertainties and multiple possibilities of nearly every word and phrase do enrich our experience. At this moment, however, we need to pull this Word and this story into our own living present. We reduce their many words to a few sentences. John’s story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is a small play about faith encounters with Jesus – encounters in December 27 CE, then in all years from 27 to the time when John (or his redactor or editor) was writing down his experiences of this and many other faith encounters 30 or 40 years later, and then for time evermore when there would be readers. The Samaritan woman wriggles on the line Jesus throws to her – debating Samaritan and Jewish theology, objecting to the nastiness of the Jews, resisting seeing the symbolic language of Jesus, and needing to be finally confronted with the awesome words, ‘I am He’. (That is what God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am … Go tell the sons of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you’.) ‘I am He’: the essence of a faith encounter with Jesus caught by the writer. Our pastoral team meeting, then, is a spiritual exercise. It is a delicate exercise. We cannot just tell our parish the truths contained in the Good News we bring. We have to let the parish experience this Good News in some way. That is the theatre of our liturgy. We are translators of a past language into a living present. The philosopher Ortega y Gasset has said this surprising thing about translation: Language cannot be understood unless we begin by observing that speech consists above all in silences … Each language represents different equations between manifestations and silences. Each people leaves something unsaid in order to be able to say other things. Because everything would be unsayable. Hence the immense difficulty of translation: translation is a matter of saying in a language precisely what that language tends to pass over in silence. By the same token, we experience truth in ambiguity. (The unambiguous is propaganda.) Ambiguity is our everyday reality. There is not a word, not a gesture, not a scene that is not ambiguous in some way. It won’t be different

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with the Word of God. Our liturgy will have to offer our people the freedom to fill in the silences in the Word of God. We of the team are not expert enough to do this by ourselves. We have, together with our weekly gospel text, a weekly commentary by an Australian scriptural scholar of international renown, Brendan Byrne, SJ, Commentaries on the Scripture Readings for the Sundays of Year A. The older ones among us might have on our desks some other well-tried commentaries, such as An Introduction to the New Testament, Raymond Brown, SS. So we prepare to present the Word on the third Sunday of Lent. The Parish has the right to expect that it can listen to the Word, not just hear it. The words in the liturgy are all performative. They are all expected to produce some audience response – joy, sorrow, thanksgiving and praise. They must create a communal and personal silence. Their cadences, their rhythms, their beauty will do that. We are aware that if we gain a living presence of the Word with more informality, we cannot afford to lose what is ours for over a 1000 years. The parish has other rights. It has a right to a language that is inclusive. It has a right to translations that are, far from being literal and thereby dead, poetic and thereby alive with the spirit. It has the right to savour the fact that the Word on this third Sunday of Lent comes in the story of Jesus, the Samaritan woman and the ‘living waters’ they share, but it is also integrated with the story in the First Reading from Exodus 17: 3–7, where Yahweh quenches the thirst of the Israelites from the rock. It connects with Paul’s words in the Second Reading (Romans 5: 5): ‘The love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us’. The parish has the right to know that we are listening to the Word in liturgical time as we approach Holy Week. These three weeks before Palm Sunday have been the climax, since the beginning of the Church, of the catechumens’ encounter with Christ as they prepare for baptism during the Easter Vigil. Above all, the parish has the right to know that the Word always belongs to a living present – the living present of Jesus himself, the living present of the authors of the scriptures, the living present of ourselves as we listen to the Word. They should recognise somehow that to enter the living present of Jesus is essential for our incarnational beliefs. Jesus in his humanity is us. Our faith is historical and always has a Composition of Place. We need to show that we should somehow enter the living present of John the Evangelist, as he shapes the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman. This is also essential. John, in his authorship, is also us as he finds meaning in the past without closure.

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Song Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? We sing in answer to the call: I, the Lord of sea and sky, I have heard my people cry, I, the Lord of snow and rain, I have borne my people’s pain, I, the Lord of wind and flame, I will tend the poor and lame. Don Schutte’s 1981 musical dialogue, written for the ordination of a friend and inspired by Isaiah’s and Samuel’s exchange with Yahweh, fits our mood. We are here to dialogue with the Lord in one voice. This is the 6 p.m. Sunday Eucharist at St Francis Xavier’s. It is here, as everyone will tell you, that the parish is most Church Alive! Before the evening is done, we will have given voice to all our emotions, joy, grief, love and praise. We will have made our acclamations – Maranatha, Alleluia, Amen. We will have made those ‘stubborn’ (ostinato) Taize repetitions that free our spirits to play with the memory of our deeper realities. Some 21 times in just one Eucharist, we will have raised our voices in song. Psalm 47 says it all: Clap your hands, all you peoples. Acclaim God with shouts of joy. God rises to shouts of acclamation, Yahweh rises to blasts of trumpets, Let the music sound for our God. Let it sound. Let the music sound for our King. Let it sound. God is King of the whole world. Play your best in his honour. The Folk Mass, as it is called, has been attracting people from all over Sydney for 40 years. In those years, it has gone through most of the worldwide phases of changing musical forms, as the Church began to learn to sing again. In the 1960s, when the guitar was king, and singing nuns and friars were an Australian and global phenomenon, protest singing in peace and justice demonstrations showed how body and soul could be engaged in communal

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action. But Blowin’ in the Wind, He’s Got the Whole World in his Hand, and Kumbaya were just entry points into a new musical experience. These simple liturgical folk songs didn’t last long in the hymnbooks. An older generation (and younger people, too) backed away from the banalities and cliches in the lyrics. In the years to come, musicals such as Godspell would provide Advent songs such as Prepare Ye the Way. But popular music was left mainly to the young in their schools. Singing the liturgy was more adult-oriented. The parish was fortunate to have young priests, like Pat Bishop, SJ, and Celso Romanin, SJ, who weren’t afraid to sing but, more importantly, were prepared to let skilled lay people lead the way in the music ministry. In the 1970s, in good part because of American Jesuits, composers turned to liturgical and biblical texts for their inspiration. Don Schutte, who composed Here I am Lord, is well entrenched in the parish hymnbook with works like You Are Near, Sing a New Song, Though the Mountains May Fall and Glory and Peace to our God. Multicultural and ecumenical influences were also at work. Send Me, Jesus by Thuma Mina from South Africa entered the liturgy, as well the AfroAmerican, Where Were You When They Crucified the Lord? The Lutheran, Anglican and Wesleyan traditions were there to be borrowed from. Brother Roger’s Parable of a Community at Taize began to inspire hundreds of thousands, especially the young, to create a worldwide community of song. Jacques Berthier, the Taize composer, is in the parish hymnal: Jesus, Remember Me; O Lord, Hear My Prayer; Laudate Dominum. Interestingly, as a community of reconciliation with commitment to no nation or language, Latin attracted the Taize composers. The 1980s saw the realisation that congregational singing was an art form in itself. Composers like Marty Haugen – All You Works of God, We Are Many Parts, Gather Us In – and Michael Joncas – On Eagle’s Wings, When We Eat the Bread, Do Not Be Afraid: I Am with You – set new directions to hymns, to the liturgical environment, and to an art of dialogic singing. Meanwhile, instrumentation, forbidden for so long in the Church, came into its own – bass, cello, tympani, synthesisers, wind and strings, and a piano began to function in ways in which a technically sophisticated audience could appreciate. They evoked emotion, contextualised ritual motion, helped bridge the gap between everyday life and worship, and facilitated new repertoires of songs. The 1990s saw compositional sophistication and a willingness to wed the Church’s heritage with contemporary creativity. The Jesuits in these years were

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blessed with a number of nationally acclaimed poets – Peter Steele, SJ, and Andrew Bullen, SJ, among them – and an internationally renowned Australian composer, Christopher Willcock, SJ’s Let Us Go Rejoicing, Remain in My Love and Do Not Be Afraid, I Am with You are all in the hymnal. And with the combination of poets and composers came a new era of creativity in which hymns and music were made for special occasions, such as ordinations, and group celebrations, such as masses for Jesuit schools and anthems. These 40 years of the Folk Mass were a classic case of the Church at its parish level ‘inventing tradition’. It was renewing the symbolic environment of the liturgy by practice rather than by decree. ‘Sing to God with your hearts, not your voices’, St Jerome told the fourth-century Christians. The Word in song was a spiritualisation of the rational, a lifting up of the eyes to the transcendent as well as a transformation of everyday living. It was a communion of ideas and intuition, making the Eucharist an action rather than a thing, making the sacrament a deep reality not a pointer to something else. The song, like all things in sound, is there only in the performance, always in the present. The song making community, the song lifting us beyond ourselves, the song possessing us in a sound environment nano-seconds faster than a sight environment is as intangible and mysterious as any event in which an historical God engages us. We are transported for an hour or so, but would be hard-put to say why. We only know that our music is a harmonic language. We melt a little when we sing in a minor key O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. We fly a little in the major key: I Have Seen the Lord, I Have Heard His Voice. The ministry of music, practised by lay people in the parish these last 40 years, has been a prophetic ministry, awakening the parish to its baptismal gifts. Prophecy is corrupted by perfectionism, by the burdening of the spiritual life with misplaced expectations. Perfection strikes us dumb. The music ministry, as it has been practised in the parish, has left the people of God singing to the God who sings comfortable in their imperfect selves – with arrangements accommodating the ordinary male voice, with the need for singers to hear themselves above the accompaniment, with the provision of accessible music with appropriate words. With their thoughtfully planned liturgies, practised a little but performed musically with skill, they have given to the community a sense that it is the primary agent of the liturgy, given to it the pleasure of the repetition of favourite pieces (while rejecting the notion of entertainment), provided it with moments of solo voice and instrument for

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moments of reflective silence. In a parish that has to nourish a community very varied in its needs and spiritual tastes, the music ministry is itself varied. Without diverting at all from the understanding that the liturgy is sung, it is sung in six or seven different styles, at different masses, and at different churches. William Baumann has given us a definition of the music ministry that could be a description of the parish’s: ‘to bring joy; to bring relief from pain and sorrow, to end anxiety and fear, to share what enriches – this is ministry. Ministry is not’, he goes on, ‘an attempt to do someone over in some preconceived pattern. It uncritically respects the individuality, taste and life choices of the persons served, freeing them to create themselves anew. It urges, inspires, shares, supports; it never forces.’

H In 2003, John Paul II wrote a ‘chirograph’, a sort of personal and gently reflective letter about music and song in the living Church. It is the sort of letter you would expect a poet, playwright and actor, and an intensely spiritual man to write. The occasion was the centenary of the Motu Proprio on Sacred Music issued by Pius X on 22 November 1903, the feast of St Cecilia, the patron of music. Pius X’s decree shaped the direction of reform in liturgical music for nearly a 100 years. It sparked a movement of extraordinary energy and creativity. He determined that the only appropriate music for the Church was Gregorian chant and Palaestrina’s polyphony. The only appropriate instrument was the organ. It is not for one so musically illiterate as myself to comment on these 100 years of creativity, save to express admiration for the thousands – the hundreds of thousands? – of choirmasters, choirs, musicians and composers who played out their living faith in redeeming the musical heritage of the Church. But Jan Michael Joncas has done so in, From Sacred Song to Ritual Music. TwentiethCentury Understandings of Roman Catholic Worship Music (1997). John Paul II’s 2003 reflections came after two major contributions of Pius XII on music in 1955 and 1958, Vatican Council II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) and a 1967 summation of instructions on music from the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship. Also, there were large numbers of bishops’ conferences and some quite brilliant reports of ‘ten

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years of observations, study, reflections and dialogue concerning the quality of liturgical music in the United States, especially within the Roman Catholic tradition’ of The Milwaukee Symposia for Church Composers (1992), and a ‘contribution to the ongoing discussion of issues which remain controversial, unresolved or even divisive’ known as The Snowbird Statement on Catholic Liturgical Music (1995). With all this to reflect on, John Paul had three criteria for Church music: its ‘holiness’, by which he meant its enrichment of the most sacramental moments of worship (‘Music is no mere adornment of liturgy. It pulls out the joy, solemnity, unity and beauty already there’); its ‘true art’, by which he meant its ability to engage the spirit aesthetically and dramatically in the divine; and its ‘universality’, by which he meant its power to convey the same Good News, not univocal – in one tongue – but to all the world, inculturated as the world is into all its different languages and modes of living. John Paul’s successor, Benedict XVI, has not been as patient as John Paul with the inculturation of sacred music in the modern Church. Twenty-five years ago when he was Cardinal Ratzinger and an active theologian, he believed church music as it was then practised in the Church was in ecclesiastical and theological crisis. Now, he sees the notions of Karl Rahner, SJ, Edward Schillebeeckx, OP, and Joseph Gelineau, SJ, that ‘the liturgy was born singing’ as dangerous utilitarianism. Singing, in Ratzinger’s view, has other functions than ‘utility’ in turning small groups of worshippers towards the risen Christ in one another. Singing, in its art and cultural heritage, should turn these small communities towards the grandeur of the Church. Where John Paul was happy to see the same spirit that created the greatness of Church music in Gregorian chant and polyphony transposed metaphorically into the modern liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger believed that the great art of the Church should come whole into the present. Word and song in the liturgy, he holds, are not actions, they are things. They, to use a little sociological jargon, ‘reify’ the Church. The Church itself is made into a thing of majesty and authority by the majesty and beauty of its art. The difference between these two understandings was apparent to many in the burial mass of John Paul – John Paul lying there in the simple wooden coffin, the Book of the Gospels set on its lid and blowing open in the wind. Behind him was the pomp and circumstance of a Pontifical High Mass, with the Sistine Chapel Choir singing Gregorian, rather poorly.

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Some in the parish and the wider Church are troubled by the lack of transcendence in the word and song of their liturgy. They have to ask themselves: Are they missing the transcendence of the Spirit or the transcendence of the institutional Church?

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Celebrating The invitation to celebrate came early for the Church. ‘I bring you good news of great joy, a joy to be shared by all people’, the Angel of the Lord announced to the shepherds (Luke 2: 10). ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, Rejoice’, Paul wrote to the Philippians (Phil. 4: 4). Celebrating has two qualities. We celebrate with someone. And in that togetherness, we ‘let go’ in some way. This togetherness means entering someone else’s personal space and inviting them to enter ours – joyfully. ‘Letting go’ means being slightly disorderly to our ordinary carefulness. To celebrate together is to exercise a trust, to share a sort of joyousness – the joyousness of our most sacred and personal beliefs, for example. We hug, we hold, we link arms, we seek to see one another in a different light. We unleash a little of the charismatic elements of our person. Maybe we will dance; maybe we will create a rhythmic antiphon of praise. We easily testify to our real feelings. We make a special place for our celebrations – with ribbons and balloons. Words will never be far away from our celebrating. So, there will be banners. Mostly we will make a communion of our celebrating by eating a meal together. There will be readings and stories, memories, speeches and toasts. It is a very special skill of ours, this human talent to make these in-between spaces where we can be different for a moment and savour the engagement of our living.

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ONE PRIEST ’S MASS The 9 a.m. mass at St Mary’s starts at 9.10, so that we can all be there on time. The priest, Father Peter Quin, understands the difficulty of finding a child’s matching left shoe at 15 minutes to 9 on a Sunday morning. He stands before the church with a smile and his arms open, giving ‘high fives’ to the children as he welcomes everyone to come inside. He begins the mass. He directs his homilies to the children. He places his chair at the front of the altar with the children seated on the steps. He tells them wonderful stories and encouragingly asks them questions. At the offertory, the children join him on the altar. He often looks like the Pied Piper, swamped by children of all ages, from toddlers to high-schoolers. There may be babies crying, toddlers roaming, infants somersaulting down the altar steps, children dressed as cowboys or fairies, all with scant regard for his personal space – but he is not fazed. He makes each child feel special, and they love him for it. Our priest has always supported the Family Liturgy Group. He has encouraged many new families to become directly involved in the mass by organising individual liturgies, with children reading prayers and enacting gospel stories. He emphasises the need for children to understand and enjoy their faith, and he is willing to do things differently to ensure that this happens. His great gift to families is in celebrating the sacrament of Baptism. Each baptism is a family – and congregation – celebration. Often he will raise the infant aloft, as though to say: ‘This is our child’. The parents of this parish feel privileged to have had Peter as our parish priest. He has baptised our babies, heard their first Reconciliation, given them their first Communion, and been present at their Confirmation. He has encouraged their faith and passed on to them his love of God and the mass. They will always remember their special parish priest.

‘ HE IS ALIVE’ Nothing in my previous experience of parish life had prepared me for my first liturgy at St Mary’s seven years ago. What caught me unaware was the palpable hospitality the moment you step inside the church.

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An animated kind of chatter rippled through the church before mass. Caught in its cross-fire, I remember thinking, ‘What is going on? Surely this looks and sounds like a group of people who are happy to be here. How unusual!’ This was all happening when social commentators were pointing out the phenomenon of half-empty churches. Yet here I was seated in one that was filling up rapidly. People even seemed to have a bearing of confidence. As they settled, they seemed assured of their belonging. Some reasons for the decline in church attendance can be traced to the loss of credibility in institutionalised religion and the shocks of recent scandals. Certainly, there is now resurgence in the search for a nourishing spirituality in a complex, war-torn world. This quest will often bypass traditional religious ritual. It will favour new experiences, those more personally satisfying and less rule-bound. Another factor – and, yes, it carries the risk of excessive individualism – is the need to relate intimately and directly to a Divine Being who understands and accompanies one through life, without the complexities of hierarchical structures. So I found myself wondering: How do people in this group see the event about to take place? Is it a prayer? A drama? Is it taken to be a salvific action by Christ? Is it a community celebration? A serious Catholic obligation? All of these? For all of the mass, we focused on God and nourished our spirit. The priest’s dismissal charged us to share with the world the transformative experience we had received. Our actions had touched the past, present and future of our lives, and the legitimate concerns of communities elsewhere in the world. The courage to live up to what we had seen and heard was a daunting challenge. Still, like the incredulous disciples after Jesus’ death and burial, we had been reenergised by the conviction, ‘That He is alive’ (Luke 24: 5) and ‘That our eyes have been opened and we have recognized Him’ (Luke 24: 31).

VOTIVE CANDLES At Star of the Sea there is a small niche off to the right of the entrance and half-hidden by the foyer. It makes a quiet, minimalist and private space. A beautifully carved Madonna stands over a rack of lighted votive candles. By chance (and in case of need), a box of children’s toys rests near a leg of the rack.

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Why do we light votive candles? Do we really think our accompanying prayer will affect the sick? Do we light the candles for their flickering beauty, or to see, in the nearby ones, that others weep or worry as we do? They seem to be outward signs of compassion and, yes, community. Lighting a small candle seems good because it does not draw attention to itself. The flickering light is a tangible evidence of mystery, and that is not a bad thing for one to be satisfied with and take comfort in. The mass begins. Our singing is not inspired but the Gospel is read, the Body of Christ becomes ours, and we are missioned to go in peace and serve the Lord.

SOCIAL JUSTICE S U N D AY It is the 6 p.m. Sunday mass at St Francis Xavier’s. This is Social Justice Sunday. Arriving early on the evening, men and women are laying out pamphlets displaying the various works of the Jesuits, such as Teresa House and other projects. Special prayers, the sermon and the meaning of the Social Justice ‘marketplace’ organised at the back of the church are harmonised into one theme: care for the poor. It is gently but strongly done. People are attentive and eager. A collection is taken up for the work of Father Ruiz, SJ, among the lepers in China. A layman makes the appeal. Who are your poor, he asks us to consider. In 1995, he reminds us, 1700 homeless men were part of the North Shore community. The musicians are early and practising. They will be 12 in number when the mass begins: drums (a handsome elderly man); piano and guitar (three women); violin (an Asian girl); singers; and the man who manages the overheads for all of us. We seldom begin on time – a relief from ‘the old days’ when being late for Sunday mass was a sin. Friends greet us. Their generosity and love are emblematic of so much of the parish. Before mass we learn a new song: ‘Shalom Klaverim’ (‘My Peace I Leave with You’). There is verve and joy in our community tonight. Much is due to the presence of Father Frank Brennan, SJ. He draws us into the meaning of Social Justice Sunday by rephrasing three questions put by the bishops for this Sunday: What resources are you wasting? Are you trying not to be too busy for others and for God? Are you being someone for the Other who has no one? We

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are carried forward into the mass. Every moment, every gesture and stanza of music is honest. There isn’t anything – any idea, any word – we can’t fully affirm. We’re together: clasping hands during the Lord’s Prayer, approaching to receive the Eucharist from the priest or lay minister, and, above all, joining our voices in singing our faith. The singing is thunderous this evening – people smile and find happiness and hope. This, the twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, is by no means ordinary. Six children, without signal, join Father Brennan at the altar for the offertory and consecration. One little boy leans close to him, cupping his chin in his hand and resting his elbow on the altar. They know the words of our songs by heart. During Father’s sermon, the message of Social Justice Sunday is given to us through his words, but also by means of a single slide showing the meeting of a blind African bishop, Bishop Kike, SJ, and Pope Benedict XVI. The bishop’s story is a remarkable one of love and service to the poor. We listen intently. As usual, the church is filled; many young people, 18 to 35, have come to celebrate. About 25 people were directly involved in the mass. It is a happy, united and loving community that remembers our cherished final songs, ‘May Yahweh Bless You’ and (a new one) ‘The Blind Man’.

CHRISTMAS, 2004 It is a warm and sultry evening. I impress on my teenage daughters the importance of arriving at St Mary’s early if we are to sit together for carols and the following midnight mass. For once they arrive on time. The church fills slowly from just after 11 p.m. Many in the congregation are middle-aged, like my wife and myself, and as time moves on we are joined by our families, a younger generation, mostly teenagers and young adults. Things have changed since my youth, when Sunday mass was a family affair. Now Christmas and Easter seem to be the only times when families worship together. The younger ones greet each other warmly; they sit in front of us. My eldest daughter greets one of her former school friends who, together with her sisters, stands out in a pink blouse. At exactly 11.30 the carols begin with ‘The Holly and the Ivy’. A single piano and a rather hesitant congregation accompany a small choir in fine voice.

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We continue in this vein through ‘The First Noel’, ‘O Holy Night’ and other hymns until ‘When a Child is Born’. A solo female sings the verses in such an outstanding manner that we are all transfixed and sing the chorus with a great deal more enthusiasm and feeling than previously. It carries over to the remaining carols. At midnight the priest enters in procession. He is in white and gold vestments and accompanied by an acolyte and the readers. He welcomes everyone in a friendly manner. North Sydney is very much a middleclass parish. Another priest I know in an inner city parish warmly mentions those groups who make up his parish: the disadvantaged, those on the margins of society, migrants, gays and lesbians, and even those who have wandered in from the local pub. Carols continue throughout the mass. The gospel, from St Luke, is perhaps the most beautiful of all the Christmas gospels. The priest stresses the themes of hope and joy during his short homily. Little were we to know that the joy and hope of millions would be shattered within 48 hours by the tsunami disaster in South-east Asia. In writing this reflection some time later, I remembered, with great sadness, an Indonesian friend who lost 40 members of his family in the disaster. Just before 1 a.m. we finish with a rousing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. We wish each other a happy Christmas and mingle with friends. I feel as if I have done my duty, but I don’t feel satisfied. The next morning I attend the mid-morning mass at the same church. There is a different priest. I am inattentive during the first part of the homily. Then the priest moves his commentary forward, to the flight of the young family from Bethlehem to Egypt. He makes the connection between them and the refugees of today, asking us on this special day to pray for refugees throughout the world, but particularly those who have been so badly treated in our own country. Joseph and his family were refugees. This makes me sit up and listen. For years, I have been searching, among all the hype, commercialisation and the usual messages of hope and joy, for another meaning of Christmas – and here it was. The message called for acceptance and faith, just as the shepherds and the wise men accepted and believed in the birth of the boy in the manger as the Saviour.

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D R A M AT I S I N G G O O D F R I D AY When Michael Paxton resigned early in February, my first thought was ‘but Easter is only five weeks away’. I knew that we wouldn’t have a replacement in time, so the job of coordinating the Easter liturgies at St Mary’s rested on me. Although quite a daunting task, I was excited at the prospect and the challenge. My concern was time. Easter was exceptionally early this year, with Ash Wednesday at the beginning of February. In the bulletin, Father Tony Smith, SJ, had asked for help for the various liturgies. Fortunately, Danielle Joosse offered her expertise for the Passion Play and preparing the music for most of the services. The lead-up to Easter is an exciting time, one of expectation and hope. I was hoping that I would be able to create meaningful and prayerful liturgies that would be cohesive and appropriate. Fortunately, I had guidance from the priests and experience from previous years. The greatest challenge at Easter is the variety and complexity of the services. All the Triduum liturgies are different and some are quite complex. St Mary’s has a history of presenting a dramatisation of the Passion at the 3 p.m. service on Good Friday. Along with Father Tony, I wanted to continue this tradition. After devising our own script, Danielle and I found various parish teenagers willing to participate in our play. Only when we started did we realise the wealth of talent we had: wonderful singers, graceful dancers, able musicians, competent actors and, most importantly, lots of enthusiasm. The dramatisation included narration, acting, singing, dancing, movement, and music and sound effects.

G O O D F R I D AY T H E PA S S I O N

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Parishioners and others started to enter the church at 2 p.m. By 3, the church had filled. Each of the actors was dressed in black, waiting in the sacristy. Some were quiet and composed, while others were using mobile phones and chatting away. It was very nerve-racking, since I needed these teenagers to realise the importance and solemnity of the day. The service started with Father Tom O’Hara presiding and Father Donal Taylor assisting. After a short introduction

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the priests seated themselves and the play began. Geri McMahon sang the first two verses from Jesus Christ Superstar, ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’. The actors then entered to the sound of a booming drum. The boy playing Jesus, Tom Riordan, sang some of ‘The Gethsemane Song’ without accompaniment. The play unfolded and all were caught up in the last hours of Jesus’ life. During the play, we heard the sounds of a violin, a clarinet, piano, whips, gongs and a cock crowing. At the end, the congregation joined Geri in singing: ‘Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?’ It was very moving and I found myself wiping away tears. At the time, I thought they were tears of relief. But I realised afterwards that many people were moved to tears by the events of that afternoon.

M E D I TAT I O N -IN-PROGRESS I am a relative newcomer to the parish. I came to live in Kirribilli with my four children 14 months after my husband died of cancer. Our experience of the North Sydney churches was refreshing after the rather tired old parish we had left behind. The parish priest welcomed us warmly, making my son feel particularly welcome in (as he called it) his school at St Mary’s. With the older boys in a Jesuit school, many familiar faces greeted us in the congregations at each of the churches. Soon we felt part of the parish, and my youngest son took his place to serve on the altar each Sunday. The older boys, who had been altar servers in our previous parish, were not as comfortable melding into this new community, so they held back on such service. Wonderfully, in the churches of the North Sydney parish, one can become truly involved. The parish bulletin describes a number of interests or spiritual needs. Once, several years ago, I responded to a request to participate in a parish review. I thought I was late for the first meeting and arrived at the parish house on McKenzie Street in a fluster. I was ushered into the meeting by being led down a corridor and through a door that had a sign pinned on it. It wasn’t until I had disturbed the peace inside the darkened room that I caught the wording of the sign, ‘Meditation-in-Progress’. Those in the room took no notice of me, other than the leader, who invited me to remove my shoes and relax! Stunned, I did as I was asked. I sat (rather

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uncomfortably) through a wonderful, somewhat enforced meditation session, totally distracted by the humour of my stupidity – our parish review was held that evening, but at a different time! This story sums up the welcoming that still enhances my desire to contribute to the fabric of the parish. My children will move on as they become independent. I would like to think, however, that Lavender Bay has left a little bit of its magic in the lives of each of our family members and that we had reciprocated at least in a small way – call it ministry, if you wish.

S TA R O F T H E S E A , KIRRIBILLI Willoughby is an old-established street in an old-established suburb. Its topography is governed by hills and Sydney Harbour. Its church is sheltered by a magnificent lemon-scented gum, huge in girth at its trunk and well above two storeys high. The parish community existed long before the new church was built. It worshipped in the old stone church at Milson’s point. My sister was baptised there. Father Hartnett, then an elderly man, officiated. My family sat in the second row of pews, while he leaned over from his seat in the front pew. What the ceremony may have lacked in pomp, it made up by gentle informality. The ‘baptismal font’ was a blue-and-white basin redolent of the Victorian basin and ewer washstand set. When we reached the baptismal vows, Father Hartnett interjected on the baby’s behalf, ‘Does she reject the Devil? Of course, she does, dear little thing!’ My mother and aunt were torn between amusement and mild shock.

A EUCHARISTIC APPLAUSE It’s ten minutes before 6 p.m. on Sunday when the mass begins at St Francis Xavier’s. A young woman is softly playing the piano, Pacobel’s Canon. A heavyset man in a shirt of wide yellow and black stripes activates the overhead projector. A teenaged girl, wearing a pink, many-layered and short, skirt, crosses the apron of the altar to the sacristy before reappearing as an acolyte.

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Settling into the pew ahead of us are seven people in their mid-twenties. They chatter. One is a handsome young man (with blonde tips in his otherwise dark hair); the others are six young women. They converse enjoyably, as if they are in a pub. (But they will be totally attentive to the mass when it begins.) Also in that pew is a man with an Aboriginal flag on his shirt and wearing an earring. Devotedly, he holds his wife’s arm. The celebrant enters from the back, along with nine boys and girls in white – it’s a beautiful sight and fitting for the solemnities we feel excited to see beginning. The music communicates professionalism and a sense of worship – a piano, violin, cello, guitars and a choir of practised voices. We all sing along vigorously – we all love it. At the Consecration, 12 people are on the altar with the celebrant. (He has already welcomed us, saying that he hopes we’ll be ‘cosy’ during the mass since it is pouring rain outside.) We experience many dramatic moments during the Eucharist. One occurs at the conclusion. We all anticipate it: we sing, ‘May Yahweh Turn His Face to You and Bring You Peace’. We hold our hands aloft. Then we applaud ourselves and God and what has happened.

R E C O N C I L I AT I O N The ceremony of reconciliation engaged about 60 of us at St Francis Xavier for 20 minutes. It began with Father Tony Smith’s greeting and a song. (It was a song weakly sung by a congregation noticeably scattered around the church, as if each of us wished to be alone.) The opening prayer was quietly simple, as was the brief gospel story of Jesus and his disciples on a storm-tossed boat: grave danger and then peace. Father’s reflection was brief. He invited each of us, if we wished, to come either to him or his colleague. Just saying, ‘I am a sinner’ and asking absolution, he said, was sufficient. He took his place in a side chapel off to the right (and neither he nor the penitent could be seen). His colleague placed two chairs at a table directly behind the altar. I found the celebration moving, humbling and authentic. People of different ages and genders went to the priest – a young woman who’d just come from work, a couple with three teenaged boys, a Vietnamese couple, and three of four people I recognised from attending Sunday evening mass. I thought the celebration was dignified and free of messages about sin and shame.

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I applauded the privacy that the priests created but was continually disturbed by the thought that the sacrament could have been lovingly communal. Still, this evening’s ritual, I reflected, will seem even more meaningful when its value as preparation for Easter becomes clear as the rites of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter itself are celebrated. The rites allowed a meditation time that was important. The quiet was only slightly interrupted by the soft bells announcing train arrivals on Track 4 at the railway station. I don’t know why, but the sounds were not an intrusion.

THE L AV E N D E R B AY FOLK MASS The Folk Mass began in June 1970. It was the idea of the curate. Father Brendan Caulfield-James, SJ, himself played the guitar. At that time Father Denis Sheridan, was the parish priest. Father Sheridan came to love saying the Folk Mass, so Brendan was often rostered to other masses, which meant we lacked our lead guitarist. We have been going for 35 years now and have worked under many Jesuit parish priests during that time. Each has enjoyed the mass; none has tried to ‘pull us into line’ or interfere with our modus operandi. Several of the Jesuits – Father John Harte, Father Kevin Staunton, Father Joe Sobb, Father Richard Leonard, Father David Rankin and Father Celso Romanin – were musically gifted, yet they appreciated our amateur standard of music. When appealing for more musicians, my message is that we are a very laid-back group – no auditions, no age limit, no practice and any instrument. Music lists are always ready and the music already in the folders on the music stands. Latecomers just sit down and start to play. Often we have dinner together, and once a year we are guests of the parish priest. Our aim has always been to have the congregation sing along with us. Our music is geared to that – we change keys and even melodies; we have upbeat tempo. Someone said that to sing is to pray twice. We believe that. The choir is there to lead the congregation. We have solos at First Communion ceremonies as a thank-you to our faithful choir. We have about 80 volunteers on the roster.

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At Folk Mass, we love to have the children standing around the celebrant at the consecration. Our special celebrations are at midnight mass, Anzac Day, Pancake Sunday (before Ash Wednesday), Pentecost Sunday, and the feasts of St Francis Xavier and St Ignatius. We often continue the Folk Mass by sharing refreshments afterwards. This year we celebrated St Francis Xavier’s day with an outdoor mass on 4 December. Our plan is to have Folk Mass outdoors on the first Sunday of each month. So we are still going and hope to keep going forever!

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New church, new priest Imagination is a representation of what Eternally exists, really and unchangeably. William Blake I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination. John Keats Vatican II imagined the Church as a mysterious Sacrament of the risen Christ, as a servant in all it did, as collegial in all its government, as Ecumenical in its reach, as Eucharistic in its form and practice, as pilgrim in its journey through time to the end of time. This was a somewhat surprising exercise in imagination for a Church that had seemed to have imagined itself so very differently for centuries – as a ‘perfect society’, as more pyramidal than concentric, as distant from the world, as guardian of truth rather than seeker of truths, as gloriously eternal rather than grubbily historical, as magisterial rather than learner. The living parish is where the imagined representations of the Church are played out, where there is the living out of the Church’s imagination of itself. Imaginations are somehow eternally real, as William Blake has

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reminded us. Imaginations linger. We never work with a clean slate, a tabula rasa. The parish, 1956–2006, lives in its imagined past as much as in its present. Of course, there is more than one set of imaginations in the parish. This is a Jesuit parish, and inspired by its dynamic general, Pedro Arrupe, it is imagining what its role is in a renewed Church. As we have seen, 133 priests served this parish from 1856 to 2006. Those whose priesthood bridged the old and the new Church have had to redefine themselves. Four congregations and associations of women – Loretos, Mercies, Josephites and The Grail – and one congregation of men – the Marist Brothers – have given witness to a religious life that had changed dramatically in their lifetime. A new group in the parish, the Pastoral Associates, have had to invent and re-invent their roles. The people of God of the parish, women and men, young and old, married, single, or alone by separation or death, have had to live out the Good News with a new sense of mission and holiness. These 40 years since Vatican II have been a revolution. Every revolution, a historian of revolutions has said, must undergo a humiliation of its ideals before it can stand upright at the bar of history. The humiliation of the Church in its ideals has been terrible. It was comparatively easy to accept John Paul II’s apologies for the Church’s bad faith on issues on which the Church had demanded blind loyalty in the past – the Crusades, the Inquisition, torture and inhuman cruelty for heresy, papal greed, and antiSemitism. None of us can be morally responsible for what has happened in the past. Bad faith is in the present. It belongs to the living Church. A Church paralysed by its fear of losing its ‘good name’ is in bad faith. Those voices of the victims of child abuse, those voices of the lost generations, they were crying out in parish kitchens, convent parlours, in presbyteries and bishop’s palaces, and in the confessional. No one heard them. No one would listen. This was the sort of banality of evil in the Church that there was in the Holocaust or in the bombing of Germany. Thousands suffered because millions did not have the courage to do one small thing – come forward and report what they knew, put loyalties towards priest and Church below justice for the victims. And when the matters became public the Church-in-Rome, and the Church in countless dioceses and archdioceses, was paralysed with a most un-Christlike hopelessness. The humiliation of these dashed ideals belonged more to the Church of the 1950s and 1960s when, as Cardinal de Smedt told Vatican II, the Church

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was ravaged by clericalism, juridicism and triumphalism. But there has also been humiliation in the ideals that Vatican II had espoused – of collegiality at all levels in the Church, of open dialogue in the pursuit of God’s truth, of a Eucharistic heart in the Church. Collegiality failed at the top, because an ecclesial bureaucracy exploited a tradition, invented only at the beginning of the twentieth century, that Rome would appoint all bishops. A Church will never be collegial when its bishops are chosen according to one mould. A Church will never be collegial at its middle – diocesan – level when its bishops are deluded by their magisterial responsibility rather than inspired by their pastoral commitments. Collegiality at its lowest – parish – level will never thrive until a parish discovers the heart and the means to converse with itself. The euphoria of Vatican II’s discovery that the Word of God could be best understood by debate and dialogue; and by the engagement of all who had theological, scriptural, artistic, and historical and social science knowledge in one another’s expertise, lasted long after Vatican II’s ending. It shows itself still in the exponential growth of theological, liturgical, and scriptural writing and education. We can be sure that the paradigm of a new Church is still to come. But it will come. The education of our young and the multiplicity of the Church’s ministries will ensure that. It is ironic that scholars whom the Church-in-Rome had banned sparked the euphoria of Vatican II. The irony is still there. The Church-in-Rome has had a very unholy history of injustice, ignorance and censorship in these past 20 years in which women and men have been banned for contributing their scholarly insights into the Church’s public and critical theological understanding. The sad thing is that, except for the outrage and anger that goodwilled women and men can be subjected to such injustice and indignity, the Church-in-Rome is irrelevant to the Church-at-large’s engagement in selflearning. There are also humiliations in the Eucharistic ideals of Vatican II. The usual measure of this humiliation is the number of priests who have left the priesthood and the number of religious who have left religious life, and the number of laity who ceased to become Sunday mass-goers. Actually these measures are wrong. Very few of those who left the priesthood and religious life ‘left the Church’. Maybe they left the ‘Church-in-Rome’, but they didn’t leave the people of God. They looked to other ways of answering calls on their faith. The faithful, too, mostly discovered another timetable to their

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living faith than Sundays, and began to educate their consciences to other moral issues than those dictated by the papacy. The people of God intuitively knew what Bernard Haring, perhaps the greatest moral theologian of the twentieth century, has said: The decision regarding the correctness of an action surely does not depend solely on universal moral principles. It depends also on the correct and sound understanding of the unique and concrete in particular instances in which the principles must be applied. And often numberless factors enter into the situation, and these may be quite obscure in our present dark and fallen state. The true humiliation of the Church-in-Rome was that it was unable to respond to the changed circumstances it had created. The numbers of the people of God who count baptism as their birthright to salvation has steadily grown since Vatican II. The exodus of the priesthood has meant that for millions, their other birthright, the Eucharist, cannot be theirs because the Church-in-Rome has been unable to discover a way of providing those who can remember the Lord in the Breaking of the Bread when there are so many ways that a married clergy and ungendered priesthood could provide the numbers.

H There is a moment of high emotion in the ordination of a priest. It is when the bishop and the assembled priests silently lay their hands on the head of the ordinand kneeling in the sanctuary. ‘Veni Sancte Spiritus’ (‘Come Holy Spirit’), the bishop would have prayed and the people sung. There will come a time, not yet, when all the assembled people of God, not just the assembled priests, will impart their priestliness on the heads of men and women with this gesture. It is a gesture that goes back to Moses in the Old Testament, to Jesus in the New, to Paul and Peter in their epistles. Hands, of course, are highly symbolic. We know that when we see a field of hands in some memorial of our First People. They had imprinted their hands on the land they had settled millennia ago. A priest’s hands are

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anointed at ordination. His hands will bless and, in their turn, anoint. It is a precious moment after ordination when a newly ordained priest gives his first blessings. For the only time in his life, perhaps, someone will then kiss his hands. It will be a humbling moment for him. Five young Jesuits were ordained at St Mary’s to begin, as it were, the last 50 years of the sesquicentenary: Bede Lowery, SJ, Tom Lees, SJ, Tom Daly, SJ, Frank Maher, SJ, and John Monahan, SJ. Before that, and since, some 70 young Jesuits have been ordained in the parish after the theologate at Canisius College, Pymble, was opened in 1947. After the 1960s they would be ordained in their home states. Andrew Kim, SJ, was ordained at St Mary’s in 2005. The priesthood has changed greatly between 1955 and 2005. The Council of Trent described a priest as having ‘the power to consecrate and the power to forgive sins’. The priest was a ‘man apart’, the voice of the magisterium. The education to the two principal functions of the priesthood, the ‘miracle’ of the Eucharist and the confessional, was tight and narrow. It was dominated by scholasticism in its philosophy and theology. It was nonacademic in the sense that it was learned from two or three manuals, rather than inspired by a desire for research and new perspectives. It promoted an introspective, mechanistic and individualistic spirituality. Its moral theology has been described by one scholar as ‘sin-centred’, ‘confession oriented’, ‘magisterium dominated’, ‘Canon Law related’ and ‘seminary controlled’. The real education to the priesthood, of course, came after the seminary, when the curriculum was life itself and priestliness was shaped by the daily exchange with the faithful. None of the Jesuits who served the parish were educated to parish life. All, except one or two, came to it from other Jesuit apostolates – the schools, seminaries, university colleges and missions. Five of them came from military chaplaincy in World War 1 and 2. These were each known as a ‘man’s man’ and possessed a sardonic sense of humour. A few had to be builders and manage large amounts of money in debt and income. A dozen or so came as migrant chaplains. Some were counted as brilliant preachers. Some were touchy and quarrelsome. Most were tight-lipped. Nearly all had some selected apostolate within the parish or without it – Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, Alcoholics Anonymous, the Spiritual Exercises for nuns and brothers, and the Guilds of St Luke for medicos and nurses. A couple were brilliant scholars and polymaths. None of them could escape the fact that they must give counsel in times of great suffering and anxiety. All of them had to

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be listeners. Whatever their personal characteristics, before Vatican II, they were put on some sort of pedestal, because they were the face of the Church. Vatican II demanded that they put on another face. Not the Church’s. Christ’s. As the Church itself, above all the Church-in-Rome, had to be demystified, so had their priesthood. They were in the priestliness of the people of God to be pares inter pares, equals among equals. Listen to Quen Vu, SJ, the latest of the ordinands describe the priesthood in which he was educated: Priesthood for me is about service. It is about hospitality and giving without expecting to receive. It is also about being open to others, being compassionate, proclaiming God’s kingdom, and loving and witnessing God’s love to others. It is finally about deepening my own relationship with God. And for me this can only happen when I encounter God in my brothers and sisters, when I become part of the lives of those I have been called to serve. I believe that it is only when we share our grief and our joys, our failures and successes, that we are able to experience the love of God, who is present in every moment of our lives. My experiences as a refugee taught me what it is like to be homeless and to face an uncertain and frightful future. They also taught me that God never abandons us and cares for us through the kindness and generosity of others whom we meet along the way. In my ministry of service as a Jesuit priest, and as I walk along this way, I hope to share this compassion and generosity with others. I am deeply honoured to be among the ‘Companions of Jesus’. I joined the Jesuits because I believe that Jesuits are genuine ‘men for others’, who have dedicated their lives to Christ. They want to make a difference in the lives of others, and I myself want to dedicate my life to do this as well. The 1950s and 1960s saw a bridging group, as it were, of pre- and postVatican II priests in the parish. North Sydney, Lavender Bay and Kirribilli were changing rapidly in character. The heart of the parish became a highrise central business district. The industrial complex, which had given working-class families employment, was replaced by high-rise apartments, which were soon to make Kirribilli, especially, the most densely populated

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area in the country. The dormitory character of the parish changed the priest’s apostolate. Home visitations nearly ceased when the times people were at home were so brief. Parishioners had to come to the parish rather than the parish to the parishioners. The issue of parish centres came to the fore – when to build them and where. Star of the Sea, Milson’s Point, was at the southernmost edge of the parish and almost impossible to reach by public transport. There was certainly a need for a new church in Kirribilli, and a trust fund was created for that eventuality. Lavender Bay would need a second church, or an extension. Tom Costelloe, SJ, a tall elegant man, loved for his succinct, clear sermons, and gifted with the ability to speak to professional men and women in the parish in ways they appreciated, was also an excellent administrator. His gift to both St Mary’s and St Francis Xavier’s was to clear the parish of debt and to build up a savings account for new buildings. It fell on Kevin Staunton, SJ, to solve the spatial problem. A commando major in the World War 2, and a journalist before that, Staunton was badly wounded in Crete by a German grenade. He used to wear his RSL badge with pride. He was pressed more than most as parish priest between the rock of Cardinal Gilroy and the hard place of his Jesuit superior. The cardinal wanted a new church in Kirribilli and more pews in Lavender Bay. Staunton got him the new church and the extensions at Lavender Bay. But he was badly burned by his experience and felt let down by his Jesuit colleagues whom he felt did not understand his dual obligations as parish priest. He later left the Society, dying in impoverished and hard circumstances, but he was reconciled to it. His monument really is the present Star of the Sea, the Loire glass wall at St Francis Xavier’s, and his return of the interior of St Francis Xavier’s to something of Wardell’s vision for it. He stripped the Dettlinger Stations of the paint with which Father Magan had vandalised them. James Dynon, SJ, came to the parish from Xavier College in Melbourne, from some years as Socius (a sort of secretarial companion to the provincial), and Director of Jesuit Missions. I personally owe him much, and if I say he tended to be politically conspiratorial and Jesuitically institutional it is with loving good humour. His archival presence in the parish is to be found in the letters that he wrote, trying to persuade them that he was not being political when he told them to be careful about voting on the Whitlam Labor plan to support Catholic schools on the basis of ‘needs’ rather than on student numbers. It would disadvantage the parish’s primary schools.

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Jim Dynon was also the first to confront or, rather, to begin to confront the question of collegiality in parish governance. He nervously made propositions about a parish council. It was not to be a decision-making group, he insisted. Advisory only. And, in the aftermath of Humanae Vitae and a vigorous archdiocesan interest, it would not have anything to say on any issue of faith or morals. His was not a power-grab, but an undemocratic fearfulness for what open dialogue might do for the ‘good name’ of the Church and the society.

H The 37 years, 1970 to 2006, are the years in which the parish lives out the metaphors Vatican II created for the Church: Mystery, Sacrament, Servant, Collegial, Ecumenical, Eucharistic and Pilgrim. The one truth that joins these metaphors is that God’s transcendence is not a distant thing. The divine is grounded in every part of the material world and human existence. The divine doesn’t come into the living in a semi-magical way of ‘just doing’ things, or saying words (ex opere operato) in a more comfortable older metaphor of the Church – ‘in the done deed’. The divine comes into living through a mutually active engagement in its mysteriousness. That mutually active engagement in mysteriousness is not an easy thing. There is doubt, ambiguity and little understanding to contend with. It requires much confidence in one’s humanity to get out of one’s humanity into the divine. Some 40 priests have led the parish into this new phase of its existence in the years 1970 to 2006. They have led the parish by giving it confidence in its humaneness. Those 40 priests, being who they are, will forgive me, I am sure, if I pick out a few among them to tell my story of a New Church, New Priesthood. The names of these few are: Paul Coleman, SJ, George Belfrage, SJ, and Peter Quin, SJ. They led the parish by showing the humane face of their priesthood and witnessing their Jesuit calling. The Jesuits themselves have been undergoing renewal in these years. In a sense they were always expected to be renewing themselves. There is probably no group of men so archivally conscious as the Jesuits. Everyone with an office – superior, minister and consultor – is expected to keep a journal and to make annual or quarterly reports to their superiors. There is always a Historia Domus (History of the House) to be signed annually by their Provincial. The

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Provincial’s annual visit to the house leaves a Memoriale (A Reminder) of what needs to be done to improve the religious life of the community. There are 150 years of this documentation in the parish, provincial and Roman archives. The points for improvement are mostly picayune and involved in character – whether the evening litanies are being rushed, whether the noontime examen of conscience is being done, and whether there is sufficient care in relations with the bishops or for the Arca, the fund for educating Jesuits. A check might be made on the poverty of community life. At the beginning of these years, the Australian Province was ‘visited’ by an American Jesuit, John J. MacMahon, SJ. MacMahon was a charismatic presence to a younger generation of Jesuits, who had not experienced a dynamic, inspiring leader, nor known what Jesuit provinces might become with the resources of dozens of Jesuit universities and institutions to call on. MacMahon was disturbed by the overwork of the Australian Province, which meant that there was little time or energy for reflection and too much attachment to maintaining systems. This was to change when Pedro Arrupe was elected General of the Society of Jesus in 1965. He turned his attention almost immediately to the Australian Province. The Australian Jesuits were too attached to ‘safety’, he told them. He thought that Australia, as a nation, had not experienced suffering as the rest of the world had. And the Australian church was excessively tranquil and uniform. He urged the whole Society of Jesus to attend to the needs of the poor, especially the refugees, the politically oppressed and the unemployed. Also, to attend to the spiritual hunger of the young. He urged them to look to Asia, to be ecumenical, to be wary of aggressive ungodliness, and to be prepared to suffer for the love of God and the poor. The Australian Province was fortunate to have as their Provincial a man who listened to what Arrupe was saying and understood it. Peter Kelly, SJ, was a moral theologian who turned his students at Canisius College away from the talk of sin to a discourse about God, who saw morality as less a question of law and judgement than covenant and failed relationships, who saw the mystery of evil as much social as individual. The American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, SJ, with his respect for freedom and pluralism, was one of Peter Kelly’s heroes. Kelly heard something else from Arrupe and MacMahon. The Province had invested much in men and money to educate young Jesuits in the higher studies of the social and natural sciences, educa-

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tion, statistics and the humanities, as well as theology and scripture. There would be no renewal, and for the rest of the century, no proceeding in the social apostolate without strong research support. Renewal began with some sobering advice from the Maryland Province of the Society on the possible polarising effect of deep dialogue. ‘Planning is not prophesying’, they warned. ‘It is preparing for uncertainties and, in the face of them, we decide what to do and how to do it’. The dominant reality was demographic – the falling numbers and ageing of the Australian Jesuits. If there were to be a Jesuit apostolate, it would have to be in companionship with the people of God. Such companionship would not work if the Jesuits were to remain hegemonic in their schools and parishes and institutions. They knew from their own history, and from the history of almost all religious orders and congregations, that the prophetic imagination of the founders inevitably fossilised into rule and legalism. They had to rediscover, as Vatican II urged all the religious, their special charisma. For the Jesuits, this was their Spiritual Exercise. Five hundred years on from Loyola’s prophetic understanding, they had to rediscover what it might mean to work Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam (For the Greater Glory of God) and the Magis (The More) and as ‘Men for Others’. They saw that they would create Companionship by educating women and men to pastoral leadership. True pastoral companionship would be in the parishes. Men like Coleman, Belfrage and Quin made it their goal to take the parish with them. They each had a different approach. Paul Coleman came with the resolution that he would know each one of the 3000 parishioners by face and name. He learnt them at the church door, in the parking lot, in the presbytery and by home visitations. He needed to know the parishioners. The parishioners needed to know one another – through groups for prayer, for liturgy, for charity, through a Parish Pastoral Council. The parish had to be responsible for its old, its sick and its young. The Jesuit community itself had to mirror this model to the parish, caring for one another, encouraging one another with bonhomie and love. Preaching, he knew, must come from a sound prayer life and a deep personal relationship with Christ. Making the daily scripture of the liturgy relevant to the anguish, hopes and sufferings of those before him was his principal aim in preaching. Let us talk of a moment of conflict during his term as parish priest. It opens an insight into the parish’s sense of sacred spaces. Coleman had come to St Mary’s from St Ignatius’s, Norwood, South Australia. There, with the

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help of a local architect, he had renovated the sanctuary to the requirements of Vatican II liturgy. He needed now to make the temporary changes at St Mary’s permanent. His Adelaide architect gave him a plan. The sanctuary was to be raised and extended deep into the nave. The centenary pulpit installed by Henry Johnston was to be removed. The tabernacle was to be moved to the sacristy side of the sanctuary, and a wooden rood screen was to run across the back of the sanctuary. The Sacred Heart side chapel was to be turned into a baptistery. The Blessed Virgin Mary side chapel was to be made into a reconciliation area. Coleman displayed these plans at the back of St Mary’s and called for a parish meeting to discuss them. There was uproar. The uproar was led by a fellow Jesuit in the Parish, Jeremiah ‘Jerry’ Golden, SJ, who came on to the front steps of St Mary’s like a prophet of old, and denounced the changes and the undemocratic way in which they were being made. He put a small, protesting pamphlet into the hands of parishioners. He threatened to throw his body in the path of the builders. In some way, Golden was an icon of the sort of Jesuitry that had graced the parish through all its 150 years. He was born in Galway, Ireland, in 1910, but his father brought him to Sydney when he was 12 years old. There he was educated at the Marist Brothers, Darlinghurst, and St Ignatius, Riverview. He joined the Society of Jesus and took his vows in 1929 at one of the earliest Jesuit establishments on the North Shore, Loyola, and Greenwich. He was sent immediately to University College, Dublin, where he took an honours degree in history and economics. Philosophy came next in Jersey. He was due for study at the Institut Catholique, Paris, but a broken leg, which became gangrenous, meant that he spent two years in a Paris hospital instead. He always felt that this was a life-changing experience, putting him in a special relationship with Ignatius Loyola and his cannon-blasted leg at Pamplona. Golden learnt much about the French church in these critical years. He returned to Ireland for theology at Milltown Park and tertianship at Rathfarnum before coming for a first period in the parish, 1943 to 1948. From there he was sent as chaplain to The University of Melbourne from 1950 to 1966. It is there that he became important in the broader story of the parish and the Australian Church. Those who write the history of the Church through the changes of Vatican II in the United States, especially, but also here in Australia, will tell how religious women and men were exposed to the ideals of scholarship and

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learning at the secular and Catholic universities in ways in which the ordinary priests of the Church, enclosed in their seminaries, were not. They came in touch with the cultural idioms of modernity and postmodernity. Just as Immanuel Kant had declared that the great movement in human culture that we have come to call the Enlightenment had come about because ‘The enlightened dared to know’, those who went to university beginning in the 1960s ‘dared to know’ in ways that seminarians – and the priests and bishops they became – never could. And that cultural world, displayed in literature, theatre, history, philosophy and poetry, had long gone beyond the Enlightenment. This was a cultural world that Picasso, Stravinsky and Wittgenstein had made. Jerry Golden went to The University of Melbourne to be inspired by and to inspire a very remarkable movement in the Australian Church. He describes the effect of this movement on him in the preface of a small book edited by the Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley, who was the inspirational leader of what was called ‘The Intellectual Apostolate’. The Incarnation and the University is the book’s title. Long before Vatican II, the members of the intellectual apostolate had discovered the writers and thinkers who would guide its proceedings – Yves Congar, Yves de Montcheuil, Gabriel Mounier and Gustave Weigel among many. But there was a home-grown brilliance to the movement as well, nourished by the ideals of humanistic scholarship. These men and women anticipated John XXIII’s optimism that the university and the modern world were graced by God in Jesus Christ. The university was not to be ‘converted’. Rather, they fled the fortress Church and exposed themselves to all that the university could give them, in the sure knowledge that their faith would grace it in some way, although they did not know how. This was their ‘Catholic Action’. Golden says that what enlivened his priesthood was the dialogue these young people engaged in to inform their spiritual way of life. Roger Pryke, the diocesan priest chaplain at the University of Sydney, influenced by the same national movement of the Newman Society, said the same thing as Golden. He was learner, rather than teacher, listening to these young who put humanity into his priesthood. Many parishioners in the parish conversations that led to the sesquicentenary remarked that they had experienced a Vatican II Church long before Vatican II. This was because of their Newman Society experience, and the freedoms that Pryke and Golden had given them. So, when he came to St Mary’s for a second time in 1970, Golden was a

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believer in dialogue as the energiser of spirituality and a protagonist for a priesthood that was open to the laity and truly pares inter pares. His protest on St Mary’s steps tripped an avalanche of letters from parishioners. They were embarrassed that Jesuit was against Jesuit, and hesitant to disagree with a parish priest for whom their praises for the personal warmth and prayerfulness with which he filled the sanctuary were fulsome. Bishop Thomas Muldoon, never one for dialogue, it has to be said, but certainly one to feel a political wind when it was blowing, wrote some stern formal admonitions. Father Coleman was instructed ‘formally’ to make ‘no change, whatsoever’ without permission of the Archdiocesan Liturgy Commission and to accept the ‘pastoral, liturgical, historical, architectural’ reasons for His Grace’s letter. Just in case, the Australian Heritage Commission, issued a report on St Mary’s and its ‘interwar Romanesque style influenced by twentieth-century functionalism (Criterion F.1).’ Coleman, of course, was accommodating. The conflict is not the issue here, although let us note again how unresolved after 150 years the matter of dialogue continued to be in the governance of the parish. Instead, the bulging files in the archives are a precious asset to an ethnographer of sacred spaces. The parishioners are their own participant observers of what makes St Mary’s spaces sacred. Actually, in addition to the Heritage Commission’s report, there are two sets of bulging files on sacred spaces in the parish archives. Peter Quin would make the same mistake as Coleman. He wanted to alter the spaces at St Francis Xavier’s by re-orienting the pews from east-west to north-south, putting the altar against the Loire glass wall and the pews antiphonally, as ecclesial architects will say – semi-circular – around it. The cynical opined that the pews would be quickly changed back to their original position because the new arrangements deprived brides of an aisle to come down on the big day (and deprive the church of the funds that weddings bring). But there was more to it than that. Quin, when the outrage broke out, was an after-the-fact democrat, and asked for written comments from all parishioners and a final vote on the matter. Let us look at the sacred spaces of St Mary’s and St Francis Xavier’s as the worshippers saw them. First, let it be noted that there was no criticism, only fulsome praise for the changes that Vatican II had brought to the liturgy. There was considerable antagonism to the height to which the sanctuary at St Mary’s was to be raised. It would become more stage than sanctuary, it

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was felt. There was a tendency for some priests to become theatrical and attract ‘claptrap’. Parishioners were not happy that the Eucharist might become centred on the personality of their priests. And some did not accept that antiphonal seating did what it was supposed to do – let worshippers see Christ in one another as well as on the altar. They still treasured privacy in their sacred space. Almost all rejected the notion of a wooden rood screen as pure fantasy. Anyway, it was an Adelaide architect desecrating the creation of a good Sydney architect, J. C. Fowell of Fowell, McConnell and Mansfield. Certainly, it was wayward vandalism to get rid of the sandstone pulpit. The pulpit was a beautiful thing in itself, and there were occasions when the liturgy needed elaborate ceremony. Radical changes were a betrayal of those who had paid off the Church’s debts so generously. In any case, the times had gone when the parish could see its identity in splendid buildings. Many would prefer to see their identity in a Christlike compassion for the poor and needy, rather than in ostentatiously expensive changes. For most, the soft-coloured stone semi-circular apse was the most prized feature of St Mary’s. The tabernacle at its centre gave focus, its curves tranquillity. Its large and shadowed spaces gave it an incompleteness that lifted the heart. The side altars, especially the Blessed Virgin’s, were places of small pilgrimages. Many saw the devotionalism of the Church as a symbol of their Catholic sacramentality. They didn’t want it to be ‘modern’, let alone like a Presbyterian Assembly Hall’. They resisted being forced, as it were, into proximity with the liturgy. They appreciated their own freedom to be at the back of the church at times, and were patient with those who felt that they must always be there. That welcoming warmth, prayerfulness and sense of God’s presence of St Mary’s came, yes, from the physicality of the space, but more from the deep memories of living faith that each one brought into that space. Entering, one needed only to dip one’s finger into the holy water font, make a sign of the cross that fluttered some distance from the body, make one’s bow or semigenuflection, kneel stiffly for a moment then sit in the pew, and wait for the memories to settle – of joy and grief, of the cycle of the seasons, of guilt and sorrow – to know the ‘reverence, relaxation and reflectiveness’ of the space. The words are not mine. They are the hopes of the Parish Committee, who in the end resolved the matter. Their names? It is a privilege to list them. They all, some now gone, have been loyal servants of the parish:

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Possible Guidelines for a Parish Pastoral Council The SPIRIT of a Parish Pastoral Council: a TEAM of FRIENDS IN THE LORD, who minister to, and SERVE, the local community, in the discovery of how much God loves us, and how he is inviting us to care for each other. The members bring their individual energies and talents and abilities, as LEADERS, to CREATING TOGETHERNESS OUT OF DIVERSITY, to the HEALING of divisions, to fostering the JESUS VALUES in Parish, family and community life, amongst groups and individuals. The PURPOSE of the Pastoral Council will be: to provide the opportunity for laity, religious and clergy to meet together to share responsibility for the whole Parish life, and for the community as a whole by: involving the whole of the Parish in the work of the Church; growing into a team of co-working, praying, discerning people, committed, pastoral in spirit, community and justice; supporting and inter-relating Parish organizations and their activities; acting as a decision-making body, with the Parish Priest. To be a body of communication and liaison between the Parish and other organizations – diocesan, municipal, government, ecumenical. To create opportunities to share personal faith-life – at Parish Pastoral Council meetings, at days of prayer as the Council decides. George Belfrage, SJ

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Dr J. L’Estrange, Dr T. Bateman, Michael O’Dea, Noel Kennedy, John Scanlon, Pat McRobie, Moya Merrick and Rosemary Flannery. When the parishioners of Lavender Bay rallied to oppose the spatial alterations of St Francis Xavier’s urged by Quin, William Wilkinson Wardell must have given a wink-wink, nudge-nudge or two to his architectural critics, if they happened to be in the same place for all eternity. Almost unanimously, the parishioners found Wardell’s Gothic church contemplative. The high ceiling and the lancet-stained glass windows were uplifting. It was a gracious, beautiful church, they said. Its eastward-facing siting was an ancient tradition that they respected. To face north would be to face a busy glass wall. One still sees strange, distracting patterns in it. But face the clean lines of the Gothic sanctuary, the simple narratives of the stained glass windows behind the altar, and the dramatic crucifix in front of the sanctuary, and the soul is lifted. Face north, the ceiling comes depressingly low. You are looking at the train station behind the glass wall. The world intrudes too much. One hundred and ten parishioners gave their written opinion against the change, 45 others for it. Quin quickly returned the pews to their original position. Whether they were for or against the change, all would have realised that a question about space alone is artificial. Space without the presence of others, without song, without gesture and movement, without acclamations and amens, without colour and words will rarely be sacred. George Belfrage came to St Mary’s after having experimented with more radical notions of what a parish might be in Elizabeth, South Australia. At Elizabeth, with Brian Stoney, SJ, and a most remarkable Jesuit brother, Jack Stamp, SJ, Belfrage set up a parish virtually around the kitchen table of a commission house. It was their purpose to share the poverty, loneliness and depression of that marginal suburb. All three, but Jack Stamp his whole life long, took literally Pedro Arrupe’s invitation to learn from the poor, the homeless and the hopeless. Belfrage’s chief concern was to free the Society from all ‘systems’ that obstructed the living of Christ’s beatitudes. He prepared himself for St Mary’s by spending a month on Lifeline. If he wasn’t a listener before that, he certainly was after it. It fell to Belfrage to provide what he least wanted to do – to write a constitution for the Parish Pastoral Council. There is no pain and frustration quite like that of writing a constitution for any group, unless it is the pain and frustration of writing a Mission Statement. Words suddenly become

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impossibly complex. Succinctness creates a code that only those present at the writing can break. The Draft Constitution that Belfrage wrote for the parish has lain in the archives since 1986. The gentle, pastoral words of its prologues are like a hidden monument to his gentle, pastoral spirit. Belfrage was one of four or five Jesuits who left the priesthood and the Society while they worked at North Sydney and Lavender Bay. Each left with the blessing and love of the parishioners. ‘Leaving’, the parishioners knew, was the wrong word to use of these men of faith hearing another call. Cardinal Suenens once famously said: ‘A pope’s finest moment is not that of his election or consecration, but that of his baptism’. He was re-wording epigrammatically Yves Congar’s theology of the laity. Divine grace builds the Church from below. The fullness of Christ’s mission is lived out more by the layperson than by the nun or monk, or priest or bishop. All ministry of the Church stems from the common priesthood of the faithful. Some ministries, as both Congar and Suenens stressed, are ad intra (within) and some are ad extra (without) the institutional church. When the parish, the diocese, and the Church itself will regain that communion in decision-making that the first Council of Jerusalem achieved in 49 CE (Acts 15: 22) none can say. Raymond Brown called that Council of Jerusalem, ‘the most important meeting ever held in the history of Christianity [deciding] … that the following of Jesus would soon move beyond Judaism and become a separate religion reaching to the ends of the earth’. But Belfrage’s intuition was correct. Communion in decisionmaking will come – and is coming – in the parish pastorally. One of our parish priests, Tim Quinlan, SJ, now resting in peace, left some spiritual notes in which he reflects on what sorts of ideas influenced him while he was doing his philosophical studies at Loyola College, Watsonia, in the 1950s and 1960s. He is referring to experiences that all priests who came to the parish and were ordained in the 1960s would have shared. Quinlan says he loved the fact that his faith was rational and historically true, but that what blew his mind was the thought of Joseph Maréchal, SJ. Maréchal’s philosophy came to Quinlan and all the others through their philosophy professor, Patrick McEvoy, SJ, a quirky genius about whom all would have memorable stories. Maréchal had had the same effect on Karl Rahner, Teilhard de Chardin and many others who shaped Vatican II. Maréchal began his discovery of the divine with the inner search for truth and understanding that is in all humanity. It is a search that will always lead outwards and to transcendence. It will lead

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inevitably to wonder at creation. So God will be revealed within oneself and within all the social and cultural processes by which we are human. There can be no contradiction between matter and spirit, body and soul. A parish, in these terms, is a place of contemplation. The largest gift a priest can give to a parish is to provide it with the means of seeing the divine in its own humanity from birth to death. This is the gift, above all, that Peter Quin gave to the parish. He provided it with the means of seeing its graced human nature in the sacramentality of every moment of living and worship. Quin did that primarily in his preaching, in which the ordinariness of living, as well as the dramatic and tragic, became story and parable. He would never claim to be a theologian or philosopher, but he was a reader of theology, history, literature and a film-goer. A sermon was a day-by-day, week-by-week, witness. The more it was in the present, the more the congregation was educated to prayerful reflection. Quin would have been taught two things about constructing a sermon’s ‘tones’ (as they were called in his seminary days): ‘Say what you are going to say. Say it. Say what you said’. And: ‘Preach as if the congregation is all twelve-years old’. (Thankfully, he seems not to have heard that advice.) ‘Two minutes’, ‘single pointed’, ‘pertinent images’ and a ‘well-timed punchline’ would be more pertinent contemporary advice. Above all, ‘Preach to lived experience’. Quin seems to have been alive to his own, and his audience’s, postmodernity. How does a parish discover transcendence in its own humanity? By experiencing the welcoming joy of a newly baptised infant held high on the altar at Sunday mass. By sharing the emotions of believing and doubting, of bravery and fear in the Rites of Christian Initiation of Adults. By ministries that bring comfort and witness to others, brought low by sickness or trouble. By playing out the theatre of Christ’s birth, ministry, passion, death and resurrection with the whole person, not just with the mind. By experiencing something of the lives of the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned and the detained, and by giving them hope. By engaging young couples, often already partnered, honestly and directly in all the issues of marriage. By finding hope, and allaying anger at funerals. By creating para-liturgies and Lenten Programs and Spirituality Nights. By responding positively to all the needs of the people of God for different kinds of prayer and meditation. The parish has been well served by their priests in these last 50 years. The strongest witness of these priests has been their own human selves, struggling with the mysteries of faith, not really knowing where Vatican II

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had taken them, but full of hope that the Father in Jesus Christ had graced their stumbling ways. The word ‘democracy’ is most frequently heard in a church context; of course, in the familiar statement, “the Church is not a democracy”.’ For Léon Joseph Cardinal Suenens, this is not true. The church indeed is a democracy, and a monarchy and an oligarchy. The papacy, as the one principle of unity, is monarchical. The collective responsibilities of the College of Bishops are oligarchical. But ‘the fundamental equality of all in the communion of the people of God’ is democratic. Not only are all three necessary, but they are all in relation to one another. So the papacy is ‘unintelligible’, except in relation to the episcopate and to the whole body of the church. Paul Lakeland,The Liberation of the Laity: In Search of an Accountable Church.

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

First Stone Church at St Mary’s (1868–98), enlarged with apse in 1896. The entrance faces west, the altar east (and Miller St). Parish Archives.

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This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

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Priestliness Priestliness is a grace given to all those baptised in Christ Jesus. All, female and male, young and old, black and white, are a priestly people, made so in baptism and accepting its responsibilities in Confirmation. That some are called to live this priestliness in an iconic way does not lessen the call on all to be the symbol of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity that the priesthood is. ‘Know what you are doing and imitate the mystery that you celebrate, model your life on the mystery of the Lord’s cross’, the ordained are told by their bishop in the laying on of hands that enables them to preach, sanctify and shepherd the people of God. The priestliness of all is in the shadow of the cross. On the cross, priest and victim were one. The baptised are expected to be priests who sacrifice themselves for others. Few live out their priestliness in such grand terms. If the Christ that we are by baptism is priest, prophet and king, then each of us is a translator of what the giving of self, the witnessing of the Good News, and the responsibilities we have for the world and others is in everyday life. We might not recite the Liturgy of the Hours, but priestliness demands that we work the hours of each day with the reflectiveness that the Good News incites.

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A M A N I F E S TAT I O N [Each year, a Jesuit used to make a ‘Manifestation of Conscience’ to his Superior. Here is one of our parish priests – now resting in peace – preparing himself for his Manifestation.] What do I like about myself? I mean anything I say and do. I take care with the daily and Sunday homilies. I apply the readings to daily life. I explain the rites – baptism; marriage; the Eucharist. What do I like about the parish? I like the Folk Mass at 6 on Sunday. It is a full house, with lots of young people. I like the organ and quiet guitars. The congregation is always supportive in its singing. The hymns are folksy and able to be sung. I like the way the laity organise the music. How would I like others to see me? I would like them to see me as a sincere religious whose vows are the source of his joy, and as a man of the Church, utterly loyal to its ordinary teachings; as someone who loves being a priest and finds fulfilment in his priesthood; as someone who is approachable and demonstrates his emotions; as someone who is generous and humble, consulting his community. He is a ‘Man for Others’. Which is the real picture? Are the above just ideals? In India, I was called devious. What is my image of God? Before I joined the Jesuits, my image of God came from Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen’s Apologetics. I loved the fact that my religion was reasonable and that I could prove that the gospels were historically trustworthy. I could debate the existence of God. But in the Thirty Days’ Retreat, I felt I came face to face with God. And doing philosophy at Watsonia, I was influenced by Maréchal (a Louvain philosopher who influenced many of the theologians at Vatican II) and his argument for the existence of God out of natural design. The ‘Proof from Perfection’ delighted me – a universe so full of light, love and beauty; creation glorifying the Church; the transcendence of God. I have felt the transforming influence of Christ in my priesthood as I worked among the untouchables in India. The Sacrament of the Sick had a calming effect on them as I anointed them with oil. My priestly blessing had an extraordinary effect on women in childbirth. An old priest once said to me as a young priest, ‘Give me the blessings of the Church, Father. They work

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miracles.’ Now I try to write to the old people in their homes, to make them feel cared for and part of the Church. I want to grow in knowledge and love of Christ and the gospels, and in loyalty to the Church. I want to make a liturgy that is deeply felt and a joyful celebration of God’s goodness.

SEDUCTIVE POWER O F S AC R A M E N T S It is hard to feel priestly as a Jesuit headmaster. There are too many administrative decisions, too many meetings to attend, too many staff to see and too many classes to teach. Parents are demanding, and they have a right to be: they are paying high fees. I moved to the parishes after 24 years of teaching. I awoke on the first morning of my new parish life vividly aware of a load lifted from my shoulders. There were no summoning bells, no heavy consignment of in-coming mail, no assembly to address. Rather, it was a time to get caught up in the sacramental life. It was time to become a priest. This year, I celebrate 20 years in the parishes and I feel at home within myself. The sacraments have seductive power. Each baptism, each wedding, each anointing, each Eucharist entwines the water and oil, the bread and wine, the vows and the ring, precious symbols of our earth, with a world beyond our own. Christ becomes present to absolve, to heal and to nourish. Each moment is a call to intimacy. Despite our fickle and easily distracted minds (given us, by the way, by our Creator), we can celebrate these tender moments that help us realise, in some small and precious way, what life is all about. Of course, there are the usual personal battles. Life in a parish is not a pond of bliss. I have a great deal of fear sometimes. I fear that I have done things poorly in the past, made wrong or weak decisions that have hurt people. And it is too late to recover lost ground, to heal the damage. I feel that I am grinding my life away in the institutional church, and the institution is not aware of my fidelity or would not care, or even notice, if I simply bought out. I fear the inability to marshal my thoughts in any logical pattern when faced with an intelligent group of my peers, and I fear their soft and polite patronising. I fear that people will see me as a naive optimist who cannot face reality. I fear that some will read these words and put them down as self-pitying.

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And yet, despite the fears, I have a strong belief that I have chosen the right path and am in the right place. In the core of my heart, I don’t have fear. There is a commitment that drives me towards the best self that I can be. It has something to do with working through the fears and inadequacies, trying to stay in this life and to grow. It is certainly not about staying in this life and becoming cynical or dead.

A M A N A LWAY S , A PRIEST FOREVER I have been a Jesuit for 30 years. I was ordained 20 years ago. Just before my ordination, a four-year-old niece reminded me that it was her birthday. The conversation went something like this: ‘You won’t give me a present, will you?’ ‘No.’ (Given that I have 21 nieces and nephews, I thought this the best policy for a Jesuit with a vow of poverty.) ‘And that’s because you’re a priest, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘When you’re a man again, will you give me a present?’ There is a real mystery to priesthood. That mystery can speak of grace but it doesn’t always. Sometimes it is just strange and different. In the most routine parish daily mass, there is a deep silence as you utter the words, ‘This is the cup of my blood … It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.’ From the sanctuary, you behold the scattered faithful who are at that moment full of faith. And you know some of the stories behind the reverential postures before you. The abiding faith of these people sustains you in your own struggle for faith in a God who is with us and who cares enough to respond to our prayers, in blood. Then we pray for peace. The silence before the prayer formula is wide enough to hold all the battles of our world and the struggles, which each worshipper brings to the altar that day. As priest you see this, day in and day out, often having privileged access to those struggles. Then come the special moments of baptisms, weddings and funerals when the churched ones are like leaven in the loaf, carrying the structure of the liturgy, while the unchurched, through their awkwardness and unfamiliarity with the forms and words, look to you to carry it through. And you look back to them to know what and whom we celebrate on this occasion. It is special to be the vested embodiment of the connection between the citizens of an unchurched world that wonders if there is anything more than ritual to mark

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the passage of life, love and death, and the parishioners of a church which dares to offer the sacrament of Jesus to all comers, in season and out of season. In the Sunday homily, you are the community’s chosen minister to reflect on the week that we have all lived searching for faith and truth. In every third or fifth pew, there is someone who is connecting and providing you with the bridge to the next thought. You hope not to disturb those, in the other pews, who are waiting on God while not being helped much by you this week. There is always next week, or another priest, or some other channel of grace at the most unexpected moment. As priest, you are the human face of the Church for many people, in church, on the street and through the airwaves. All types of people meet you. At wedding receptions you invariably get to talk at length to the happiest and saddest people in the room. You get home and face the aloneness of knowing that there is not a lifelong companion to lovingly pull you into line or urge you to do better. But you have your Lord and memories of the day where your presence provided the briefest opportunity for the delighted or the sorrowful to open themselves beyond their own controlled world. You know grace as a daily reality, because you are with graced people every day. Sometimes people have no use for you. They think you should just get back to your presbytery and say your prayers. But before you do, you look for something practical you could do or say. As priest, you are invited to become fully a human being while on public display as the possession of the faith community. You can’t respond to the invitation without the intimacy of prayer, friends and family who believe in you as priest, even though you have the same foibles as they. I did travel interstate for that niece’s twenty-first birthday. I still haven’t given her a present, but she understands that’s because I am a priest.

A G R AC I O U S PRESENCE On the day Father Richard Harris, SJ, said his last public mass, I knew that I was in a gracious presence. He had decided at the age of 92 to move from the retirement complex where he had been chaplain for ten years into a Jesuit community. He was born in Ireland in 1904 and joined the Jesuits, later training many young men for the priesthood in China and suffering under the Japanese

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occupation of Hong Kong. In Australia, he served St Mary’s parish. I met him there, 14 years ago. A gentle Irish brogue enlivened his ascetic demeanour. The warmth of his undivided attention, even for 30 seconds, could give you hope and courage for the week ahead. He was one of the great mentors of Catholicism who attracted me to the Church. In this week of his farewell, he would accept nothing material in the way of a gift. ‘I have taken a vow of poverty’, he would say, and you were startled into realising that he meant it. He demonstrated that in poverty there is a great freedom. He was attached to nothing but his lifelong faith. His final mass was a test for the many of us who knew how much we would miss him, his honesty and the absolute conviction with which he celebrated the sacrament. Standing frail and trembling at the little altar in the chapel, he negotiated, with customary delicacy, every move in the consecration of the bread and wine. It seemed miraculous that his shaking hands did not send the host scattering or knock the chalice, as he reached across them to turn the pages of his missal. Struggling to see the text, he held the lectionary at an angle to catch the words before they slid sideways into a blur, escaping him. His face had the lucidity of a long habit of truth. And now, after a lifetime of devotion to his ideal, Father Harris seemed to be looking beyond us, as though he had caught a glimpse of someone beckoning over our shoulder, and was eager to respond. He assured us that, where he was going, he would not forget us and would continue to pray for us. Our sadness muted by awe for his sense of destination, we parted to let him pass. Our spattering of applause seemed puny in its attempt to honour a man who had walked faithfully in the steps of his master, no matter what the cost. We were in the presence of an authentic holiness that had been 92 years in the making.

CHALLENGES TO O RT H O D OX Y For much of my professional life, I have undertaken clinical practice and research in the area of human reproduction, including the management of infertility in men and women. On occasion, such involvement has required deep reflection on apparent conflicts between religious orthodoxy and medical practice. I have lived in a society with a diversity of attitudes and was employed as the director of a public research organisation that provided

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specialist clinical services to infertile couples. I ultimately found no contradiction between my personal faith and my science. I would like to tell why. I was the only child of parents whose attitudes to Catholicism were complex and could be described as ‘liberal European’. They had married both in the Lutheran and Catholic churches, and my own baptismal documents reflect a similar duality of allegiance. I was educated in the Catholic tradition, predominantly by the Jesuits. As a student and resident medical officer and registrar at a Catholic hospital in the 1950s, I was imbued with Catholic moral teachings and was a frequent communicant. I became closely involved with the Medical Guild of St Luke, which debated issues such as contraception and euthanasia but took a firm, orthodox line. I subsequently lectured on sexuality and family planning in the Marriage Preparation courses conducted under the auspices of the Catholic Family Bureau. I taught the principles of the Ovulation Method of Natural Family Planning, a fertility- regulating method acceptable to the Church. In 1965 I became director of a new Research Centre that was active in reproductive research and instrumental in establishing a Reproductive Medicine Clinic for infertile couples. In the early 1970s I was a co-investigator of an important study that validated the ability of women to identify, very simply, the fertile phase of their cycle. Subsequently, I coordinated a five-country study of the method for the World Health Organisation’s Human Reproduction Program. Having been married in 1959, fertility regulation was an immediate issue. I was the primary driving force in the decision to be strictly obedient to official Church teaching in spite of my wife’s disagreement with it. The practice of periodic abstinence placed a very substantial strain and immense frustration on our relationship, but we continued with it until after the birth of our fifth child. We were shattered by the publication of Humanae Vitae and strongly identified with views expressed against it. Our lived experience, however, finally led us to adopt the oral contraceptive pill without any real qualms of conscience. Professionally, on the infrequent occasions I was asked to do so, I did not hesitate to prescribe the pill. Such decisions were finally based on my belief in the primacy of conscience. Ours told us that the love of our marriage could not be reduced to one reproductive function. For me and in general the ethical practice of medicine engenders little conflict with Christian principles. On potentially very divisive issues such as abortion, to follow the dictates of one’s conscience does not require an insistence

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that everyone else in society act as you do. Conscience requires careful examination of an issue, consideration of official Church teaching and its status, and attempted reconciliation with fundamental moral and scientific principles. Through these years, I gradually came to terms with the fact that I had experience and expertise in the complexity of these issues that not many others had. On matters in which the institutional Church had little credibility, I was alone with my rational self. But then again I was never alone. My wife has always accepted the challenge of educating ourselves in the freedoms given us by the Second Vatican Council. We have come to understand that our faith and science can never be in contradiction when the whole of our humanity, with all its sensibilities, is graced by God.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND P E AC E My wife Margaret and I moved to Sydney from Melbourne near the end of 1975. Together with our three children, we all grew to love the lower North Shore. Our Lady Star of the Sea was our church, but our parish kept changing boundaries. First it was Lavender Bay–Kirribilli; then Neutral Bay–Kirribilli; and finally, North Sydney–Lavender Bay–Kirribilli. In all cases, we were under the care of the Jesuits, an Order I knew well from schooldays and seminary years in East Melbourne and Werribee. I can also boast of having had a granduncle, two cousins, and various friends in the Jesuits at different times. I owe much of my early spiritual and intellectual formation to men like the late fathers Louis Loughnan, Cecil Smith, Lou Lachal, Phil McInerney, Hugo Quigley, Gerald Jones, Charlie Mayne, Des O’Connor, Jim McInerney and Herb Wilkins. In Kirribilli and now at Xavier Terrace, my family and I have valued the ministry of other Jesuits, including fathers Bob Walsh, Celso Romanin, Peter Quin, Donal Taylor, Joe Sobb, Emmet Costello, and Tony Smith and the rest of his team. My work for the past 17 or 18 years, until my retirement on 1 February 2005, has been in the social justice area. The base for that work, since 1989, has been the familiar red brick building alongside St Francis Xavier’s church. I was responsible for moving the offices of the Bishops’ Committee for Justice,

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Development, Ecology and Peace (BCJDEP), the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council (ACSJC), Caritas Australia, and Catholic Earthcare Australia (CEA) into that former Lavender Bay Parish school building. We renamed the part that we occupy ‘Leo XIII House’, to honour the pope who launched modern Catholic Social Teaching in 1891 with his great Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, on justice for working people. This has been in many ways the richest, happiest and busiest period of my 74-year-old life. Helping my wife, a superb teacher and mother, raise our three beautiful daughters has been a joyful experience. Being able to play a low-key role in parish life (I was a reader for a number of years at Star of the Sea and occasionally spoke at masses on Social Justice Sunday) was satisfying for one who had been active in the priesthood in an earlier stage of his life. And the opportunity to work for the people of God in the area of social justice, peace, and overseas aid and development has been a privilege and a blessing. I hope and pray my tiny contribution has borne some fruit. In all of this, my greatest inspiration has been Jesus Christ himself, with his Beatitudes, his great discourse about the criteria on which we will be judged, and the example of his care for those suffering poverty, hunger, injustice, imprisonment, homelessness, and other forms of disadvantage and discrimination. And I have stood in admiration of the heroes who have followed him, people like archbishops Romero and Helder Camara, Dorothy Day, Cardinal Van Thuan, Mother Teresa, Blessed Mary MacKillop, Sister Irene McCormack, Mrs Caroline Chisholm and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In their own way, each lived the gospel of love, justice, freedom and hope. May there be many who are prepared to go along similar paths.

P L AY I N G A DIFFERENT GAME I am living in a Department of Housing block in Redfern. I returned to Oz in 1996 from the north-west Nile region of Uganda, where I tried to help the Sudanese refugees. I lived alone near the camps for the most part. The Khartoum forces and Idi Amin’s rebels (from Sudan) began to attack us in 1996 and UNHCR pulled us out. Back in Oz, I spent about four or five years working in drop-in centres for street people, one run (partly) by Brian Stoney. I acted as chaplain in the Talbot hostel for street people in Woolloomoloo. Two

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years ago I retired. I had had enough – especially of preaching. I don’t want to speak about the mystery of life: I find it too hard to talk about. I just want to live. Ian Travers-Ball, whom I used to meet when he visited his brothers in Korea, told me that the Indian tradition divided life into four stages. In the first, you are a child in your family. In the second, you put yourself under a guru and acquire the wisdom you need for life. In the third, you do your life’s work, marry, raise a family, settle your children and complete your life’s work. Finally, you leave all things, go to the forest and attend only to God. Redfern is my forest – I have trees outside my window, and other Sydneysiders call us a jungle because of crimes committed here. In the 1980s and early 1990s I worked in Korea. I taught in Sogang (West River) University and lived in the Jesuit ‘Hilton’ on the campus for the first two years. Then I went to live with the people being evicted by the government from their rooms. One American Jesuit had pioneered work among these evicted poor. I went and lived among these communities on the fringe. They supported me for the next twelve years. I used to visit the Jesuit ‘Hilton’ on the campus once a month to see my Jesuit colleagues. They mostly did not want to see me, but I could have a shower. I made my retreats in Buddhist monasteries each year, revealing little of my identity. In the 1970s, before and after independence, I lived in PNG, teaching at UPNG in Moresby and working in villages outside or on its outskirts. Before that, I fiddled around for a year or two at Newman and Thomas More. Shag on a rock! I regard each of the periods in my life – in Melanesia, Korea, or among the Kakwa, Lugbara, Madi, Dingka and other peoples in Uganda and the Sudan – as chaotic. My efforts, whether to teach, console, counsel, help build schools or find dwellings for the homeless, did not achieve much. I failed, but I don’t feel very guilty. I don’t apologise to anyone but God. I hope that the Lord will have mercy on me and forgive me for my arrogance and cowardice. We need new terms, like the ones I have been fumbling with all my life; for example, ‘traditions’ instead of ‘churches’ and ‘mystery’ instead of ‘God’. Outside the clerical circle stretch other vast circles: Hinduism; Buddhism; Islam; and the Chinese cultural circle inspired by Master Kung, Lao Tse, the Buddha and others. These traditions are facts and are surely the work of the one whom we call God. Hinduism and Buddhism are facts. Indigenous cultures with communities of humans and spirits were, and partly still are, facts.

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I don’t talk much about these matters now. Deep down I suppose that, as a body, the Jesuits have disappointed me, but not nearly as much as I have disappointed those who needed me. I want more from the Society. The hype, the middle-class veneer, the talk, the scarcely hidden fear, leave me cold.

L AT E S TA R T E R In November 1983, I came to Australia from Hong Kong, where I had been teaching in a Jesuit-run day school for Chinese boys, the majority of who were not Christians. I had grown tired of teaching, my heart was no longer in it, and I wanted to experience parish life. I was just 60 and had spent 25 years at the chalk face. It was a good time to make a move. My first assignment was to Lavender Bay. The contrast with school life was startling. In school the bell rules life. When it rings, the teacher must be in the classroom. In a parish, your time is your own to a large extent, and you have to develop your own apostolate. There is, of course, the doorbell; you can be called on at any hour. Still, the feedback in a parish is far more than in the classroom. A potent reason for moving to parish work was the chance it offered to celebrate the sacraments other than the mass. There were babies to be baptised and, consequently, parents to be met and instructed. I tried to involve them in the ceremony by asking them to read or to lead the prayers. There were weddings, too. During all my time in Hong Kong, I had officiated at only two weddings. Now I could see church laws about marriage having to be known and put into practice. So theology wasn’t being wasted. Having had to deal with obedient teenagers all my life, I had to discover that adults had to be treated differently; I couldn’t expect the same reverence from them, much less obedience. Getting impatient with them wasn’t fair – after all, all my knowledge of marriage came from books. I have most enjoyed celebrating the Eucharist with a congregation. People seem to like the way I conduct the liturgy. I do believe I have a feel for it and how to celebrate. I take great care in preparing the Sunday homily. I believe it insults people to preach without preparation. At any rate, I’m not good at speaking off the cuff.

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Theologically, I try to be open to new ideas while not discarding those that have merit. Too often since Vatican II, we’ve lost a sense of reverence in the Church and in dealing with ‘holy things’. This is one of the unforeseen effects of the use of the vernacular. At the sign of peace during a concelebrated mass, priests will become ‘matey’. Holy water, the rosary, statues, votive candles and the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament; all these things helped people in the past, but nothing has replaced them in their lives. I sometimes think that our celebrations are not marked by real devotion, that they are satisfying the need of an elite but not the ordinary faithful. My greatest inspiration as a priest comes from the people of God. I marvel at their faith, their unselfishness, their holiness and their forbearance. It is a humbling experience to be with them and to have the privilege of ministering to them. They often put me to shame. God bless them, everyone.

HOME-GROWN PRIEST From early years, Saint Mary’s was my religious home. I used to be an altar server, and in 1956 acted as Master of Ceremonies for the centenary celebrations of the parish. I felt very much at home in those years, and the parish community life was simple and fairly predictable North Sydney itself was a much smaller township, and our street was a quiet offshoot, most of whose residents were known to me. My mother was ownermatron of a 12-bed private hospital, so I became familiar very early on with the medical world of birth, sickness and death. We had no car, so a walk to Crows Nest, a tram ride into the city, and a double-decker bus ride to Manly were our ways of transport. In 1988 the Jesuit Provincial, Father Peter Steele, SJ, asked me to go to North Sydney as the parish priest. This came as a great surprise and joy, of course. I was welcomed by my mother, who was over 80 years of age, and by the parish community, many of whom had known me since boyhood. George Belfrage was my greatly loved predecessor. We undertook a number of projects during the next five years. We set up a parish pastoral council and a finance committee; the parish school was renovated and extended, the centenary of Marist College was celebrated; the Mission Shop was burnt out and eventually converted into a residence; after consultation, we reduced to three the Sunday

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morning masses. For several years, we experimented by having one parish Sunday mass in Saint Leonard’s park, across from the church. Reaction was mixed, but those who attended found it a good experience. A major realignment occurred when the Lavender Bay church became attached to North Sydney and Kirribilli church to Neutral Bay. For some, this was a very painful transition – perhaps we could have managed it better. Our relationship with the Marist Brothers’ community was enriching. We sometimes used their residence for Anointing masses and their chapel for a weekly community mass. Our membership of the diocesan deanery was also an enriching one – Father Eugene Harley, as parish priest of Mosman, led us in seeking ways to collaborate in our ministry. My understanding of priesthood, as well as the way I have exercised it, has changed very much. To celebrate the Eucharist with a community is always both a privilege and a joy. Undoubtedly, my biblical studies over the years have helped me greatly: I have seen my role as enabling people to enter the mystery of God’s love through the scriptures and the liturgy. I find that the Society’s call for a faith that does justice speaks to people. It disallows our liturgical activity from becoming merely cult-like or ritualistic.

THE HUMANITY OF JESUS AND THE PRIESTHOOD I recall being in trouble before ordination. For about six years, I had been involved at Hawthorn with the choir and youth groups. But when it came to asking for ordination, the permanence of the priesthood suddenly became a reality. So I spent some time closely observing various priests and wondering if who they were was what I wanted to be. In many cases, I did not much like what I saw. The decision was even more taxing by not being able to see clearly into the future. Eventually, I asked for ordination and then began the journey of identity as a priest. Not liking the identity people gave me, I increasingly saw myself as part of the parish community, not someone apart from it. I resisted being addressed as ‘Father’. My early homilies were stilted because of a sense of separation from the ordinary lives of people. Tertianship was a turning point for me – probably the greatest time of my life. I went to Italy for the first time and it felt like a homecoming. I made a

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pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There the humanity of Jesus struck me very strongly. I came back from Italy to be a parish priest at Lavender Bay. We worked hard in the parish to set up a proper Parish Pastoral Council, refining ideas as we went. We were not a management council. We were men and women engaged together in a common ministry. Eventually, this became a threat to the then provincial and I got the sack and was moved. Although hard at the time, it turned out to be a rich blessing. I became coordinator of the Jesuit Refugee Service and spent time in refugee camps. This brought me close to the ordinary lives of people in a radical and different way. I now saw, and still see, myself as a priest very closely linked to the lives of people and events in the world. I now read the gospel within the context of our contemporary world. The sense of the humanity of Jesus that began for me in the Holy Land stays very close. Reflections and homilies are now very different. Sacraments as moments of closeness to God become ever more precious. The most joyful moments are baptisms, perhaps because we don’t need all the paraphernalia of weddings, dresses for Confirmation, or the sadness of funerals. I find myself often moved in celebrating the Eucharist. I recognise it as a precious time of gathering people from all over, worshipping and praising God.

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The Christ and women She is within herself a spirit, intelligent, holy, Unique, manifold, subtle Active, incisive, unsullied, Lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, sharp, Irresistible, beneficent, loving to man, Steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, Almighty, all-surveying, Penetrating, all intelligent, pure, And most subtle spirits; For Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; She is so pure; she pervades and permeates all things. She is a breath of the power of God, Pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; Hence nothing impure can find a way into her. She is a reflection of the eternal light, Untarnished mirror of God’s active power, Image of his goodness Although alone, she can do all; Herself unchanging, she makes all things new. Wisdom 7: 22–27

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‘Christ the Power of God. Christ the Wisdom of God’, Paul wrote to the Corinthians (1 Cor: 1: 22–24). If I entitle a chapter on Mary, women and religious sisters in the parish from 1956 to 2006 ‘The Christ and Women’, it is because I need to touch on the mysteriousness of gender and the Incarnation. ‘The Christ’ is my effort, inspired, as we shall see, by a most creative theologian, Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, to describe the Son of God, Jesus Christ, without giving some priority to his maleness. The Spirit in Christ is power and wisdom, both as much feminine as male. In these past 50 years, the tradition of the role of Mary, women and religious sisters in the Church – and powerfully in the parish – has been reinvented. The fact that humanity has only a gendered, male and female, expression, cannot allow us to engender the Divine as one or the other. Language-bound as we are, however, we have to use one or the other. It only becomes a fixed, idolatrous notion when a metaphor like ‘He’ feeds on the unjust use of power. The Church is dangerously idolatrous in its patriarchy. We need a prophetic imagination to fix it. John XXIII warned the Church against the idolatry of patriarchy when he urged it to read the ‘signs of the times’ in what it meant that women were treated unequally in domestic, public and ecclesial life. The Spirit, I would like to think, is always politically correct. The Spirit inspires us to erase injustice, when we can easily do so in our language and dialogue. The Spirit is also postmodern in how it inspires us to do this. Johnson is a sister of the Congregation of Saint Joseph in the United States. She is also Professor of Theology at the Jesuit Fordham University, New York. Her recent book, Truly Our Sister. A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (2004), has inspired much of the thinking of Church Alive! I turn to her now as I reflect on Mary, women and religious sisters. I do not do that because as a man, I cannot write of the religious experiences of women. That thought is anathema to me. It leads to nihilism. Being human means that we have to cope with Otherness in every moment of our living. It is in Otherness that we know ourselves. I turn to Johnson because she gives insight into the two themes that have dominated our story of life in the parish so far. First, eternal truths do not come to us from afar. They are known, as Karl Rahner has put it, in the ‘drudge’ of everyday living, and in the interpretation of the revelation that comes to us in the ordinary. They come to us ethnographically, I would like to say. Johnson writes an ethnography of Miriam of Nazareth, Mary. Second, postmodernity is a way of being in, and embracing, a pluralist world, respecting otherness, and being ethical by

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accepting the claim of others to attention by conversation. And Johnson’s ethnography is also of the theological conversation in the Church about gender.

Miriam of Nazareth It is difficult to meet Miriam of Nazareth face to face, as it were. All the present moments of Miriam’s life come to us only in the words of those whose after-memories tell them who she was and what she meant. Lost are the actual experiences of the 12-to-15-year-old girl saying ‘Here I am’ on that momentous day for the entire world, perhaps 2010 years ago. Lost, too, is the present experience of the 45-year-old woman at the foot of the cross in the spray of sweat, blood and vinegar, and in the smells of death and fear, amid the mocking sounds of the crowd and soldiers, the screams of pain from the crucified two beside her son, the whisper of his dying words that she is now mother to someone else. For us, the layer on layer of images and representations of Miriam of Nazareth are countless in the religious culture of 2000 years. And in our own lifetimes, from childhood to womanhood and manhood, we never leave Mary in what we imagine were her present moments. We are always reshaping her into our own present. The 100 years in the life of the Church from 1854, when the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined, to 1950 when Pius XII declared the dogma of the Assumption, was an Age of Mary. We, whose childhood was played out in the years that ended the Age of Mary, experienced its extravagances without knowing them as extravagant. We prayed The Memorare – to win a football match, at some moral crisis in pubescence, at moments of near mysticism after communion: Remember, O most loving Virgin Mary, that never was it known in any age, that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored they help, or sought thy intercession, was abandoned. Inspired with confidence, therefore, to fly to thee, O Virgin of virgins, my Mother, to thee do I come, before thee I stand sinful and sorrowful; do not, O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise my prayers, but graciously here and grant them. And we prayed the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘Mother most pure, pray

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for us, Mother most chaste, pray for us, Mother inviolate, pray for us, Mother undefiled, pray for us’. We were unconscious of what was being imprinted on our consciousness about women and the dirtiness of our sexuality. No doubt, there must be some suspicion that such personal experiences and such sparse evidence as that of a litany express a paradigm. But listen to a postVatican II Litany of Mary of Nazareth and ask what other sort of paradigm it suggests: Mary, wellspring of peace, be our guide, Model of strength, be our guide, Model of gentleness, be our guide. … Oppressed woman, lead us to life, Liberator of the oppressed, lead us to life, Comforter of the afflicted, lead us to life. … Mother of the homeless, pray for us, Mother of the dying, pray for us, Mother of the executed criminal, pray for us. … Woman of Mercy, empower us, Woman of Faith, empower us, Woman of Contemplation, empower us. There was directness in the pleas of our prayers and litanies for Mary’s intervention in our lives. That prepared us to accept that Mary would appear to young children in exotic places: Knock, Ireland; La Fatima, Portugal; Lourdes, La Salette, France; Akita, Naju, El-Zeitour, Amsterdam, Cibolo, Damascus, Madjuaze … the list is long. We were prepared for the many promises of the apparition at Fatima: ‘To all those, [who] on the first Saturday for five consecutive months go to confession, communion, [and] pray for the intentions of the Pontiff ’, Mary shall, ‘assist them at the moment of death with all the graces necessary for the salvation of their soul’. That the Virgin’s promises and warnings to the three children of Fatima fitted our cultural fears of Communist Russia and socialist-leaning Spain, that the apocalyptic possibilities she threatened in times of world tension fed on our deepest fears, that her promises were comfortably arithmetic and directed to that moment of Catholic uncertainty, death, that God could improve on

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revelation with secret messages locked in a pope’s safe – all this fed on a mentalité of discovering the divine not in the ordinary, but in the extraordinary. The rosary was our chief instrument of prayer. There would not have been a religious occasion in our lives – first communion, confirmation or entrance into sodalities – that would not have been celebrated with a gift of a rosary – large, small, black or glittering. The nuns, who taught us, had huge rosaries on their belts. The rosary featured in our penances, in our spiritual bouquets, at the grave, at mass and in times of crisis. It was our refuge. It was our mode of prayerful concentration. It was Mary-oriented in its Hail Marys, but it belonged to the narrative of our faith in its glorious, joyful and sorrowful mysteries – and now, since John Paul II created them, its luminous mysteries. He did that in accordance with the reforms of Vatican II to renew the Christological dimension of the Church’s devotions. As we shall see, Vatican II reconstituted a theology of Mary. Yet she remains our sign of hope. She is pilgrim, member of the communion of saints, mother, model of the Church and mediator. Let us return to Mary’s first step in her pilgrimage of faith. Nazareth, in 4 BCE, was a 900- metre high, ridge-top village of about 120–150 people. They lived in probably a dozen or so households. All the villagers would have been related in some way. A clan of David, of the tribe of Judah, had settled there about 80 to100 years before. They were coming from exile in Babylon. This, however, is occupied territory. The Romans are establishing a sort of R and R township at Sepphoris, just eight kilometres from Nazareth, on another ridgetop. They defend it savagely whenever it is threatened. Nazareth was south of Galilee, an area noted for its population of gentiles. Understandably, it has a sense of oppression. To the Jews it had a mixed culture, a marginal feel. ‘What good comes from Nazareth?’ they would scoff. Cana is about 18 kilometres to the north; the Sea of Galilee is 32 kilometres to the east. The Mt Carmel range to the west blocks Nazareth’s view of the Mediterranean. Miriam is betrothed to Joseph, a tekton, Luke says, using a Greek word that has usually been translated as ‘carpenter’, but more properly a ‘Jack-of-alltrades’. His were handy skills, with the Romans building a township just eight kilometres away. Miriam is no prissy lass. We have seen that in her great song, ‘The Magnificat’. Betrothed to Joseph – Yossif-yah – ‘May Yahweh add this son’, Rachel had said, when she conceived the patriarch Joseph and named him that (Gen. 20: 22–27). Even at 15 years, Miriam is well experienced in the poverty,

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burdensome taxes and violent retribution for any insurgency in this occupied land. Probably at some prayerful reading of scripture – because that is how Luke sees Gabriel coming to make visionary announcements in Daniel (Dan 9: 21; 10: 8–12; 15) – Miriam has a vision of the Fortitude of God, as Gabriel is known, overshadowing her. Luke gives his story drama, and dialogue and scriptural witness, but he doesn’t lessen Miriam’s confusion and uncertainties. That is her membership of the communion of saints. By the same token, he doesn’t lessen the greatness of her fiat. Marian devotions, as I have suggested, were strong and many leading up to Vatican II. May was Mary’s month; October the Holy Rosary’s. Novenas were held for the principal Marian Feasts – especially for the holy days of obligation of the Assumption, 15 August, and the Immaculate Conception on 8 December. The young girls’ ‘Children of Mary’, in their veils and capes, used to meet monthly at a Sunday mass. There would have been a Miraculous Medal in all their households. Women and men of The Legion of Mary, a fairly late confraternity from 1920s Ireland, brought to daily devotions some of Ireland’s spiritual desperation in its problems of drink and abandonment of the Church. They met in their cohorts at Sunday masses as well. As an organisation, they joined others that met on (almost every) Sunday: the Holy Name Society and the Sodality of the Sacred Heart, groups that met held their banners proudly and paraded into their special seats in the church. The traditional Marian devotion of the Jesuits – the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary – never really got a hold in the parish. The bishops put pressure on the parishes to promote diocesan-wide devotions, rather than the favoured devotions of religious congregations and orders. The Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, conceived of as an elite group committed to the ‘More’ of the Jesuit’s own spiritual lives, was strongest in their schools, and chaplains worked out of the schools to establish sodalities for professional men, such as doctors and lawyers. The parish was swept up in the global tour of the Statue of Our Lady of Fatima when it visited the parish in 1956. For a time, the five first Saturdays (and the fifteen Saturdays of the Holy Rosary) were strongly supported. There would be all-night Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on the Friday eve of the first Saturday, and confessionals were manned most of Friday for schoolchildren and others. Many parishioners could boast of being a ‘Hail Mary’ or an ‘Our Father’ in some Living Rosary at Randwick in response to the visit of some international evangelist, such as Father Peyton.

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Marian devotions competed with a plethora of other devotions – the Bona Mors (‘Good Death’) Confraternity, a union for prayers and good works in preparation for a happy death; the Forty Hours, continual 40 hours of prayer before the exposed Blessed Sacrament; and the Apostleship of Prayer, with its monthly leaflets with specific intention marked for prayer. The strongest supporter of Marian devotions in the parish was the Jesuit pious magazine, published monthly since 1903, the Madonna. ‘Herbie’ Wilkins, SJ, was a pro-active editor. Perhaps his most creative work was his exploration, on the cover and inside of the Madonna, of the modern, cross-cultural representations of the Virgin and the new churches dedicated to her. It was a brave exercise, and earned him many critical letters in his correspondence columns. But it was an important exercise in weening the faithful from the kitsch in Marian devotions. In the end Wilkins was disappointed that Vatican II did not join him in the theological extravagances that nineteenth-century Mariology had engendered in the notion of Mary as Co-Redemptrix. There was only one Redeemer, Vatican II insisted. Mary was the first disciple, the first one to be saved, Mother of Christ, not Mother of God. There is much historical argument as to why Marian devotion supposedly collapsed so quickly in the Church. Of course, it hasn’t decreased in Africa, Asia or South and Central America, where its liberating effect is still being felt. The implosion in the Western Church had more to do, it seems to me, with the issue of women in the Church, to which we now turn. But first, in 2005 Mary. Grace and Hope in Christ. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. An Agreed Statement appeared. The cochairmen of the commission that prepared the statement were the Most Reverend Peter Carnley, the then Archbishop of Perth and Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia, and The Most Reverend Alexander Burnett, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Seattle, USA. (I should note, however, that of the 30 theologians and clerics of the commission, only one was a woman.) The Agreed Statement had these remarkable things to say: The Scriptures lead us together to praise and bless Mary as the handmaid of the Lord, who was providentially prepared by divine grace to be the mother of our Redeemer. Her unqualified assent to the fulfilment of God’s saving plan can be seen as the supreme instance of a believer’s ‘Amen’ to the ‘yes’ of God. We affirm together: That the teaching that God has taken the Blessed Virgin

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Mary in the fullness of her person into his glory is consonant with Scripture, and only to be understood in the light of Scripture; That in the view of her vocation to be the mother of the Holy One, Christ’s redeeming work reached ‘back’ in Mary to the depths of her being and to her earliest beginnings; That the teaching about Mary, in the two definitions of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception, [and] understood within the biblical pattern of the economy of hope and grace, can be said to be consonant with the teaching of the Scriptures and the ancient common tradition; That this agreement, when accepted by our two Communions, would place the questions about authority that arise from the two definitions of 1854 and 1950 in a new ecumenical context; That Mary has a continuing ministry which serves the ministry of Christ, our unique mediator, [and] that Mary and the saints pray for the whole Church, and that the practice of asking Mary and the saints to pray for us is not communion-dividing. We agree that doctrines and devotions which are contrary to Scripture cannot be said to be revealed by God or to be the teaching of the Church. We agree that doctrine and devotion which focuses on Mary, including claims to ‘private revelations’, must be moderated by carefully expressed norms which ensure the unique and central place of Jesus Christ in the life of the Church, and that Christ alone, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is to be worshipped by the Church.

Women Women are the subjects of two very different texts. According to Tertullian (c.160–c.220) writing on The Dress of Women: Do you not realise that you are each an Eve! The curse of God on this sex of yours lives on even in our times. Guilty, you must bear its hardships. You are the gateway of the devil … All too easily you destroyed the image of God, Adam. You are the one who deserved death; because of you the Son of God had to die. And Elizabeth Johnson, writing in 1993 on women, earth and the creator spirit:

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We must be wary of roads that lead to dead-ends. I think it is a strategic mistake to retain the dualistic way of thinking and hope to make an advance simply by assigning greater value to the repressed ‘feminine’ role of the polarity. … What we search for is a way to undercut the dualism and to construct a new, holistic design for all of reality built on appreciation of difference in a genuine community. We seek a unifying vision that does not stratify what is distinct into superior–inferior layers but reconciles them in relationships of mutuality. Let us then listen to women’s wisdom, discern our kinship with the earth, and remember the Spirit, as vital steps toward an ecological ethic and spirituality. ‘We believe in Our Lord, Jesus Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man’, we say in the creed. ‘Homo natus est’ is the Latin for ‘was made man’. Our English is the wrong translation. It should be ‘was made human’. The Christ in His incarnation is not male, he is human. Jesus in his birth was male. The Christ is made human. In Christ, there is ‘neither male nor female’. In the years since John XXIII told the Church it must be a symbol of justice for all humanity, the steps towards justice in the Church have been mincingly small forward and large backward. The extravagances of a Tertullian, we must hope, have gone, but such fundamentalism dies hard. Women have been allowed on the altar, even to touch the host and the cup, but not to make any gesture or do any action that might be deemed priestly. Women can go into the pulpit to read any scripture other than the gospels. They cannot preach. Small efforts at inclusive language have been tried, but large exclusivity has been maintained under the pretence of literalness. Women can minister pastorally but not sacramentally. Even if the whole people of God are imprinted with the priestliness of the Christ by their baptism, a pope has declared that he has not the authority to ordain women, and worse, bans any discussion on the matter. Even if Vatican II had declared that a true anthropology of a believing people was a self-actualisation out of scripture, the anthropology of the Church-inRome is of a gendered humanity, an archaic remnant of the rational scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, divorced altogether from history and scripture. The priests of the parish have been constantly exhorted by their Jesuit superiors to give the needs of women in the Church primacy. Every statement of the Pastoral Ministries of the parish and of the Society of Jesus have said the same.

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The women of the parish seem likely to agree with a 1996 survey by the Australian bishops showing that most women love the Church, and feel more disturbed by such issues as the alienation of the young than any wrongs they might be subjected to. When they openly discuss women’s matters in the Church, they are inclined to say that there are more important things to discuss than the intransigencies of the hierarchy. If the matter of women’s ordination is raised, many would say that they would not want to be ordained into such an unreformed Church. Nearly all the women of the parish, young and old, are postmodern, though it is not a word they would use. They will deny that ‘woman’ is easily defined. What woman is ‘woman’, they will ask. The white, middle-class, heterosexual? The single mother? The gay? The black poor women in Africa suffering under the laws of sexuality of the Church? The detainee in the refugee camps? The abused? ‘Mum’ in Aboriginal Redfern? They feel uncomfortable, too, with any broad definition of the ‘Church’. The ‘Church’ is what they live, day in, day out. The Pope is not the ‘Church’, nor the Vatican, they will say. The ‘Church’ is certainly not the bishops, nor even the parish priest. The ‘Church’ is their journeying selves. Older women, with deep memories of who they were in the old Church, will talk of the enrichment of their spiritual lives in the devotions of those days, but will exclaim: ‘I feel free now!’ Younger women scarcely believe the restrictions their mothers experienced. The parish has resolved many of these issues for itself by a ‘just-do-it’ approach that makes the new freedoms of women in ritual, worship and decision-making seem natural. The parish is a pilgrim Church journeying, ‘loving itself humbly’. Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher historian whom we have met before, has a famous thesis about scientific revolutions. Revolutions have long happened before the supposed revolutionary act. The change in women’s position in the Church will have happened long before the first woman has been ordained priest or bishop or, for that matter, elected pope. The dynamic of that precursory revolution will be dialogue, true dialogue. Listen to what John Paul II wrote about true dialogue. His 14 encyclicals have been collected and translated into everyday language (see Donders 2005). ‘Dialogue’, he wrote in Ut Unum Sint (That They May be One), and quoting from Lumen Gentium of Vatican II, ‘is rooted in the nature and dignity of human beings, unable to find themselves except through a sincere gift of themselves. It is an indispensable step towards human self-realisation …

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Dialogue is not simply an exchange of ideas; in some way it is always an “exchange of gifts”’. There have been moments of true dialogue in the parish, when the living Church and women have exchanged the gifts of themselves. These moments have been called Women’s Spirituality Nights. Despite being a just once-a-year event for ten years, they are anticipated and remembered the whole year long and are sacramental to every dimension of parish life. The winds of change that blow on these nights are like the breath of the Spirit in Jesus Christ. They come in story and parable. Women’s Spirituality Nights are nights of stories, ways in which equality becomes more than a political struggle. It becomes a lived experience. Caroline Jones, in An Authentic Life. Finding Meaning and Spirituality in Everyday Life, has told how stories affect her. She would not be alone: ‘Fragments of other people’s memories came tiptoeing to make themselves heard. I felt them peering over my shoulders and I had to heed them. I carry the stories like a sacred library. Once someone has told me their story, I cannot do other than keep it and treasure it.’ If women are prevented from preaching from the pulpit, then women’s lives could be made sacramental in the stories they tell of their spiritual journeying. If they are denied the priesthood, they can act out their priestliness by letting others enter into their spirit by speaking to the whole body as well as the mind, by revealing what was actual in their religious experience rather than what ‘should be’, by being womanly in the presence of a thousand women. Women’s Spirituality Nights have given hope. In the words of the theologian, Letty Russell, ‘by making a memory of the future’, they ‘subvert the Church into being a Church’. It does not embarrass me, then, in this book, that I give a list of those women who have told their stories. It is a measure of the importance that I attach to this dialogic mode of change. You will recognise many of their names and will know that among them are media personalities, actors, magistrates, governors, writers, politicians and businesswomen: Geraldine Doogue, Dorothy Lee, Sr Deirdre Rofe IBVM, Morag Fraser, Vera Link, Caroline Jones, Jacki Weaver, Deborah de Wilde, Kerry Chikarowski, Janine Shepherd, Helen Garner, Kathryn Greiner, Teresa Pirola, Stephanie Dowrick, Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir, Carmen Murphy, Judi Taylor, Mahboba Rawi, Trish Watts, Carmen Duncan, Margaret Wiseman, Jenny Boland, Barbara Holborrow, Anne Webster, Wendy Harmer, Gabrielle Toner, Gabi Hollows and Rachel Ward.

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Human beings are ‘unable to find themselves except through a sincere gift’, John Paul II said. A thousand women in the pews gave themselves to three women on the altar. Three women on the altar gave themselves to a thousand women in the pews. Perhaps no giving of herself is remembered in the parish as much as Carmen Murphy’s. The sweetness of her voice brought peace, and the humaneness of her story brought joy. The women listened. They laughed with one another. They wept. They sang. They absorbed the beauty of the flowers and the music. ‘Dialogue depends on prayer’, John Paul said. They prayed. Would that the Church-in-Rome could give itself in gift to the Church-atlarge in dialogue. Would that the Church-at-large could inspire the Church-inRome to accept the gift of itself in dialogue. It would rediscover what the Spirit inspired Vatican II to see that a duality that detaches God from the world, humanity from nature, and men from women is a false god.

Sisters In these last 150 years, the parish has shared in what has been perhaps the most extraordinary God-quest of the modern era – the dedication, in the love of Christ, of hundreds of thousands of women to a ministry of charity, service and education in revolutionary and war-torn Europe and immigrant United States and Australia. From the 1830s, the Church was the seeding ground for hundreds of congregations of women who clustered together in consecrated celibacy, evangelical poverty and prophetic obedience. What was new about this movement was that old monastic religious models were overturned, and women created a non-cloistered apostolate in which the world was excluded not by walls but by dress, rules and distinctive spiritualities. The parish has celebrated its debt to these women on only one occasion – the Dedication of the carillon bells at St Francis Xavier’s in memory of the Sisters of Mercy’s 107 years of work in Lavender Bay, from 1883 to 1990. I would like to celebrate not just the work, in love, of these women, but their witness to the Christ in these past 40 years. The Sisters of Mercy preceded the Jesuits in the Parish in 1875, and have stayed in it ever since, in their ministry of education and healing. Sr Ignatius McQuoin, RSM, brought them to Sydney from Liverpool ten years earlier. They came to West Street seeking some respite from their gruelling work among the destitute. They stayed, to educate the poor and well-off alike at Monte Sant’ Angelo, St Francis Xavier’s, and St Mary’s primary schools, to heal the sick at

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Mater hospital, and to help all religious women in the archdiocese through the changes of Vatican II at the Xavier Institute, Lavender Bay. Mercy convents in these years before their federation were always independent of one another. The Goulburn Mercies brought their ministry of hospitality to ‘Mercedes’, the former residence of the Cahill family who were prominent parishioners for generations and donors of the large crucifix in St Francis Xavier’s. Blessed Mary MacKillop established a novitiate for her Sisters of St Joseph in 1884. Dean John Kenny, the second parish priest, had given them ‘Alma Cottage’, and would later give them his two properties on Mount Street for further expansion. The feisty Australian spirituality of the Josephites has been a true blessing on the parish. Its story is told in the museum and shrine on Mount Street. Blessed Mary MacKillop is honoured in all three parish churches. The Sisters of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Loretos, came from the other (southern) side to the other (northern) side. They came with the spirit of their founder, Mary Ward, who had been inspired by the heroics of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in England to educate young women to their full potential. Like Mary MacKillop, Mary Ward suffered in the Church. Her institute was suppressed and she was imprisoned as a heretic in 1631. The Loretos came first to Normanhust in 1897, then to Milson’s Point and Kirribilli, by slow expansion between 1901 and 1975. Mother Philomena Heaton, IBVM, gave a lifetime of service to the parish between 1901 and 1963. The Missionary Sisters of the Society of Mary, with missions in the Pacific, Australia and Bangladesh, established themselves in Lavender Bay from 1977 to 1999. There they made a place of retreat and prayer. The Benedictine Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, known as the Tyburn Nuns, set up a Chapel of Perpetual Adoration on Berry Street (1958–62), but the construction of the Warringah Expressway forced them to Manly. In 1936, ‘The First Five’ of the Grail came from Holland, where the Church had great vision of what a religious experience should be for the rest of the millennium and beyond. The Grail was not a religious congregation in the traditional sense. It was an international movement of young, old, single and married women prepared to conduct a modern apostolate of information; for example, on justice, ecology, indigenous peoples, liberation theology, the Muslim faith and East Timor. By wandering pilgrimage in many parts of Sydney and its suburbs, they ended up at ‘Avila’ on McHatten Street. By 1956, sisters, whatever their congregation, were icons of catholicity. The faithful, in a sense, owned them. They were the Church – in their habits and in

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their lives of hard sacrifice. There would not have been a parishioner who did not incorporate into her or his life story some story of a sister’s – or a brother’s – eccentricities. There was probably not a boy or a girl who was not teased by the question ‘Do I have a vocation?’ The loving acceptance of their children’s calling in the Church was a gift in faith, hope and charity of parents, though many were puzzled by harsh, at times, cruel rules of life that distanced their daughters from all family life. The Church has always had a high estimation for ‘red’ and ‘white’ martyrdoms – ‘red’, the giving of one’s life in martyrdom for the love of Christ; ‘white’, the living ‘death to the world’ of religious life. By the 1950s, the proficiency of religious congregations in sacralising their members to ‘death to the world’ by rule and law was almost exquisite. Australian religious congregations had absorbed much Irish Jansenism, with its mistrust of human nature and its systems of surveillance. Anyone familiar with studies of how military institutions socialise their members to act instinctively by rites de passage, humiliation rituals, close drill and creations of special languages; or anybody familiar with Irving Goffman’s studies of total institutions and their power to expunge individuality from ordinary standards of behaviour, would recognise how totally and masterfully religious congregations incorporated these systems into their way of life. It would be wrong to think that this closed world of religious life was necessarily an unhappy one. Anyone who has heard the laughter floating over the walls of a Carmelite monastery in their hour of recreation will know that. That closed world of religious life redeemed itself by being theatre to itself. It entertained with mimicry and reverse-world rituals. Laughter at the ironies of a fluffed line or inappropriate gesture was constant. It is ‘insider’s’ laughter. Not mocking or destructive. It was familial. It was the back-stage in the theatre of religious life, the space that was reserved for self away from the intrusions of the institution. Sr Margaret Barry, RSM, archivist of the Sisters of Mercy at Monte Sant’ Angelo, has made a study of this back-stage of religious life in the stories sisters tell. These stories aren’t history in the sense that anyone worries about their facticity. They are stories repeated hundreds of times, leached in their telling to their essences, creating laughter and tears in the hearers in their almost coded phrases. What the story loses in accuracy, it gains in truth. The truth concerns the bonds of familiarity. Insiders know their closeness in the shared humour in a (seemingly) social disaster or impropriety. These bind people together. They give practised insight into how to interpret sacred texts and to make parables of everyday experiences.

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At the acme of a system that still had many characteristics of the Middle Ages, Vatican II practically dumped religious congregations into a postmodern age. The Council, by first declaring that all of the people of God were called to the holiness of the beatitudes by their baptism, subverted the elite and special position of religious life in the Church. Then Perfectae Caritatis (Decree on Appropriate Renewal of Religious Life) told religious congregations two things. They must rediscover the charisma of their founders. They must adjust their way of life to modern circumstances. Religious were now to be in a graced world, not out of it. Religious sisters, who had responded to the changes of Vatican II more positively than any other group in the Church – certainly more positively than the bishops, priests and laity – now, turned to renewal of every aspect of their own identity. To outsiders and to enemies of Vatican II, this renewal of women’s religious life has been seen as cataclysmic. On the contrary, it has been a gift of extraordinary richness to the Church, a new charisma. Where it could have been despairing, cynical and self-interested, it has been energetic, full of hope and visionary. The sisters of the new Church have been generously willing to take risks. Because they, more than any other group in the Church, were prepared to educate themselves to the present, they are the ‘light on the hill’. They have taught the Church what celibacy might mean in a world without love. They have shown how rich in spirit one must be to stand beside the oppressed poor, how prophetic and disobedient a conscience must be when confronted by the banality of unthinking obedience. Perfectae Caritatis had a stunted, male, antiquarian and after-thought quality about it, with little inspiration. Most of the sisters of the parish understood instinctively that the prophetic vision of their founders inevitably had become smothered in layers of rule and regulation, but they had a better sense of history than Perfectae Caritatis exhibited. They realised that their charismatic gift to the Church could not be something fossilised in the past. They must discover what they had become by the grace of God in location, here in the parish, the nation and the globe. Many began to write, in prayerful dialogue, histories of themselves. They discovered, of course, that history is always about the present. Monsignor Tom Connolly, professor of theology at Manly, inspired a constructive response to Perfectae Caritatis among religious sisters in the Sydney area. In 1967 he helped establish the Xavier Institute of Sister Formation in the present Leo XIII building at St Francis Xavier’s. Between 1967 and 1974 about 150 sisters a year, from 26 different congregations, attended lectures there in

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Dogmatic, Ascetical and Moral Theology, Scripture, History of Religious Life, Liturgy, Church History, Catechetics, Sociology, Education, Literature, Art, Drama, Child Psychology and Creative Writing. Sister M. Cleophas Logue, RSM, was the Warden of the Institute from 1967 to 1974, when the functions of the Institute were taken to the Mercy Novitiate at Castle Hill. The Xavier Institute was a brave experiment, part of a broader movement that came late to Australia, in which women, especially religious sisters, and laymen, became better educated theologically than their clerical contemporaries. It should be remembered, and as I have said, that till 1967, wherever the Church controlled theological education, women were banned from pursuing advanced degrees in theology. Falling numbers in religious congregations, and the availability of other means of theological education, meant that the Xavier Institute was no longer viable after 1974. Falling numbers of religious has been taken as ‘sign of the times’ of the failings of Vatican II. Many, if not most, of the women who left religious life, left it for other apostolates – pastoral ministries, chaplaincies in schools, hospitals and mental institutions, religio-social help units, spiritual counselling, and adult education. They feel just as called.

H Some thirty or so years ago I was chaplain at the University of NSW. One day a young man who was working as a gardener popped into my office and asked me to explain the Trinity to him. Fortunately I had enough sense to pause and to ask him how he saw it. In a way that nicely avoided abstraction, he went straight to the heart of the mystery by speaking of the Trinity in terms of dance. He thought of the Father as the Dance, the Son as the Dancer and the Spirit as the Dancing. We come to know the Dance by watching the Dancer. We experience the Dance when we are drawn by the Dancer into the Dancing. One could speak of God as Life, of Jesus as the one who lived this life and of the Spirit as the experiencing of living. Perhaps best of all one can speak of God as Love, of Jesus as the Lover who incarnates his love, and of the Spirit as the experience of loving that we enjoy because of Jesus. Michael Fallon MSC Trinity Sunday Homily

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Calling Many notable people have been ‘called’ – ‘God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses” (Exodus 3: 1–15); ‘The Lord said to [Samuel]: “Rise, and anoint [David], for this is the one” (1 Samuel 16: 1–12). And, of course, Mary and Elizabeth (Luke 1: 26–52); Simon and Andrew (Mt 4: 18–22); Nicodemus ( John 3: 1–16) and Saul (Acts 9: 1–20). Ordinarily, one has to think, God doesn’t call in these dramatic ways. But then, again, these stories might be telling us what we already know – that we have to struggle to know who is calling, and to what we are being called, and whether the voice calling is just our own in another guise. Dozens of men and women of the parish have felt called, hearing the message Jesus gave to the rich young man: ‘If you will be perfect, go and sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me’ (Mt 19: 21). Being ‘perfect’ would be a lifetime goal for them – in poverty, chastity and obedience. Each of them could tell us the cost of answering that call – to themselves and their families. Each would have had different inspirations for this decision. They would have been attracted to different expressions of religious life – Loretos, Mercies, Josephites, Marists and Jesuits. They would insist that this calling is not one-off. The calling is a lifetime of calling – day-by-day, year-by-year. The generation of religious who speak to us in this word picture has experienced change as perhaps no other generation of religious has experienced it. Theirs is a charism, a gift to the renewed Church that deserves witness.

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–

THEN AND NOW BEING A SISTER OF ST JOSEPH When I was eight years old, a priest, giving a school day retreat, asked if I were going to be a Sister like my aunt. I answered, ‘I suppose so’. But then, having given my word and feeling bound to keep it, I was presented with a problem. How was I to tell my boyfriend? Each day since grade one, he had brought me chocolate frogs from his parents’ delicatessen. I was saved when his family moved away. Then, aged 14, I went to St Joseph’s Juniorate, a boarding school for ‘little nuns’. About 20 girls shared life there. We studied, did manual work, played sport and prayed. Because it was assumed that a religious vocation was best protected without the distractions of normal high-school activities, we rarely went out or mixed with students from other schools. Parents could visit once a month, and we returned home only during the Christmas holidays. The Sisters worked hard and did their best for us. But later I recognised the injustice of such a system. It was abnormal, a remnant of an institutionalism that had characterised aspects of society in a previous age. In the last year of high school, I progressed to the postulancy. I taught 30 bright and beautiful kindergarten children. Later and after two years in the Sydney novitiate, I made profession as a Sister of St Joseph. Ten years later, I suddenly became aware of where I was and what I had done. By now, Vatican II had come, and I was caught up in the good news it brought. I found nourishment and excitement in absorbing its teachings. But I was also engaged in the painful, private struggle of questioning whether I was really called to religious life. Now I rejoice that my daily choice to respond to God’s call has found its expression in the Sisters of St Joseph. The journey of this communal body has paralleled my personal journey, as together we have sloughed off the effects of institutionalism and come to understand the place of religious life within the broader context of church and world. We see ourselves as partners with all the baptised. As a vital part of the history of our country, Sisters of St Joseph identify with the best of what it means to be Australian. As an expression of our baptismal relationship to God, our vows bind us to the people of God in love and service. The Spirit has gifted us with a way of serving that others also share. It is my hope that we Sisters might, with others, provide a forum of support and

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identity for those lay people and diocesan priests who find themselves alienated in a Church that, in some places, is now the antithesis of Vatican II. Mary MacKillop made Australia a different place; she gave shape to the Church here. We can do the same.

S TA R C H O U T D RI P - D RY I N

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After three years of novitiate, January 1958 was the beginning of my teaching life. It was in an intermediate school to which I was appointed. It finished at third year, when the girls were about 15 years of age. This was going to be a whole new life, challenging and interesting. I wouldn’t see my novitiate pals until the school holidays in May – and only one sister of my age was living at the school’s convent. The other six sisters seemed to me to be very old. Some of them were helpful and friendly, despite the age difference; others lived in their own worlds and neither helped nor hindered me. As in every convent, a strict timetable of prayers, school work, housework and recreation prevailed. My parents and relations were allowed to visit me on the first Sunday afternoon of each month, and could write as often as they chose. There were few outings. I looked forward to Friday nights. We went out – but only across the road, to Benediction in the parish church. We were accustomed to walking to and from the church in two’s. We processed in order of seniority of profession, beginning with the most junior. We sat in the front two pews of the church, supposedly for the edification of the parishioners or maybe to keep us from being distracted. This was a daily occurrence – twice daily on Sundays when we attended both the 7 a.m. and the 9 a.m. mass. Being pre-Vatican II, the mass was in Latin. In 1958, our habits were black wool serge, with many pleats, black veil, white starched coif, and black guimpe. They were very hot in the summer and not warm enough in winter. Being the junior in the house, my job was to starch the coifs every Monday after school. There were eight coifs, one for each sister. The starching was a tricky job, requiring the right heat on the iron, precision timing and patience. I was not sorry to see the habit modified and changed after Vatican II – starch out and drip-dry in. A sister five years my senior helped me navigate the intricacies of convent etiquette and diplomacy. She told me, for example, what I was expected to say when I’d broken some small regulation or other and what tasks were mine.

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There was a whole new culture in 1958. I learnt many useful living skills and interpersonal skills. These, I know, have stood by me for my 50 years of living in communities of sisters.

T H E S AG A OF THE HABIT Why is it that the dress of the Sisters is such an issue? Some say they approve of habits because they want a sign of consecration. But what sign? Does one have to know when one follows a man in the street that he is a priest? Or that he is married? Stereotypes of nuns have them garbed in quaint medieval dress. Many will measure change in the Church by what Sisters wear. I have to admit, dress has been one indicator of their journey over the last 50 years. It began when Pius XII ordered them to revise their way of life in order to comply with demands of health and mission. Here are five vignettes that describe that journey. Scene 1: It is the late 1950s, and my grandmother has just given my cousin and me, both 16 years old, our Christmas presents. My cousin has a rope petticoat, all the rage. Me? I’m given the long, black, unflattering garment worn by nuns. I run into the bedroom and cry with disappointment. Next month I don this petticoat as a postulant with the Sisters of St Joseph. Scene 2: As a novice I have just put on the habit (the word means ‘dress’) of the Sisters of St Joseph. There’s a point at which the band of cloth around my face meets the inserted triangle to cover the neck. It’s like a stone poking into your throat and it hurts. The whole headdress is tight and, on hot days, quickly becomes damp and uncomfortable. Down the spine of my back there are seven thicknesses of material. Scene 3: It’s the mid-1960s in a small country town and I have just taken a stand. Never again, I’ve decided, will I use men’s handkerchiefs, the standard supply to Sisters. Further, I am going to let my hair grow into a ponytail. I’m a woman, not a man. Scene 4: By the early 1970s, others and I have simplified our dress. But as a university student taking part in a geography excursion, I’ve been refused permission by my superior to wear ‘civies’ suitable for clambering over rocks and through creeks. I feel stupid and humiliated when one of the professors tells a rude joke about nuns. I’ve learnt, too, that the early Church Fathers ordered consecrated virgins

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to wear veils because every decent married woman wore one, and the virgins were considered to be married to Christ. What is the sign of commitment now? What impression are we giving when we go around so oddly garbed? Josephite spirituality is based on finding God in ordinary life. Why do we not say that in our dress? Scene 5: Since the 1980s, the veil has become optional, our dress is simple, and our sign of consecration is the ring and the emblem particular to our congregation. Dress is no longer an issue. Our whole attention is given to who we are for mission, as religious and as Josephites. We have got back to our roots. What Mary MacKillop and Julian Tenison Woods tried to do for their time, we want to do for ours. Who are the marginalised now? Who is it that now needs the good news of God’s compassionate love? Where do we encounter God? With whom do we stand? As we continue to address these questions in an ever-changing world, we are constantly challenged to be authentic, to take up a mode of life that identifies us with those in whom Christ is found. This is our consecration. This is where we find life.

O F PA I N I N A ‘GOD-QUEST’ This story is one of pain and heartache that need never have been. A young woman, seeking to give her life to God, became entrapped in the mores of a religious way of life, which owed more to Jansenism than to the teachings of Christ who came to set us at liberty. How the freedom of the children of God has been distorted and frustrated over the centuries has been the experience of all too many young people. Brought up to be ‘good’ Catholics, all too often they found the practice of virtue equated with the repression of their very humanity. Religious life has been called the ‘God-quest’. Those entering its ways are essentially seekers. The primary focus of their self-gift to God and to the church answers life’s Big Questions. Yet many have seen their quest frustrated by a life of discipline that seemed to be an intolerable burden. My own struggles with ‘the system’ were doubtless due to having left home too soon. I was young, immature and inexperienced in the ways of the world. So the constant reprimands I experienced from those seeking to assist me in my struggle against the World, the Flesh and the Devil actually led not to my

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spiritual awakening, but to my becoming fearful and introspective. Timidity replaced my natural spontaneity. To be a ‘good’ nun, I attempted to play out a role. I did not realise that perfection and sanctity resided in being fully myself, with a potential uniquely mine. When, therefore, some years after taking my final vows, I met and fell deeply in love with a fellow-religious, I had no way of dealing with the situation. For a time, I lived in dread of discovery, knowing it would mean the end of my precious relationship. Finally, the strain of secrecy and living in constant fear proved too much. The breakdown that followed resulted in my total physical and mental disintegration. The effects lasted not years but decades. For my friend, they were equally disastrous. Even when seemingly over my crisis, I continued to meet daily life more as an automaton than a person. Few had any idea of who or what lay beneath the surface, but I felt an empty shell. In retrospect, I acknowledge that eventually I found strength and peace that good could come out of evil. But I sometimes wonder how different, how more fruitful life might have been. Surely where there is love, there is God, and even in a committed religious life, true friendship between male and female religious could prove a source of richness and growth for both. Must risks never be taken? Even in today’s enlightened approach to the consecrated life, one wonders if subjects are sufficiently trusted by those in authority, whether the shackles of the past have disappeared. If married love can lead to union with God, why not love between vowed religious? My situation met with only suspicion and censure. How tragic is the thought that not a few of such alliances have been frustrated before having a chance to blossom.

VAT I C A N I I : AN EVENT ST ILL HAPPENING I have lived in the North Shore area and lower North Shore since the end of the 1940s. I have had associations of various kinds with the parishes – St Mary’s and, in the last decade, Kirribilli – and with many Jesuits. Our 1950s formation in religious life in the novitiate was heavily influenced by Ignatian spirituality. Our daily meditation books introduced us to this mode of praying, while Jesuit priests generally offered our daily masses and monthly retreats. For those of us

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who lived and taught at Monte Sant’ Angelo (as I did for some 30 years), this influence continued throughout the following decades. It probably taught us some discipline in a mode of praying, but it wasn’t something I found attractive. The Vatican II had little impact on me in its early years. Classroom teachers were encouraged to take up new courses in spirituality, especially studying the Vatican II documents. There was little incentive, however, for music teachers to do the same. I was locked into an all-consuming ministry of teaching music six days a week. I had little time to catch up with the new spiritual literature then available to us as young religious. Looking back now, I can see that it was an isolating time in terms of lost spiritual opportunity, but I was busy surviving – and that’s just the way it was in those days. Being assigned ministries – often not of one’s choosing – and sometimes coping with living in difficult community situations, our reliance was nonetheless strong that God’s Providence would see us through the difficult times. Later, I had a lot of lost time to make up. I suspect I’ve been doing that in a big way since the mid-1970s. The Charismatic Movement began to open doors for me at that time. I attended a Charismatic weekly meeting at Redfern with a group of lay people, religious and priests for a number of years. I encountered another mode of prayer (although I never progressed to speaking in tongues). It involved getting in touch with feelings that had been subdued since I entered the convent at the very impressionable age of 16. The next important step in my spiritual development came in the late 1970s. I began a two-year course in theology with an eminent theologian at Aquinas Academy. I obtained a diploma and, on his advice, undertook the serious study of philosophy. This changed my future ministry. I went to Sydney University and completed a Masters Honours Degree in philosophy. An ex-priest lecturer, Paul Crittenden, helped me navigate my way along this path. This study opened a door to a teaching ministry of more than 16 years with the Marist Fathers at Hunters Hill Theological College. These developments stretched my mind, allowing me to catch up quickly with the exciting new ideas in the Vatican II documents. As well, I was engaging with other academic minds, including those of the mature lay students who were coming to study theology and related disciplines (and quickly outnumbering the seminarians). I was also able to encourage a number of young women who were coming to study but had school-aged children. They were eager to deepen their faith and make a valuable contribution to parish life.

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Sadly, those in authority in parishes often blocked their way to doing this. Many, however, found avenues for using their knowledge and experience. Mine is very much a Trinitarian spirituality. I have a new appreciation of the role of the Spirit embracing the whole cosmos. This has helped me relate to other religions in inter-faith gatherings, taking me to a respect for the beliefs of others and recognition of the many paths to the worship of the one God. A recent experience at a Quaker interfaith evening brought home to me the radical nature of the developments that have taken place within my faith journey over the last 70 years. I’d been invited to speak on: ‘The Christian Perspective on the Topic, After Death?’ I was trying to convey how some of our images of heaven can tend to trivialise this great mystery. I remarked that far from an anthropocentric perception of heaven as an ethereal state seen as a reward for a devout life, a more contemporary image would be to imagine the final fulfilment of life from within a vigorous social commitment to the poor and oppressed in the works of love and justice. I’m sure that in my early years I would certainly have subscribed to the first perception and could not have imagined the second. It is exciting to be living in the Church today. I now recognise the real achievement of Vatican II – and that the vitality of the ‘New Pentecost’ envisaged by John XXIII lies ahead of us. In many ways, the Second Vatican Council is an event yet to happen – and we are part of making that come about.

RESPECTING THE PERSON, NOT THE HABIT It was about 1980 and I had returned to Papua New Guinea after my leave at Christmas. I was ready to commence the new academic year. I had attended mass on the Sunday at the cathedral at Mt Hagen. This building was certainly not like an ordinary cathedral. The original framework was from an old army hut. After the liturgy, I was outside meeting with Papua New Guinea friends. As I talked with a teacher I knew quite well, I noticed his wife, Maria, was quite agitated, looking at me and talking excitedly to her husband, Michael, in Melpa, the Hagen language. I asked Michael what it was all about. I could speak Tom Pisin but not Melpa, and Maria was a Melpa-speaking person. He explained that Maria was

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upset because I was not wearing a veil. She was asking him if I were still a Sister. I explained that I was, but we had held meetings and now we, as Sisters, could go without our veil if we wished to. I probably pointed to my Mercy Cross and showed Maria the silver ring that was still on my finger. I smiled and nodded to affirm that all was still well, that everything was all right. Reflecting on this episode was good for me. I realised that changing our habit was, in some ways, an education for the laity; it was and still is difficult for some people to approve of us wearing ordinary dress. At the time of this incident, I was probably wearing a blue skirt and white blouse. It was being without the veil that made Maria worry that I was no longer a Sister. The laity did come to learn that the veil does not make the religious Sister and that the habit does not make the religious. It is who I am as a person that is really important. The laity – as this experience said to me – need to respect me for who I am as a person, respect me for the way I act and live, not for the habit I wear.

AN EXPERIENCE IN LIMA In 2001 I stayed at our Mercy mission in Lima with three Sisters. Each had spent several years in Peru after serving in Chile. The purpose of my visit was to immerse myself in a Third World experience that would deepen my spirituality and provide insights beneficial for my ministry in social justice in Australia. It was also an opportunity to support the Sisters in their missionary work. They had built two Women’s Houses and opened a health clinic in the more remote of the two missions. They have now empowered many women with literacy and occupational skills helpful for becoming more independent. Many are single mothers with the responsibility of supporting large families, in the face of widespread unemployment. They live in makeshift houses built on infertile and unwanted land. Basic hygiene is a constant concern and diseases like tuberculosis are rampant. The spread of the AIDS epidemic is kept hidden. My first visit to one of these families remains with me. Despite having one room with a dirt floor and scarcely any utensils or furniture, except one bed, this was home to three adults, six children, and several animals, chickens and other birds. Two of the children were seriously ill because they had no money for medicine. I had seen many pictures of life in Peru, but the reality was quite

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another. For the first time in my life I was an outsider. Since my grasp of the language was totally inadequate, I was the one on the edge, in no way able to contribute or be part of their work. Yet they warmly welcomed me, readily accepting and trusting me as another ‘Madre’, even though they knew I would disappear from their lives as quickly as I had arrived. Because of the language barrier, I became more conscious of using my whole body in the act of communicating, and felt the impact of looking into the eyes of a stranger. I was privileged to be in Lima for the sacred time of Easter. Good Friday was the most moving of the ceremonies, with the cross, I soon realised, a familiar part of their daily lives. The Way of the Cross began in the dispersed Catholic communities across a wide area. Walking in processions and carrying their cross, the people eventually gathered in a designated place that changes each year so that all have a turn at hosting it. I accompanied one of the Sisters to the area where her mission house was, on a high hill some distance behind our house. The procession began outside a small chapel up the hill, with ‘Jesus’ and soldiers leading in appropriate dress. The ‘crowd’ of men, women and children followed, animals excitedly running in and out. Along the route, we encountered various ‘stations’ set up outside houses especially chosen and decorated accordingly – some festooned ornately with holy pictures and flowers (usually plastic since nothing much grows there). Others were simple, with the household using the little they had. Someone in the house was granted the privilege of carrying the cross to the next station. When a young, intellectually disabled man enthusiastically took his turn, the look of pride on his face was unforgettable. A disabled Jesus carrying his cross just seemed so right at that point in the Passion. Nothing could have prepared me for this life-changing experience.

ENERGISED TO ‘ R E N E W T H E FA C E OF THE EARTH’ My forebears arrived here from Ireland in the mid-1860s. My upbringing was solidly Catholic. In Ballarat, most of our neighbours were financially better off than us. We, however, believed that we had other advantages: our own schools, an active parish life and, of course, the ‘one true faith’. The Loreto sisters, who taught me, provided the sort of good general education that enabled girls to

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train as teachers or nurses, or to obtain employment in secretarial fields. Few proceeded straight to university. In the 1940s and 1950s, the concept of the Church as ‘The Mystical Body of Christ’ influenced lay apostolate movements such as the Campion Society, the CYMS and the NCGM to which the Grail introduced me. In the parish, groups such as the Catholic Women’s Guild and the St Vincent de Paul Society dealt with justice issues. There were sodalities and a rich liturgical life in the cathedral parish. After a year of teacher training, I entered the IBVM novitiate in Ballarat. I found the atmosphere congruous with my home beliefs and practices. After further training in scripture and theology, I began a career of teaching in our schools, with additional study to keep abreast of the times. Fortunately, religious order priests or seminary professors offered scripture and theology courses in both Sydney and Melbourne. Women, barred from seminary courses, found in them an avenue for studying at tertiary level. Vatican II was like a new Pentecost. I discovered new treasures in returning to the vision of Mary Ward and realising how well her ideas suited our times. We welcomed changes in religious dress, and participation in the life of those outside the cloister grounded us in reality as our horizons were widened. A study of the Vatican documents, especially Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, reminded us that the good news of Jesus Christ was meant for everyone. This was a time when the religious learned to collaborate with the laity as partners in the enterprise of the new Pentecost. Positions of authority were no longer the preserve of the religious and clergy. A Theology of Ministry developed, marking a gradual shift from the idea of the laity sharing in the ministry of the hierarchy to one of articulating their own ministry. They could see the priest as facilitator – perhaps as prophet – leading the community but supported by themselves as acolytes, lectors, Eucharistic ministers, administrators, catechists, even liturgists. For me, this meant coming to appreciate the freedom I already had as a child of God, to question unjust structures, stand with the marginalised, and bring about a less chaotic world. Opportunities came for further study and undertaking new ministries, as well as for supporting the lay people who were taking on their rightful roles. New approaches to the teaching of religion began coming from overseas scholars, the study courses were available, and I could involve myself in the training of catechists. I embraced every new insight with enthusiasm and

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endeavoured to present each to my students, though not all were prepared to accept change. As students were now questioning even basic doctrines, teachers and priests, concerned at their apparent loss of faith, responded with more lively liturgies, shared homilies and student-led prayers. It was a time of turmoil in the Church, the schools and, to some extent, the religious congregations. It was also a time when the laity attended seminars with visiting and local scholars. Nuns were at the forefront of renewal. Through the schools and parish discussion groups, they helped release many from the limited, but prevalent, understandings of the Church. Vatican II energised me to lead – in whatever way I can – a life called to ‘renew the face of the earth’.

THE NORTH SYDNEY GRAIL GROUP In the late 1930s, a small Grail group was formed in St Mary’s parish. Father Richard O’Mara, SJ, was parish priest, and Father Richard Murphy, SJ, directed catechetics. Seven or eight members had had early invitations to learn about the Grail. They wanted to know more. As part of the Grail outreach to young women working during the day, parish groups took part in programs at Loyola, the novitiate of the Jesuits. Here, young women from parish groups participated in weekend programs meant to widen their knowledge and love of the Church, while also growing in self-fulfilment and Christian responsibility. A sense of joy came alive as we studied the mass, scripture, liturgy, dance, drama and crafts. One was being drawn into the mysteries of the faith through talks, seminars and camps. My involvement occurred in this way. A request had come from Judith Bouwman, one of the first five Grail leaders from Holland. She had asked for young women to join her and two other members in setting up a Grail headquarters in Melbourne. I knew my father would miss me here in Sydney. I was his secretary, assisting him in his office on Pitt Street. I also had responsibilities as the eldest of five children. But I went to Melbourne with my parents’ blessing. I arrived in Melbourne in August 1939 and entered an impressive Tudorstyle residence given to the Grail by Dr Daniel Mannix, archbishop of

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Melbourne. I undertook a six months’ training course organised for girls who’d finished school and wished to further their knowledge and practice of the faith, and develop a dedication to one’s task in life whether in marriage, religious life or single life. We engaged in many social activities and especially those with young people from the Melbourne parishes. I returned to Sydney when World War 2 began. There our Grail group went on, developing into a Centre for Adult Education. Now the Grail has become an international movement, generally with members working in areas of justice and peace. They seek to relieve poverty through education and other channels, always within the culture of individual countries.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GRAIL In the early 1920s, a group of Dutch women approached Jacques van Genneken, SJ. They said that as Catholic lay women, there was no way of serving the Church except through membership of a religious community. Their search became a movement of women committed to the transformation of the world. They, and later others, dedicated their lives as celibate women prepared to go wherever they were sent, without personal financial belongings. At first they were known as Women of Nazareth. In time, they were to become responsible for a movement known as the Grail. It spread from Holland to England, Australia and America. Women of the Grail are now in 20 countries. The Grail came to Australia in 1936. Five Dutch women arrived in Sydney and established their first centre at Loyola, then the Jesuit novitiate. The movement began to draw young women from all walks of life to a greater spiritual awareness and personal responsibility as Catholic women in the world. Groups were formed around interests such as choir, public speaking mission work and drama, even camp-craft. Members experienced a spirit of joy and purposefulness, as well as a desire to become involved in apostolic work. As with other movements of its time, members wore colourful uniforms for processions and on other occasions. World War 2 brought great changes to the activities of the Grail. Gone were the uniforms and marching. Centres in Sydney, Melbourne and Mackay offered days of prayer and study, as well as Christmas plays and other

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gatherings with a liturgical theme and a Christ-centred vision. For some years, the Grail administered the Women’s College attached to St Raphael’s at the University of Townsville. When Grail women were working in Wewak (Papua New Guinea), Fiji and Townsville, they planned a 12-day Pacific Summer School, to be held in Suva. Young island students met with young Australians, including some Aborigines, praying together and sharing the histories of their lands, their changes and problems. Social change and world events had served to broaden their work and continued to do so. The Grail Centre in North Sydney is home to some of the nucleus members of the Grail. Women meet for occasional liturgies, seminars, and Grail meetings open to those who might be interested in its programs. The Grail continues to work for justice, peace and cultural understanding, the end of world poverty, and the goal of women developing their full potential in various walks of life.

AG G I O R N I A M E N TO I belong to a group of North Sydney ‘Mercies’. We have fond recollections of times spent together in the 1960s when the world and the Church were astir with revolutionary ideas. These gave great cause for hope, not least because of the convening of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 under the guiding inspiration of ‘good Pope John’. The ‘Mercies’ had recently acquired a holiday house at Newport where we could spend two weeks together annually, and were encouraged to break from our routine duties and the horarium that precisely dictated every activity of the day. We felt a part of the 1960s. Protest songs such as ‘We Shall Overcome’ became our theme and gave us energy and inspiration. New forms of prayer became common. Informal, spontaneous prayer was a novel and fulfilling experience to those whose daily prayer consisted largely of recitation of the psalms, as well as a multitude of novenas, litanies and other pious devotions. More than that, we sought guidance from authors such as Teilhard de Chardin and the Liberation theologians, Leonardo Boff and Gustavo Gutierrez, all to be censured by the Vatican for their progressive ideas. When Humanae Vitae appeared, we were challenged to question ideas long accepted as part of everyday Catholic life. But it was above all the mutual sharing and support that most enlivened us. We were not alone in our aggiorniamento. Sisters of most congregations

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were similarly challenged. The Vatican’s advice to adapt to the modern world involved far more than modifying our dress. For some, the changes proved too difficult. The safe haven of convent life, so medieval in concept and so constricting in its outmoded structures and practices, no longer existed. Security and a safe way of life seemed to be slipping away. Our numbers began to diminish noticeably. Over time, it became evident that abandonment of older traditions did not mean abandonment of the essential commitment to religious life. Indeed, for many of our co-workers and those we served, we were now more approachable, more ‘human’. No longer were we the idealised (or feared?) nuns they had known in the past. Aggiornamento meant a paradigm shift in both thought and action. No longer confined to the apostolate of teaching and nursing, with strict curfews and prohibitions ‘after hours’, we have become aware of the need for the acquisition of skills that give us an equality with other professional women meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. We have undertaken tertiary studies – including theology, philosophy and scripture studies – and become involved with controversial social issues. The problem of refugees, for example, has challenged us to become more politically involved as ‘voices for the voiceless’. The need for educational centres in Papua New Guinea and South America has drawn many of us overseas. Although our numbers continue to diminish, we take strength from the emerging worldwide amalgamation among the various congregations and from our many lay associates. This is the spirit of Vatican II.

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eight

The prophetic imagination We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, let us therefore lay aside any weight… and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12: 1–2 I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies; education and culture for their minds; and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centred men have torn down, men othercentred can build up. Martin Luther King, Jr: Nobel Prize speech

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Priests, in the way that anthropologists tend to think of them across cultures, are men of establishment, custodians of the God-given. Prophets are women and men of disturbance, moved directly by spirits to challenge power in the present for some future outcome. Kings, in the metaphor that comes to us from scripture, personify authority and power. In baptism, Vatican II taught, we are made priests, prophets and kings in Jesus Christ. It is a trio of attributes that sits awkwardly on us. Priest, prophet and king are key words of another age. We tend to soften the sharpness of their image with words like priestly, prophetic and empowerment, although it is hard to imagine celebrating a Feast of Christ the Empowered! Priestliness I take as the grace we have to bless and give, prophecy the vision of a just world we are missioned by our baptism to accomplish, empowerment our responsibility and ability to enact what we envision. That world towards which we are priestly, prophetic and empowered is not ordinarily giant and theatrical, although many of that cloud of witnesses around us have used those ordinary qualities to giant effect – Mary MacKillop, Ted Kennedy, Frank Cox, Dom Helder Camara, Oscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. The world in which the Spirit of life in Jesus Christ has set us free (Romans 8: 21) is very small and momentary. But as Schillebeeckx said in 1982 in a conversation celebrating his winning of the Erasmus Prize for Theologians, ‘God is new each moment’ of our momentary world. I would like to tell how the Parish performs its prophetic imagination momentarily. The Prophetic Imagination is a phrase that comes to us principally from the 1978 work of a scholar named Walter Brueggemann. ‘The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us’, he wrote. I read that right at the beginning of my research for Church Alive! I was troubled at how I could describe the great changes in religious experience in the parish that came with Vatican II without appearing to denigrate the experiences that came before it. I realised that both the before of Vatican II and the after shared a prophetic ministry – the desire to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness of the dominant Australian culture. There was much of the Fortress Church in the particular prophetic imagination of pre-Vatican II. We said the Prayer for the Conversion of Australia after every mass and Benediction:

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O God, who has appointed Mary, help of Christians, St Francis Xavier and St Teresa of the Infant Jesus Patrons of Australia, grant that through their intercession our brethren outside the Church may receive the light of faith, so that Australia may become one in faith under one Shepherd. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. Mary, help of Christians, pray for us. St Francis Xavier, pray for us. St Teresa of the Infant Jesus, pray for us. No sense of pluralism there. ‘They’ – with whom we were forbidden even to say an ‘Our Father’ – would have to change. But there was also an enormous confidence that Catholicism offered Australian society a moral and religious system that, in its strictness based on a culture of sacrifice, would lift its standards of public life. The vehicle for the pre-Vatican II prophetic imagination – the lamentations, the proclaimed visions of an alternate future, the engendered hopefulness that the world was changeable – were the great encyclicals of Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum, The Conditions of Labour, 1891) and Pius XI (Quadragesimo Anno, After Forty Years, 1931). Although these encyclicals were basically conservative documents, blinkered by Europe’s peculiar experience of revolution and liberal social thought, the Australian (Irish) bishops, close as they were to the working class, translated words like ‘socialism’ and ‘liberal’ into the Australian context and gave social justice movements here a Catholic dimension. What mattered was that the Church had a social conscience. But the great vehicle for a particularly Australian Catholic prophetic imagination has been the Social Justice Statements that the Australian bishops have made since 1940 and the annual statements since 1973 of the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace. Michael Hogan has edited the first from 1940 to 1966 in Justice Now (1990) and the latter from 1973–1987 in Option for the Poor (1992). Taken together, they make remarkable reading. The 1940–1966 period is bound together by a corporatist metaphor, which had both theological and political dimensions. The statements idealise small communities, privilege the family unit, favour craft rather than industrial production, and give rural life some centrality. They have a nostalgic, sort of Chestertonian–Bellocian romance about them for a proper world that never was and never would be. There is a giant step between the 1966 end of the bishops’ statements and

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the 1973 beginning of the Commission of Justice and Peace. It is reflected in the parish. These are times when the parish priests, Paul Coleman, SJ, George Belfrage, SJ, and Peter Quin, SJ, are reading Harvey Cox’s 1965 The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective. Cox developed the notion that the Church is primarily a people of faith and action, rather than an institution. ‘God is just as present in the secular as the religious realms of life’, he wrote. The Church should not be a protective religious community. It should step into God’s ‘permanent revolution in history’. The priests understand that nostalgic rural metaphors don’t work in the high-rise urban communities of their parish. Theirs has to be another sort of prophetic imagination. That was also Vatican II’s redefinition of what social justice now must be. Justice was a theological rather than an institutional virtue. The Church is sacrament to the Good News. That change can also be seen in the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace statements. Now they address the affluence of Australian society, social rather than personal sin, women, multiculturalism, poverty and power, just peace, and Aborigines. And the Jesuits are redefining their prophetic imagination. Energised by their efforts to formulate the mission for their Province’s social apostolate, they have used their publications and their missionary calling to educate the parish to its prophetic role. They preach what they announce on their web site. There is: ‘No service of faith – without promotion of justice, entry into cultures, and openness to other religious experiences. No promotion of justice – without communicating faith, transforming cultures, collaborating with other traditions. No inculturation – without communicating faith with others, dialogue with other traditions, commitment to justice. No dialogue – without sharing faith with others, evaluating cultures, concern for justice.’ For the moment, let us note merely the intertwining, encircling character of everything – faith, justice, culture, difference, communication and dialogue. This is no step-by-step plan of action. Everything affects everything else, but ‘culture’ has some sort of primacy in their minds. The last time I looked there were 355 anthropological definitions of ‘culture’. I like mine: ‘Culture is talk. Living is story.’ I’ll work on that. Brueggemann reminds us of a number of important things about prophecy. First, prophecy is about language. Prophets are always breaching the double-speak of power. Second, just as the prophets of old confronted the people of Yahweh, not the pagan outsiders, so the prophets of the new will confront the people of God in their churches. Third, prophets are always teasing dangerous memories.

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Brueggmann states: ‘It is the aim of every totalitarian effort to stop the language of newness, and we are now learning that when such language stops, we find our humanness diminished’. The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard puts it another way in Rudiments Païen. ‘To arrest the meaning of words, that is what the Terror wants’. The Terror: the terror of fundamentalism, the terror of autoda-fé, the terror of science in service of power. ‘Political correctness’ is a ‘boo word’ these days, but many women will know the terror in exclusivist language. The parish has a proud record of ‘just doing’ its prophetic imagination in inclusive language and in the use of words that speak to the whole person. Brueggmann says the prophet ‘invites the king to experience what he must experience’. For ‘king’ read pope, bishops, parish priest. They all need to experience some otherness, whether it is the otherness of the love of a gay couple; the otherness of the pain of the ‘excommunicated’; the otherness of a dialogic theology; the otherness of a joyful, free, bodily-whole celebration of the Eucharist; the otherness of democratic collegiality; the otherness of free, open and committed scholarly journeying. Perhaps they might be reminded of St Augustine’s experience: ‘When I am frightened by what I am for you, then I am consoled by what I am with you. For you I am the bishop, with you I am a Christian. The first is an office, the second a grace; the first a danger, the second salvation.’ Karl Rahner does his own sort of prophesying when he urges the Church to experience the diversity within itself: I am thinking of a theology which can no longer be uniform in a neo-scholastic approach … I envisage a theology, which in the Church at large must be the theology of a worldwide Church. That means a theology which does not only recite its own medieval history, but one that can listen to the wisdom of the East, the longing for freedom in Latin America, and also to the sound of African drums. Social Justice Sundays have been important in the parish since the Australian Catholic bishops began to make their Social Justice Statements in 1940 and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace began to make their annual statements in 1973. The parish has housed the executive of the Commission in the appropriately named Leo XIII building at Lavender Bay. Its Director, Dr Michael Costigan, has been a parishioner and has helped the parish focus its attention on the issues raised in each annual statement.

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But it has been the parish itself that has given theatre to its prophetic imagination in their Social Justice Market Place at the back of the three churches on Social Justice Sunday. There they spell out the very ordinary ways in which they can set themselves free to be self-giving for others. There you can learn of Bridges for Asylum Seekers, Cana Communities and their shelters for the homeless, and Compeer in which you can make a one-on-one friendship with those disabled by mental health. City Streets has its own prophets – an international one, Jean Varnier, and a local one, Brian Stoney. If you go back to Chapter 6, you will realise that Brian Stoney, with George Belfrage, has had a great influence on the prophetic imagination in the parish. You will begin to realise that prophecy and mysticism come together in reflection and prayer. Christian Meditation, David’s Place will help you. Uniya, the Jesuits’ social apostolate with the indigenous peoples and the global poor, is very insistent that there is little justice without entry into other people’s cultures – Muslims, for example. Teresa House is the parish’s own responsibility on Sunday nights – one of our word pictures, ‘Teresa House’ in Ministering, will tell you more. There is also work to be done in Aceh, and among those with Aids in Kuala Lumpur. We have only scratched the surface of the parish’s outreaching to the poor and suffering. It comes in all sorts of modes in these 50 years and the 100 before that. ‘The Flying Squad’ looked to the aged and sick and single parents. The Nest was home for young refugees seeking education and employment. The parish St Vincent de Paul Society members will tell you how extraordinarily generous the parish is in every appeal they make. Op Shops, hospital visits, visiting the sick and elderly in their homes, visits to Detention Centres – the litany of charities is long. Perhaps the ministry that has taken the most energy and attention over the years has been the Jesuit Mission in India. On 2 February 1951 at St Ignatius, Richmond, ‘The First Six’ Australian Jesuits were missioned to Hazaribagh. It was a giant step for the young Australian province. The Jesuit parishes and schools responded enthusiastically to the challenge for raising the funds for the infrastructure the mission would need. The Indian Bazaar at Riverview and the Maytime Fair at Xavier were the focal points for raising money and interest. If there is an Honours Board somewhere for those of the parish who took this ministry on vigorously, these names would be on it: Claire Givney, Eileen Madden, Justice ‘Jock’ McClemens, Peter and Joy Anderson, Dennis McCarthy, Terry and Dolor Meagher, Lou and Joan Benaud, Joan Ward, Kath Lock, Bill Fox and Sheila Timmoney.

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The Jesuit missionaries themselves had a ministry in the parish to educate it to what a mission might mean in a post-Vatican II Church. They discovered that they were at the end of an era in the missionary Church. Their heroes were Francis Xavier and Matteo Ricci, both of whom believed in ‘inculturation’ long before the word was invented. But they discovered that they were at the dawn of a Pentecost in Asia, a new way of being a Church without colonial powers to sustain it. Pedro Arrupe wanted the Australian province to have not just an Indian face, but also an Asian face. The province became part of an East Asian Assistancy. A province that emerged out of an Irish Mission and, with that, possessed a comfortable self-image of itself, was and is confronted with something of the unease that the Australian nation has as it begins to discover a past that is uglier than it ever dreamed and a future that has none of the predictable dimensions because of its growing Asian face. It is hard not to think that the parish’s prophetic imagination in 20 years will be differently coloured. The St Vincent de Paul Society gives them all a text from the Prophet Micah: ‘This is what the Lord requires of you: Only this, to act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God’ (Micah 6: 8). Micah is tough. He scourges the moneyed capitalist, the inexorable usurer, the swindling tradesman; he berates families divided by rivalry, avaricious priests and prophets, and venal judges. He doesn’t mind some coarse expression, and loves wild images and plays on words. The Vinnies have caught him in one of his gentler modes, but ‘to deal justly, to love tenderly, to walk humbly with God’ is at the heart of the prophetic imagination. ‘It is in the liturgy that we confront the otherness of pain and injustice and walk humbly with God’, James L. Empereur, SJ, has written with justice in mind. ‘For us the liturgy does justice. They are there – the street-dwellers and all the poor and suffering they represent – at the back of the church and in its dark corners. At St Mary’s, at least, this is so. St Francis Xavier’s and Star of the Sea are locked. Charity in these places is to be found at the Parish Centre or in the caretaker’s flat. At St Mary’s, the homeless and disoriented have a quiet presence. Sometimes they are awkwardly present in a liturgy, moving around, speaking in a loud voice. The trick is how to make them – and all for whom justice needs to be done – always present. That is a liturgy that does justice. Making such liturgical space, Jane Walton writes in a piece that inspires these thoughts, requires imagination, courage, curiosity and practice. It takes imagination to break with the fixed and finished; and to enter the pain, vulnerability, shame, failure, worries and differences of others. We need love to get in

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touch with this otherness, but we also need rage and anger to name the evils that are overpowering. We need the courage occasionally to curse. Of course, a ‘don’t want to know’ attitude is a comfortable sort of blindness. A liturgy that does justice, on the other hand, is full of curiosity about other cultures, even if they are sub-cultures of our own, of other languages and symbols. It won’t happen just sitting there listening. All the letters of the word ‘silent’ are the letters of the word ‘listen’, someone has said. Listening is an active silence. Silence is most active when it is an engagement in someone else’s story. The prophetic imagination is fed by story – Christ’s story, the stories we see in our neighbour’s eyes when we look closely, the stories in the homilies, the stories triggered by a bare mention in the prayers of the faithful. No liturgy that does justice needs to be quiet, but it needs to be contemplative. It needs to cultivate an inner silence. Now there are a variety of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good (1 Corinthians 12: 4–7). Perhaps the most powerful example of the prophetic imagination at work within the Church was the call of the Council Fathers to return to the freedom that Paul calls all who are baptised to; namely, that they exercise their gifts in the service of the Lord. In the inevitable institutionalisation of the Church in the early centuries, that notion of gift and charism became ordered – literally – in the sacrament of order. St Augustine explained order as ‘the appropriate disposition of things equal and unequal by giving each its proper place’. Thomas Aquinas, a little more bluntly, called it ranking. So priest, deacon and subdeacon are ranked. Then come the ‘minor orders’ – acolyte, exorcist, readers, doorkeepers, cantors and grave-diggers. The tonsure became the entry point of this clericalisation, and the cassock and surplice its uniform. The ‘imposition of hands’, a joyous, Pentecostal sacrament of the early Church, became ordination, an ordering, with its fatal tendency to build ontological walls around what was ordered. It is a tendency not yet complete, to judge by a recent Church-inRome declaration, ‘On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World’ (2004) and Redemptionis Sacramentum (2004), a rather sad document for such a joyful sacrament, raging against ‘abuses’ of all sorts, but especially against trespassing over priestly boundaries.

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There was probably no bigger boost to the prophetic imagination in the parish than when the reforms of Vatican II on the ministry began to be implemented in the 1970s. Perhaps there is no more consistent theme in the word pictures of the parishioners than their sense of awe at being entrusted to make a gift of their services. They tell how awesome it is to offer ‘The Body of Christ’ and to get the response ‘Amen – Yes, it is!’ For men, whose boyhood memories include their experiences of learning to be, then being, ‘altar boys’, and then, in manhood, going up to the altar when there was no altar boy, making the responses, carrying the missal from the ‘epistle’ side to the ‘gospel’ side, presenting the priest with small jugs of water and wine, holding the lavabo bowl for him to wash his fingers – for them it was a very rewarding moment when, with an imposition of hands and small ceremony, the Church recognised them as ‘acolytes’. It was an honour for them to be educated for their new role. Women, who stood in the sanctuary for the first time, read scripture, led the prayers of the faithful, and distributed communion, found a new dimension to their spirituality. Let us be clear. This is no lay ministry. This is authorised people of God’s ministry, service, gift-giving. This is the Spirit levelling the Church’s sacramentality. This is ministry in the Church as distinct to the ministries all the baptised have – of parenting, caring, comforting and grieving. This is prophecy, a vision of the future. There are not as many ministries as there are responsibilities in the parish. Let me list the current responsibilities as some indication of how broad gift-giving is. Welcomers, Acolytes, Sacristans, Collectors, Counters, Choirs and instrumentalists, Eucharistic Ministers, Communion to the Sick, Catechists, Family liturgy, RCIA Programs, Home Rosary, Pastoral Teams, Finance, Healing Mass, Spirituality Nights, Catholic Women’s League, Legion of Mary, Sacred Heart Sodality, Assumption Sodality, Folk Mass, Teresa House, Spiritual Reading Library, Meditation Groups, Jesuit Mission Workers, Sacramental Program, Infant Foundation of Australia, and Counselling. Let me go to one of the ministries in particular, Catechetics, and one expression of it, The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Catechetics is a special form of prophecy. Catechists are essentially mediators. They mediate the mysteries of faith to young and old. They are on their own pilgrimage and are companions with others in theirs. They are the generation of Vatican II. They have to educate themselves to its insights and discover a way of sharing them with others. Fancy Greek words of the early Church have come into their way

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of thinking. Kerygma: proclaiming the Good News and preaching the Gospel. Didache: teaching, discovering windows into the souls of others, finding a language to talk of faith, reading life’s experiences. Koinonia: making community by conversation, encouraging others to reveal themselves. Liturgia: doing the work of the People of God in prayer and worship. Diakonia: serving others rather than ruling over them in some way. I hold in my hand a faded Catechism of Christian Doctrine. Adapted for Australia by the 2nd and 3rd Plenary Council. Published in 1939, it has N. T. Gilroy’s imprimatur. Maybe it is significant, maybe it is not, but there is a picture of a Celtic Cross on the cover. The catechism begins with prayers – The Morning Offering: ‘O Jesus, through the most pure Heart of Mary, I offer Thee the prayers, works, joys and suffering of this day for all the intentions of Thy Divine Heart’; the Act of Contrition; Hail Holy Queen; Mysteries of the Rosary; Divine Praises; and Aspirations. The Catechism begins with Lesson 1. ‘On God and the Creation of the World. 1. Question: Who made the world? Answer: God made the world.’ The Catechism ends with Lesson 27 ‘On the General Judgement. 1. Question: What does the resurrection of the body mean? Answer: The Resurrection of the body means we shall all rise on the last day with the same bodies, which we had in this life.’ (Surely a disappointment for many!) I can’t say that I am ‘holding in one hand’ the Catechism of the Catholic Church (translated from the Latin in 1994). It is a wrist-breaker – 804 pages, 50 of them a subject index. ‘Paragraph 1. God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself [sic], in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man [sic] to make him [sic] share in his [sic] own blessed life. Paragraph 2865 and last: By the final “Amen” [of the Final Doxology “For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever”], we express our “fiat” concerning the seven petitions [of the “Our Father”]: “So be it”.’ The frontispiece of the Catechism is a coloured photo of a wood carving by the Aboriginal sculptor, Georg Mung. ‘Pregnant Mary’ is its title. Ochre coloured and dot painted, the statue is a hopeful, ‘inculturated’ opening to the Catechism. The new Catechism is clearly not to be learned by rote. There is a theologian’s saying about theology. The art and science of theology is ascribing levels of certainty to any proposition. In that sense there is no theology at all in the old catechism. Everything was at the one level of unquestionable certainty. The new Catechism, while sure and assertive, addresses the issue that the people of God have the right to be educated – really educated – in their faith as adults. That education in the faith for adults takes place in the parish, principally in

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the liturgy. While there will always be some tension between the pastoral and the educative element in the liturgy – a fear that the educative element will be too ‘academic’ – it is clear that, in the past decades, the Jesuits have tapped their province resources in theology, scripture and social justice to both inspire and educate the parish. But there has been another ministry in the parish, one totally free of apologetics and beyond the resolution of ‘mixed marriage’ problems. Let me introduce it by quoting a letter written to me: I was attracted to the Church by the life-giving atmosphere and activity of St Mary’s Parish under the leadership of Father Paul Coleman. He had beautiful liturgies, a great deal of social activity, and many lay ministries operating. One just wanted to be part of it. He also arranged excellent opportunities for religious adult education. When I asked him for instruction, he entered me in the RCIA (Adult Initiation) for a year, as well as giving individual instruction. There were many involved in RCIA. Very significant and rich for both cradle Catholics and inquirers alike. He also introduced me into a Christian Life Community group (CLC) to which I still belong 21 years later. This has been a most valuable, prayerful experience. The Christian Initiation for Adults, nourished by the spirituality Paul Coleman seeded in the parish and developed by the priests who followed him, has been a remarkable ministry of the parish community. It is not directed at ‘conversions’, except in the sense that we all need conversion. It is for all who have questions of their beliefs and of the ministers and of the Church. This ‘initiation’ is a shared pilgrimage. Both inquirers and ministers witness to one another the mysteries they are entering. RCIA is a ministry of the parish through its Pastoral Associates, more than a ministry of its priests. These Pastoral Associates have found a calling, which takes them to an education in the faith outside the seminary, and a spirituality born of an active engagement in life rather than a separation from it. They bring with their witness a sense of contemplation that the parish needs. They bring a cloud of witnesses in the collection of readings they bring to help in the pilgrimage of the RCIA. They provide what we must hope the Church will provide in its Catechism one day: a way of journeying into faith through doubts and questions, through life experiences and stories. Reading is a dance of the mind, it seems to me. We read slowly. We

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read fast. We soak up the timelessness of the words of our sacred texts. We fly over the contradictions and errors of writers to join a worldwide conversation. That conversation is babble at times. But when we listen to it silently and prayerfully, it feeds a prophetic imagination.

H A genuine personal life is impossible without Conscience, that is, without conscious choice. It is a voice in each of us that speaks so imperatively that it cannot be silenced. Archbishop Willem Bekkers

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Ministering To ‘minister’ is to ‘serve’. ‘The Spirit in Jesus Christ’, Paul told his early churches in his epistle on ministering (1 Cor. 12–14), ‘has set you free to serve one another through the charisms, the graces, that each one had been given personally – to heal, to counsel, to preach, to do marvellous things. There is a ministry in everyday life and all through life – of parenting, of friendship, of citizenship, of social justice.’ But this ministering is given another dimension when one – to use a scriptural term – is ‘anointed’ to perform it: ‘anointed’, ‘consecrated’ to represent a living parish. Anointing makes each ministerial experience sacramental, larger than itself by reason of the Spirit that infuses it. The ministries of the parish are many: the Eucharist, the Word, music, worship, counselling and comfort, visiting, welcoming, catechetics, helping the poor and homeless, and prayer and meditation. The sacramental moment in ministering, as will be seen in the word pictures that follow, is a moment of enlightenment. When the ministers and the ministered-to encounter the Spirit of love or hope or faith in one another, they are awed in some way by their experience.

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‘ T H E B O DY O F CHRIST ’ ‘The Body of Christ’, four simple words I say repeatedly as I stand in the church and help distribute Communion. ‘The Body of Christ’ I say as I hold up the Eucharist. This is the Body of Christ. This wafer. This miracle. ‘The Body of Christ’ I say to those who are, with me, the Body of Christ. What a reflection this is. What a meditation that these people who come to me are so intimately connected to me in this sacrament. What a mystery that we are bonded together in a ‘common union’, in Christ. It stuns me; it amazes me. It humbles me and touches me deeply. It is an uncommon privilege indeed to distribute and be a part of ‘The Body of Christ’.

TERESA HOUSE Teresa House is an overnight accommodation house for the homeless people of our city. It opens at 6.30 p.m. each night except Thursday and offers ten guests a meal and a clean, comfortable bed for the night. Owing to their working commitments, our overnight volunteer staff rouse the guests at 6.30 a.m. for a 7.30 a.m. departure. Last Sunday night was my turn to do the overnight shift (which occurs once a month). It was also the first night for a new volunteer, so I was energised by the opportunity to share this most rewarding experience with a newcomer. As I walked into Teresa House, volunteers from our parish, who had just completed the evening meal shift, greeted me. Great to see them! As I walked into the lounge room to meet the guests, my eyes fell upon a familiar face. My heart almost stopped. Certainly the blood started to drain from my face. I could feel it. Part of my work as Pastoral Associate for our parish includes answering the door at the presbytery in Miller Street. You can imagine the variety of visitors we receive. One particular chap had been a regular visitor over the last year, and he became known for his aggressive manner. In fact, at one point in my dealings with him, he sized up to throw a punch at me. He is a homeless man and comes for money and/or food. His aggression has concerned me, and in one of

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our encounters, I told him that his behaviour would soon mean that we would be unable to help him. We don’t give out money from the presbytery, I said, but, if he persisted in coming with such anger and aggression, we wouldn’t assist him at all. Each time I encountered him at the door I was anxious, wary and a little aggressive myself. At least I could make a quick escape inside the presbytery’s screen door, if I needed to. So here I was in the lounge room of Teresa House with no protective screen door – and face to face with my ‘enemy’. Maybe he wouldn’t recognise me. Perhaps he’d taken his medication and was a different person. My first thoughts were how I could spend a whole night here with him. The first hour passed without incident, and I did what we usually do. I made a cup of coffee and sat down with the guests. At about 10 p.m. I found myself sitting next to the man I feared. I was quite convinced by this stage that the night would pass without him recognising who I was. Then he, Fred, engaged me. ‘Mike, isn’t that your name?’ ‘Yeah.’ (We always introduce ourselves when arriving at Teresa House). Still okay. ‘Do you know me?’ he asked. ‘Mmmmm, yeah, you seem familiar’ (gulp). ‘Where do you work?’ he continued. ‘At North Sydney’ (sweaty palms). ‘Where in North Sydney?’ (He knows me!) ‘At the Catholic Church – St. Mary’s.’ ‘We haven’t got on in the past, have we?’ ‘No, not really’ (exposed). Where to from here, I thought. Fred then continued, ‘That’s okay. We all have different personalities. We’re all different. But, gee, it’s good to see you here. Nice to finally meet you.’ Before I knew it, an hour had passed and we talked easily and honestly. Yes, we had finally met. At 11 p.m. the guests who had not already gone to bed headed to their rooms. Thibauld, our new volunteer, and I called it a night. We enjoyed an easy sleep until 5 a.m. when I got up to wake one of the guests who had to get to Parramatta for a court case. I dozed until 6.30 and then knocked on doors to get the guests up. The start of a new day. My new friend and I said goodbye at the door and I wondered when I would see him again. Wednesday morning, 8 a.m. There was a knock on the presbytery front door. I opened the door and there he was. We smiled at each other, shook hands. There was no fear anywhere to be found – not in him; not in me! It had taken Fred numerous attempts to meet me over those past 12 months. Each time he came to my door, all we could both see was aggression and fear. But I went to his door only once and he welcomed me. Everything has changed now.

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M I N I S T RY O F S ERV I N G The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. Matthew 20: 28

Mine is a ministry of serving. I am Finance Manager for North Sydney parish. Every day is eventful, meeting people across all walks of life. Conversations with the priests are scattered through each day. My special highlights are my short conversations with Father Tom O’Donovan to learn the spiritual theme for the day. He is able to recite verses from the Bible and brings the ideas to life for me. Then, once a week at our staff meeting, we read the gospel for the coming week and meditate on it. For me, it is a luxury time-out. The companionship of the employees of the parish is like an extended family. We share our lives and our loves and tribulations with much concern and laughter. We have the opportunity to share a meal each day in the large kitchen of the presbytery. The parish also has volunteers who donate their time to help out with tasks. I am touched each time I see their generosity and enthusiasm. We are slowly building accurate accounting and personal records, and aiming for best practices with our processes and policies. I have a strong belief that I have been drawn here to help the parish achieve its vision and be a vital link bringing people and resources together to achieve our goals in a timely manner. The compassion of the parish for all sorts of good causes enriches my sense of faith and hope. It is part of my ministry to account for that great charity. The vision is to build a parish centre. I am happy to contribute to the building of a place that all the ministries can use.

–

EILEEN A PA R I S H I O N E R ’ S JOURNEY

I am a Eucharistic minister. The ministry is an honour. It is far more rewarding than I could have imagined. I am humbled to enter the faith lives of others. They share their love with me. They entrust me with their confidences. Eileen, who has now died, was the most difficult and interesting person I

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met. Each week for five years, I took her communion. As a little girl, she had lived with her grandmother but when her grandmother died, her father put her in an orphanage administered by the Sisters of Mercy. In these difficult and lonely circumstances, her personality developed, marked by independence and acquired survival techniques. After leaving school, Eileen taught in Catholic schools and then entered the Sisters of Mercy at Gunnadah. She continued to teach in country schools until her health broke down and she left the convent. She then became a midwife at the Mater Hospital in Sydney and over many years became a wellknown figure. She joined the Women’s Army in World War 2 and suffered another breakdown. She then married ‘below her class’, she would say. When the marriage ended she resumed her nursing at Mater and continued studies to qualify as a teacher. Her days at university were her happiest and she learned to speak (she said) Latin, German, French and Greek. When I visited Eileen, I would often find her reading a Latin or German text in a well-worn book. Her creativity was also expressed in gardening and cooking. She was an outstanding lady who, although she didn’t get along easily with people, loved God with all her heart. My gift to Eileen was the Eucharist that I brought. It gave her a peace that she could never receive through relationships with others. She called for me during her last days at the Royal North Shore Hospital. I think I brought her peace. Eileen’s gift to me was a feeling of joy, which still lingers.

‘HERE I AM, LORD. IS IT I, LORD?’ I learnt the piano from the age of 12, but didn’t achieve a high technical standard or progress to classical studies. I play a simple ‘popular’ style. In my thirties, I lived in St Bernard’s parish, Belmont, Victoria. I began playing the organ at Sunday liturgy. It took a while to adapt to the organ, the style being quite different to the piano. I don’t have training in liturgical music, but learnt a lot from some excellent musicians at St Bernard’s. I am most comfortable playing at simple Sunday liturgies and am not competent to plan and coordinate major events. At Star of the Sea we now have an electronic keyboard; I much prefer that to a large organ. I usually play on my own without a lead singer. Therefore, I have to choose

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hymns that I know the congregation can confidently sing without a leader. I choose hymns from several sources but mostly from As One Voice. I start by looking at the readings of the day, jotting down words, phrases or themes. I then search the index of several source books to locate hymns suitable for the season; I develop a short list from which I make a final selection. In this way, I find that the music not only helps me align with the key message of the readings but also reaches into my spirituality. I enjoy playing soft background before mass, and at the offertory and communion. With this, I try to create a mood suitable to the Sunday and the occasion. I value my role in music ministry and, although I recognise that my style will not suit all communities, it seems to resonate with many in the Star of the Sea community. I have played here for almost 13 years. We help and support each other, even though we play separately and meet only occasionally. We are mainly linked together through the roster that we put together each six months. A moving moment I’ve experienced at Star of the Sea relates to song and a previous parish priest, Patrick Bishop. About eight years ago, Patrick was saying his last mass prior to taking leave from the parish and the Jesuits. He needed to explore further his own life journey. He has since spoken and written of his journey and of his new life as a gay man. He remains my friend and has a deep faith and inspiring reflective manner, with the quiet confidence of a man at peace with himself.

O U T R E AC H I N G I participate in ministries that are both ‘internal’ and ‘external’. That is, they function within the parish venues and are of an outreach nature. Within the parish, I am a Eucharistic Minister, a reader/greeter/announcer, and a member of the Finance Committee and of the Parent Infant Foundation of Australia. Relative to outreach, I am a Eucharistic Minister assisting the chaplain at the Royal North Shore Hospital and a volunteer at Teresa House. The outreach ministries offer the richest and most diverse experiences. This is possibly because they demand direct and personal interaction with fellow travellers and answer the greatest apparent needs. Because the outreach activities involve dealing with human beings facing distress, I usually approach the experience with some trepidation – yes, at times reluctance. And often I carry the impact of the experience with me for days. However, I am always drawn to

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reflect on the value of what is done, and that brings a special satisfaction, no matter the discomfort. The hospital work involves giving up the best part of a Sunday – when I would really rather be sailing! It means engaging the sights, sounds and smells of the wards, as well as confronting people in discomfort, anxiety and pain. At times, the responses of the patients make me wonder whether my presence is appreciated at all. Yet, at other times, tears appear on the faces of the recipients of the Eucharist. I find a lump in my throat as I leave a patient, overcome at seeing their communion with their God and experiencing my own gratitude for the opportunity of bringing the sacrament. Teresa House is a shelter for the homeless. It can present such raw aspects of the struggle to survive that I find I am psyching myself up before each visit: it means immersion into the lives of street people with whom I am to spend the night. A teenager: he told me that he started on drugs his parents had given him at the age of nine. He then graduated to dealing drugs, but is now trying to free himself by his own program; that is, by using only ‘soft drugs’ in the hope of escaping addiction. I wonder how slight are his chances. An old man: he has lost his life partner and has no home. Yet he preserves a cleanliness and sense of dignity as he trudges the streets by day and seeks whatever refuge he can find by night. He is increasingly frail and vulnerable: I wonder how long he can go on and what end awaits. The women: both young and old, they bear the losses of all they would crave for; they face failed relationships and efforts made; they arm themselves with tricks to survive the streets; they are scarred by addiction; they’re sometimes feral and sometimes soft. And I cringe for them. Usually I leave the hospital in some degree of elation, my own spirit uplifted through some sense of having ministered. Invariably I leave Teresa House profoundly moved, but sometimes depressed by the struggles that some guests have to endure, even to live in the most basic way each and every day. Sometimes I

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return home ashamed of the gifts I enjoy every day – of family, friends, security and choice. I wonder why I should be so blessed while others lead lives of such hardship and seeming emptiness.

TA L B O T HOUSE My ministry is outside the parish of North Sydney but with the St Vincent de Paul Society. For about ten years, I have been a volunteer at the kiosk of the Matthew Talbot House for Homeless Men. Although I had spent much of my working life among the poor of inner Sydney, nothing prepared me for turning into the lane at Woolloomooloo and experiencing my first glimpse of the homeless men at the Talbot. The narrow lane is a single roadway, with gutters on both sides. In them and along the footpath lay dozens of men. Some were in various stages of drug or alcohol intoxication; some were sitting in shabby armchairs hauled there from a nearby throw-out collection; some were setting up makeshift tents for the night out of sticks and newspapers. One or two men were accompanied by a pet dog – but all were present in that lane because they had no house to go to, and no family. Even now, as I approach the lane, I feel both immensely grateful and guilty for all that I have and hope that in serving the men of the hostel I am giving something back. Inside the hostel, the scene is not much better. All who work here do a wonderful job, but basically most of the men would prefer not to be here. I constantly wonder what all their life stories are, and how they became so down on their luck. In the kiosk, when we are not too busy, we have the opportunity to talk to the men and some love that. They come to know when our shifts happen and become ‘regulars’ in our lives for a few weeks or months, or occasionally years. This listening has become more important and easier for me since doing a counselling course last year, when I trained to become a Lifeline telephone counsellor. We have a familiar sight at Talbot. He is the regular con man who stands penniless at the counter waiting for some Good Samaritan (or soft touch) to lend him money ‘til pension day’. I am continuously amazed at the generosity of these men, all of who have nothing and yet look after each other without a trace of hesitation.

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The experience of working with the homeless has been enriching. I try to see the face of God in each of the men, and so what I do is done for God. It’s not always easy. Sometimes the men are angry or abusive, and then I tend to retreat or ignore them, which is not the right way. Now, many among the men are mentally ill because there is nowhere else for them to go. Talbot House silences me when I even think of complaining.

GOOD WORKS IN S M A L L WAY S I think of myself as sharing rather than ministering. I am a Eucharistic minister at Star of the Sea, Kirribilli. This gives me a strong sense of belonging and being accepted. I am a convert, having been introduced to God by a small group of Christians who called themselves ‘The United Church’ many years before the emergence of the Uniting Church. After this small Church’s demise, I was received into the Anglican Church and, after my marriage and children, became Catholic. There the sense of belonging and acceptance developed. So, I think of my Eucharistic ministry as a sharing rather than as a ministering. I feel privileged to be part of this Jesuit parish community and think often of my cousin who told me that when she converted to Catholicism she felt she had ‘come home’. This morning I’ve been reading about music, especially the Pentecostal Movement. Young people need the sense of belonging that comes from music, and, if the music of the young will draw them to God, why not? I have had a life closely associated with classical music, and a large part of that has been inspired by religious faith. Young people should not be denied theirs. As best I can, I’ll sing along with them, sotto voce. Within the Parish, I am a member of a small Kirribilli conference of the St Vincent DePaul society. Most of our visits to the sick and neglected are to the Housing Department’s Greenway flats. Many are people with few expectations, some of whom are trying heroically to brighten their lives. Those with mental illness are the most heart-wrenching. I think we can only do our good works in very small ways. If we try to do that, however, it must add to the sum total.

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COMMUNIONS Over the years, I have visited the sick with the Eucharist. I have been astounded at their good humour and welcoming of me (and the Lord), despite their physical and often mental pain. None has ever complained to me of their ills. They seem to accept with equanimity the ageing process and its accompanying discomforts. Lucy lived with Mrs Golden, a sister-in-law of Father Gerry Golden, SJ. She was a saintly woman, always praying and delighted to see me and hear news of the parish and the Jesuits. I visited her weekly and learned from her experience and wisdom. George was an elderly bachelor. He lived alone in a small unit. He had difficulty breathing and needed oxygen; he had prostate problems and had a catheter. I visited with the Eucharist weekly. He worried for taking my time but told me his life’s story and loved a joke. His vision was very poor, so I took him to an ophthalmologist for laser treatments and check-ups. Father Tom O’Donovan accompanied me several times to see him for reconciliation. George loved it when the priests visited him. He had a hard death but never stopped believing in God. Anne was a fragile lady mentally as well as physically. She too lived in a small unit. Her husband had died and she missed him greatly. She knitted a lot, and I was able to answer her many requests for wool because Mary at the presbytery was able to get some. Again, I visited weekly. One week, I needed to enter her unit with the police because she was not answering and no one had seen her. She had simply gone away and seemingly not told anyone. Mrs Mac. lived near my home. When young, I used to see an old lady driving around Crows Nest at great speeds – dangerously. Years later, I began taking the Eucharist to this same woman. She was a beautiful and intelligent lady; we enjoyed talking, often of religion. She was living alone and, towards the end of her life, unable to handle the oxygen tube she needed for breathing. After one particularly frightening time when I found her near death, she said, ‘I didn’t worry. I knew you would come and that you would know what to do’. Next morning I returned and knew she was dying. I rang her daughter in Tasmania and let her speak to her mother. Father Bob Walsh, SJ, came and gave her the last sacraments. She died a few days later.

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These are some of the people I have visited and still visit with the Eucharist. To be associated with them has been a great grace. I know how much it means to them to receive Communion. Perhaps I’m remembering the helplessness I felt when I couldn’t get a priest to bring Holy Communion to my father.

FA M I LY M I N I S T RY I have been a parishioner for about 30 years, first as a teenager very keen to sing along at the Sunday 6 p.m. folk mass at Lavender Bay. After I married and had children, my husband and I attended the Children’s Mass at St Mary’s. When my first daughter was born, we joined the Family Liturgy Group. The group came together with the aim of preparing liturgies, especially for the children of the parish. It was quite an intimate group, with the members knowing each other well and sharing social occasions that cemented friendships within it. We had no pastoral associate then, so the group made all the decisions about the Children’s Mass – hymns, prayers, scripture readings, dramatisations, banners and morning tea. We met every six weeks in the presbytery to plan the coming liturgies. We set a ‘Sacristy Sunday’ aside each month. The children were invited to go into the sacristy during the Liturgy of the Word in the mass for their own scripture story. Parents, then, could have their own sermon opportunity from the celebrant. Music was always important for the mass. We encouraged any child who played a musical instrument to join. Once a month, we had an Instrumentalist’s Mass. The mass is special to the families of the parish. The children are encouraged to become involved in as many aspects of it as possible – as a welcomer at the door, reading the scripture, dramatising the gospel, reading prayers of the faithful, helping in the offertory procession. They are welcomed on the altar in order to feel a central part of the liturgy. The children enjoy coming. They like their own participation in the liturgy, as well as the fact that their faith community includes their friends. The parents enjoy coming because their children are happy, and they can feel comfortable with their children there and with other similar families. The family mass needs a priest who is relaxed with both parents and

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children, and who can involve both. It needs gracious and generous pastoral assistants who can gently control the children. We have been very fortunate on both scores. Of course, we need families full of faith and love. We have those, too.

L AV E N D E R B AY CONFERENCE OF THE ST VINCENT D E PA U L S O C I E T Y We came to this parish 50 years ago when Father Arthur Stone, SJ, was parish priest. He had no car, so he walked everywhere and knew every inch of the area. Thanks to him, my wife and I found a lovely spot in McMahon’s Point where we built our house and have lived ever since. Father Henry Sneddon, SJ, was the much-loved curate who baptised our children, He was known to everyone, as he whizzed around the parish on his motor scooter. The first person to whom Father Stone introduced me was Frank Cox who lived all his life in this parish. He died last year in his late eighties. Frank said to me one day: ‘I want you in the St Vincent de Paul’. I was in the Holy Name Society – as we all were in those days – and knew nothing of St Vincent de Paul. For the next 40 years we visited the poor together. Frank knew where to find the poor. They lived in run-down boarding houses with walls teeming with cockroaches and rooms over-run with rodents. Frank also sought them under bridges, in boat sheds and in hidden culverts. One day we received a call for help from Jimmy who lived in a tiny cottage near St Aloysius College. He was a dwarf who had been deserted by his parents at the age of six. He lived by catching fish at the wharf at Kirribilli. The local shopkeepers would buy his fresh fish or exchange them for other food he needed. We visited Jimmy regularly for years, making sure he was okay. Then he came down with bone cancer in his leg. He boasted that he had the magic cure for it. This was goanna oil. Eventually the cancer took hold and Jimmy ended up in Greenwich Hospital. He called for Frank and me. Before he died he told us that, before he called the St Vincent de Paul Society, no one had bothered about him or shown him affection. More than that, he said he wanted to become a Catholic. Frank called Father Bob Walsh who brought him into the church. This is both Jimmy’s story and Frank Cox’s story. Frank was a true Vincentian.

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H E L P I N G FA I T H WITH REASON I was employed as Pastoral Associate for the community of St Francis Xavier, Lavender Bay. Leaving behind 37 years of teaching in Catholic schools in Sydney, I joined my wife Carmen who had been appointed as administrator two years before. For me, this was returning to my parish roots because it was in these churches at Lavender Bay and North Sydney that I became initiated into the Catholic faith. I grew up in Kirribilli and Waverton. For Carmen, the move to churches on the North Shore was a new experience. So, too, was meeting the Jesuits. When she asked about these priests, I depicted them as ‘having feet of clay like the rest of us, but able to see the big picture’. Today I am still happy to depict them thus. But I wonder, because of their ages, how long they can be committed to the parish. Until her death from cancer in 2004, Carmen’s distinguished contribution to the parish was the giving of herself, and also as administrator and musician. Father Peter Quin and Carmen operated out of complementary spiritual gifts. Peter was our leader, directing our efforts and setting our direction. As administrator, Carmen attended to the practicalities needed to get us there. I watched as their reliance on, and affection for, each other deepened. As Pastoral Associate I became responsible for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. I accepted ‘inquirers’ whenever they approached our parish and worked with each one, often in the company of their Catholic spouse/partner/fiance/friend. The RCIA has become the most privileged part of my work in the parish. In the process of preparing for any of the sacraments of initiation or updating their faith education, our inquirers take the opportunity given them to become well-informed adult Catholic Christians. As Pastoral Associate, I have other responsibilities, such as helping in the liturgical life of the parish, especially in preparation for Easter and Christmas. I also encourage the better functioning of liturgical ministers, help prepare families for the sacrament of baptism, and aid in the visitations of the parish, especially those to the house-bound and sick. At this stage in my life I can see what I am bringing to parish ministry and to those with whom I work in this parish. But at this stage in my life and with the enrichment that directing RCIA has given me in spiritual and theological education, I feel my contribution to the life of the parish is this:

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to think critically and see the complications of proposals; to appreciate the inner world of ideas and impressions to evaluate ideas and suggestions so that the Parish Team and Lavender Bay Pastoral Team are better placed to take balanced decisions to organise a job and carry it through, with or without help.

A LTA R B O Y B E C O M E A C O LY T E Sometimes I used to wonder why I became an acolyte 14 years ago. I am not deeply spiritual, and when I am performing this office my mind drifts away to other matters, sometimes during a homily or momentarily during the mass itself. I was, of course, an altar boy 70 years ago in this very parish, so I haven’t moved far from base, have I? I carried out the duties of an altar boy until I entered the army at 18 years of age. So I had a fairly knowledgeable background when I returned to these activities at the age of 69. Some things had changed. The priest said the mass facing the people – the Latin had disappeared. The altar rail had been removed, and the priest had discarded the biretta and even the habit. I returned to the acolyte office full of nostalgia and ready to get on with the job – Sunday or weekday masses, exposition, funerals large and small, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, each with its own special ritual and preparation. I am honoured to be the priest’s special helper and intimately involved in the Church’s liturgy. So I no longer wonder why I entered the ministry. Not long ago, I offered my services as a Communion Minister at Royal North Shore Hospital. I have now completed my term of three years, perhaps regretfully. Those three years were the most edifying period I have experienced. No two days were the same; no two patients were ever remotely similar. There were those too sick to acknowledge your presence, while others welcomed you with a cheery smile, needing someone with whom to chat. Some kept the radio or TV on, seemingly just acknowledging your visit. Many with little English recited their prayers in different languages. I proceeded from the orthopaedic wards to the oncology areas; and then to the cardiac wards, intensive care, maternity and severe burns. It was a great joy to bring a little spiritual solace

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into the lives of just a few of these patients. In return, their courage changed me. Combined with my role as acolyte, their spirits answered so many questions for me, about humility, charity and love of our Catholic faith.

FRINGE DWELLER I have lived all my life on the fringes of St Mary’s parish. It is as familiar as a dear relative or friend. We lived in Roseville but frequented all the churches between Chatswood and St Patrick’s, Church Hill. From 1962 to 1972 I attended school at Monte Sant’ Angelo. At nearby St Mary’s I made the first of my many confessions and my Confirmation. It was also the place of our school masses. In the late 1970s Sr Kay, a Monte Mercy, began a Youth Centre in Stormanston House. Stormanston (as it was called) only lasted a few years. Many people have no idea of its existence, yet it had an extraordinary influence on many young people at the time. The priests who helped out were usually Jesuits. Stormanston was a place where a deep yearning for God was tangible in the people and programs that drew us there. There I met Caresse, who one day asked me to help in a ‘structural analysis’ program that the Grail was about to initiate. I have been involved with the Grail ever since. I have just completed a formation program and hope to be accepted as a member later this year. In 1982 I felt a call to the vocation of marriage (after having spent years considering a religious vocation). My husband and I married in St Francis Xavier church in 1983. When I became pregnant, a friend introduced me to the ‘R & R Group’, weekly meetings at which women provided spiritual nourishment for mothers. The parish paid Sr Marnie Kennedy (Father Ted’s sister) to lead us in reflection and prayer while parish volunteers babysat the toddlers in the garden. I remain immensely grateful to the parish for providing me that opportunity of growing in faith and being strengthened by the witness of strong Christian women, for all of whom I retain a deep affection. Last year, I once again became part of a St Mary’s community. I began to attend the 6.30 a.m. mass and immediately felt at home. Within the year, I accepted being rostered for readings each Monday. I feel privileged to be part of a very special mass. I suspect others feel that way, too.

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Epilogue

Pilgrim parish

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in hope and often in pain. The hope is that at journey’s end, the pilgrim will be graced in some way. The pain is the cost of entry into otherness of any sort. Pilgrim parish, like pilgrim church, is always journeying. Neither parish nor Church ever finish their journeying, except, presumably, on the Last Day. There is a famous description of a pilgrim in the fourteenth-century allegoric poem by William Langland, ‘Piers Plowman’. Walking behind a pilgrim would seem to be like driving behind a car with hundreds of stickers displaying places visited. A bolle and a bagge He bar by his syde And hundred ampulles; On his hat seten Signes of Synay, And Shelles of Galice, And many a conche On his cloke, And keys of Rome, And the Vernycle bi-fore For men sholde knowe And se bi hise signes Whom he sought hadde.

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Perhaps I should count the Notes below as the badges of my own pilgrimage in Church Alive! For pilgrimage it certainly has been, a journey of hope made good by a little pain. A long time ago, as long (now that I think of it) as the beginning of this study, 1956, I made a discovery that changed my life. I discovered that I wanted to write history of ‘the other side of the beach’, of indigenous peoples with whom I had no cultural bond. And on ‘this side of the beach’, I wanted to write history of people whom the world would esteem as ‘little – not kings and queens, or heroes, but those on whom the world pressed most hard. So the history of a parish on ‘The Other Side’, Wallumetta, attracted me instantly. Othersidedness has many dimensions – the other side of the globe from Rome, the other side of the harbour and the Sydney of church and state, the othersidedness of believing in an age of unbelief, the othersidedness of renewal in a conservative Church, the othersidedness of trust in the humanity of a believing self and of Jesus. And the ‘little people’? Those people who invited fathers Powell and Therry into their Berry Street homes to say mass on the chest of drawers still in St Mary’s sanctuary, they are my little people, and the generations of parishioners who followed. They were on their own Irish-Australian pilgrimage in the beginning. They built nine churches, six schools in the parish (and helped in the building of another four), 11 convents and monasteries, and five hospitals. And all of this in the belief that they were responsible for proclaiming the Good News, as they understood it, for the betterment of their society and the salvation of their souls. But it is the sesquicentenary generation of the parish that is especially my ‘little people’. We began a pilgrimage two years ago. We started a dialogue, ‘rooted’, as John Paul II said it should be, ‘in the nature and dignity of human beings unable to find themselves except through a sincere gift of themselves’. Out of that dialogue came the witness, as here written down, of the pilgrim parish. ‘May Yahweh bless you and keep you’, we sing with raised arms at the end of our Eucharist. Indeed.

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Acknowledgments My first and most pleasurable task is to acknowledge, thank and give the names of those who generously and courageously contributed their witness to Church Alive! with their word pictures. Deirdre Arnold, Diana Baird, Margaret Barry, William Baumann, Juliana Bellew, Ron Boys, Frank Brennan, Kerrie Bristow, Andrew Bullen, Henry Burger, Jenny Burger, Ida Cameron, Linda Conroy, Mavis Cooney, Siobhan Costigan, Michael Costigan, Julie Cranfield, Mary Cresp, Linda Curtis, Genine D’Arcy, James D’Arcy, Genevieve Davey, Ann Drover, Marie Duffy, Carolyn Dwyer, Jim Egan, Noreen Farrell, Rosemary Flannery, Tricia Gemmell, Bill Gibbons, Josephine Gibbons, Bruce Gillespie, Denys Goggin, Antoinette Gray, Philippa Green, Jenny Gribble, Mrs Harrington, Paul Heywood, Graeme Hood, Sophie Hunter, Caroline Jones, Anne Kearney, Kerry Kelly, Bridget Kennedy, Douglas Kennedy, Jan Kricker, Tony McCurdy, D. McKenna, Patricia Martin, John Masterson, Donna Merwick, Joy Morgan, Barney Mungoven, Michael Murphy, Anne O’Brien, Trish O’Brien, P. H. Oder, Michael Paxton, Anne Pearson, Annalise Pike, Celestine Pooley, Yvonne Quarrel, Peter Quin, Tim Quinlan, Celso Romanin, Tony Ruhan, Margaret Rush, Margaret Shakeshaft, Thomas Silk, Joseph Sobb, Kathryn Summerhayes, Brendan Taylor, Donal Taylor, Judi Taylor, Christine Tighe, Vince Toohey, Elizabeth Tyacke, Molly Webber and three anonymous writers.

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From its very beginning, it had been our hope that Church Alive! would be a parish creation, not just mine. Genine D’Arcy, Pastoral Associate at St Mary’s, made that possible. The success of our Monday evening meetings and our parish conversations were largely due to her energy and excitement for our project. Michael Paxton and Michael Murphy, also Pastoral Associates, guided me on new paths. Besides the writers, many parishioners made our meetings memorable or made our visits comfortable. Margaret Cahill, Peter Christoph, John Conroy, Louise Darmody, Jean-Michel Deplanke, Jennifer Farrell, Michelle Giglio, Maire Glacken, Michael Gray, Elizabeth Hall, Claudia Jew, Patricia Kerin, Claire Lonergan, Sheila McNamara, Rosemary Macey, Youlla Norquay, Michael O’Dea, Janet Quade, Martin Ryan, Tim Smyth, Joanne Thompson, Ruth Thompson, Ann Tothill, Judy Tusino and Margaret Zucker. The Jesuit community in the parish gave us loving hospitality: Daven Day, SJ, Emmet Costello, SJ, Frank Brennan, SJ, Paul Coleman, SJ, Manuel Carracedo, SJ, Tom O’Donovan, SJ, Tom O’Hara, SJ, Peter Quin, SJ, Tony Smith, SJ, and Donal Taylor, SJ. And I called on other Jesuits for their expert advice: Andrew Bullen, SJ, Brendan Byrne, SJ, Andrew Hamilton, SJ, and Christopher Willcock, SJ. Anne Kearney’s art, and her thoughtful reflections on it, make Church Alive! beautiful. Robin Treseder’s photographs do the same. Barney Mungoven of the Parish Archives made the whole project possible. He had help in Sydney: Joan O’Brien, Peter Taniane, Kathryn Summerhayes, Biddy Kennedy and Philippa Green. In Melbourne, Graeme Hood gave me hours of his time and much comfort in his support. I have acknowledged the help I have had from other archives and archivists in my Notes. I need to acknowledge formally some copyright permissions: Judith Murray, daughter of Roland Wakelin, for permission to publish a reproduction of Roland Wakelin’s painting The Bridge from North Sydney, 1939. Leslie Walton, Wakelin’s biographer, discovered the painting and provided us with photographs of it. Viv Szekeran, Director of the Adelaide Migration Museum, for the use of the children’s paintings from Baxter Detention Centre. Peter Melocco for his photographs of St Mary’s, St Francis Xavier’s and Star of the Sea. St Aloysius College Archives for the use of Peter Moore’s 1968 sketch of The Old Chapel, Milson’s Point. Les Murray for permission to publish in part his poem ‘Religion is poetry’. All scriptural citations are from The Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday, New York 1966) unless otherwise indicated.

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Donna Merwick, my wife, was my key partner in our ethnographic endeavour, always enriching my insights with her observations. And when our observing was done, she has been my editor in the writing. It would be impossible to exaggerate the gift of her love in my life. Di Quick, University of New South Wales Press, designed both Wallumetta, The Other Side. Faith, Life and Worship on the North Shore, 1856–2006 and Church Alive! I am deeply grateful for her skills and patience. Heather Cam’s coordination of the editing process has been equally professional. We shared some laughs about the sort of knowledge that is required to edit a book on Catholic tribal behaviour. Robin Derricourt, Director, University of South Wales Press, and Mary Halbmeyer, Client Publisher and Rights Manager, confronted various aspects of jesuitry calmly and courteously. Nothing is written until it is read, I have always told my students. Edward Caruso is my first reader and editor for Church Alive! I thank him for his carefulness and efficiency.

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Notes I have always told my students that the extravagance of the historian’s engagement in the archives will always give our language richness, our images colour and sharpness, our arguments conviction, our examples pertinence, and our selection an informed boldness. ‘Being there’, where the past leaves itself most particularly, is an historian’s signature gesture in research performances. The Parish Archives, which have the entire parish registers, years of bulletins and magazines, statistics, letters, journals, and all the bureaucratic detritus of institutions, are kept ordered and alive for any important life question that someone might have by the archivist Barney Mungoven. It would be difficult to overestimate my debt over these two and a half years to Barney. He and his parents before him have given lifetimes of service to the parish. It is my historian’s privilege to thank them for it. Down at the Jesuit Archives, Power Street, Hawthorn, Tom Daly, SJ, Michael Head, SJ, and Lawrence Drake, SJ, gave their time and knowledge generously. My research took me to a number of other archives: the Sisters of Mercy Archives and Sister Margaret Barry, RSM, their archivist; the Congregational Archives of the Sisters of St Joseph and their archivist, Sister M. Benedetta, RSJ; St Aloysius College Archives, Gerri Nicholls; the Xavier College Archives, Doug Kennedy; and the Archdiocese of Melbourne Archives, Rachel Naughton. The Historical Services of North Sydney Council in the person of its Director, Ian Hoskins, also served me well. I thank them all.

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The real advantage of these years of research has been my reading. Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag refer to the ‘erotic’ pleasures of reading. The erotic pleasure of reading for me comes in that moment that I read something that I think I am about to say myself. My notes to follow are an acknowledgment – not by fact after fact, but by ideas and inspirations – of those scholars I have been principally dependent on in the research and writing of Church Alive! I hope that my naming them – and, in my text, including passages of their work – will inspire others to make their own discoveries.

Prologue: The spirit at work Very early in my research, I encountered the work of a scholar, Elizabeth A. Johnson ( Johnson 2004) who wrote Truly Our Sister, an ethno-theological study of Miriam of Nazareth, Mary the mother of Jesus. I count her as one of the most creative theologians writing today. I owe her much. I had the ambition to tell my stories about Pentecost and Vatican II in the same manner – ethnographically, to give the past its own present. Since so much of ethnographic writing is attentive to the cultural and environmental context of every event, I did what I have never done before in my historical research. I chased every place, person and event on the Web. There I met Bargil Pixner (Pixner 1997). He stirred my imagination with his archaeology of the Essene Gate. But I am a reader most of all. Raymond Brown has been a hero of mine for decades. His Introduction to the New Testament (Brown 1997) and his Biblical Exegesis (Brown 1985) were never far from reach. Eugene LaVerdiere’s Eucharist in the New Testament and Early Church (LaVerdiere 1996) and Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus (Eisenman 1997), and Prendergast and Ridge 2004 were very enriching. Since the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocalyptic Gospels are full of ethnographic detail, I did not hesitate to go to those who went there in some way: Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus (Eisenman 1997) and Marvin Meyer, The Secret Gospels of Jesus (Meyer 2005). Cheslyn Jones et al. The Study of the Liturgy 1992 has been by my side virtually in every chapter. Peter Hebblethwaite’s brilliant biography, revised by Margaret Hebblethwaite in 1994 has been my entry into John XXIII’s soul. Of course, a prolific journal writer like John XXIII (Chiffolo 1999, John XXIII 2000) hardly needs a biographer. The Basic Documents of Vatican II (Flannery 1995) were my source for the documentary resources for the Council, backed by the Web. Since the

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fortieth anniversary of the end of Vatican II came and went in the years of my writing, there were abundant memoirs and analyses – Bausch 1989, Doyle 2002, Duffy 2004, Dulles 2002, Greeley 2004, Heubsch 2002, Ivereigh 2003, Prendergast 2004, Schreck 2005 and Tanner 2005. I confess I had not anticipated the vituperative criticisms of Vatican II of writers like Crouan 1997, 1999, Davies 2003, Torevell 2000 and Trower 2003, although I had known for some time the critiques of anthropologists I greatly admired, Douglas 1973 and Turner 1978. I thought such negativity was hollow because it lacked any real theological foundation. That sent me off on a wonderful excursion into the theological foundations of Vatican II, described below.

1 Living history I have had my say on the writing of Living History over many years. I do not need to repeat it here. Anyone wanting to see how my thoughts on writing Living History blend with my religious experiences might like to read ‘Ethnography on My Mind’, ‘Poetics of History’ and ‘Soliloquy in San Giacomo’ in Performances (Dening 1996) and ‘An Archaeology of Believing’, ‘An Archaeology of Learning’ in Beach Crossings (Dening 2004). There is only one way that I know of to begin a local history. That is to absorb, as far as possible, the knowledge of the local historical society. The North Sydney Historical Collection with its indices of newspapers – Mosman Daily Times, North Shore Times and Freeman’s Journal – and of its extensive Merle Coppel Collection of Oral History, and its own Historical Journal, and library of publications is where I began. The First People’s past in the area was my first search: Kohen and Lampert 1988, Guider 1980, Syzpak 1998. Then North Shore local histories: Fitzpatrick 1967, Jones, 1988, Mann 1938, Park 1996 and Russell 1990. Then the institutions, hospitals and schools: Carey 1991, Doyle 1972, Dunn and Harper 1988, Rankin 1975, and Strong 1997. Meg Sword, in her much-valued historical research on the parish (Sword 1976, 1977, 1980, 1981 and 1981a) and Henry Johnston in Seed that Grew ( Johnston 1956) have done all the hard work, identifying personalities and property, doing a sort of archaeology of all the churches. I owe them both a great deal. The Jesuits have been served well by scholars. Ursula Bygott’s With Pen and Tongue (Bygott 1980) is a treasure of Australian intellectual history. David

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Strong’s The Australian Dictionary of Jesuit Biography 1848–1988 (Strong 1999) has been indispensable for me. And his history of the Jesuits in Australia (Strong 1995) was always an informative backstop. Lyotard’s quote from Rudiments Païens is cited in Certeau 1988, p. 170. I counted Patrick O’Farrell a friend, and blessed his personal courage, his fiery independence and his willingness to write religious history when it was not very popular among his secular colleagues and thought to be downright treasonous by the Catholic hierarchy. I would think that his stamp on my narrative through The Catholic Church and Community in Australia (O’Farrell 1977) would be clear; It has to be read nowadays with Anne Cunningham’s caveats in her The Rome Connection (Cunningham 2002). Michel de Certeau’s ideas on reading are to be found in Certeau 1988, p. 170. I felt that I needed to understand what sort of paradigm the Irish imprinted on the Australian Church and looked for it in – O Riordain 1998 and Carroll 1999. Robert Dixon (Dixon 1996) provides a factual image of the Catholic community in Australia. Hans Mol (Mol 1971), a pioneer in religious studies in this country has given a similar image for all denominations.

Sacred space R. K. Seasoltz, A Sense of the Sacred. Theological Foundations of Christian Architecture and Art (2005), and Doug Adams and Michael E. Moynihan (eds) Postmodern Worship and the Arts (2002) were the source of many ideas on Sacred Spaces. Richard Taylor (2003) and Richard Champlin (2003) were useful tools in reading churches. Walton 1987 is the best reading on Roland Wakelin’s life and painting. The Welsh Black Book of Carmarthen is quoted in Brown 2000, p. 149.

Sacred time Clifford Geertz’s Turtle Story is told in Geertz 1975, pp. 28–30.

2 Triumph 1956 As I began my research, an eminent Church historian, Eamon Duffy, published his Faith of Our Fathers. Reflections on Catholic Tradition (Duffy 2004). Part spiritual odyssey, part cultural history, it humbled me not a little. Perhaps I should offer his moderate pessimism about the changes in the Church as an antidote to my moderate optimism. We both have a passion for history and its science, so I was pleased that he was as trusting in his own personal experiences

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as I was in mine. A more sentimentalist account of The Catholic Imagination can be found in Andrew Greeley (2001). I boosted my memory of the sort of mass that Arthur Stone would have said by returning to the bibles of rubrical behaviour: Adrian Fortescue, The Ceremonies of the Roman Rite Described (1948), J. O’Connell, The Celebration of the Mass (1940) and L. J. O’Connell, The Book of Ceremonies (1956). To renew my piety, I kept Alter Christus (Anon n.d.) close at hand. Alter Christus was provided to all boys educated in Jesuit schools. My notes are full of detail from 75 pages of tediously translated Latin in which the old moral theology textbook Genicot (n.d.) dealt with the almost infinite number of obligations imposed on us to receive Holy Communion properly. Kevin E. McKenna’s, A Concise Guide to Canon Law. A Practical Handbook for Pastoral Ministers (2000) sorted me out on the changes to Canon Law. Doing Right and Being Good. Catholic and Protestant Readings in Christian Ethics (Ahearn and Gathje 2005) was more edifying. Ken Bazyn’s culling of all of literature to write The Seven Perennial Sins and their Offspring (Bazyn 2004) in the end was just as tedious as Genicot. Newman is quoted in Tilley 2000, p. 35 and Coleridge in Duffy 2004, p. 9

Reflection: On religious change Pedro Arrupe, SJ is to be found in his memoirs and writings: Arrupe 1979, 1981, 2002 and 2004; and Bishop 2000. As is John XXIII: Hebblethwaite 1994, Chiffolo 1999 and XXIII Pope John 2000. To get some idea of what might be the paradigmatic shift at work in the Church in the decades preceding Vatican II, I thought that I needed to immerse myself as far as I could in the processes of theological debate, to grasp the ideas of the foundational thinkers, and to understand the postmodernity of it all. Postmodernity, first of all. I am fortunate in that I have in the family an expert on postmodern thought, my wife Donna Merwick. She kindly reported to me on a range of postmodern theological writing, Adams and Moynihan (2002), Borgman (1999); the various writers in the Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Vanhoozer 2003); and The Blackwell’s Reader, Theology after Liberalism, Webster and Schner (2000a); Parratt (2004); Kung (1988). She guided me to a number of conclusions: 1. The link between culture and thought must be taken seriously – it is no longer respectable to dismiss acceptance of such conditions as dangerous relativism. 2. Language in its rhetoric, narrative styles, ploys and conceits is as much in play in scripture and theology as anywhere else. 3. Continual revisionism is unavoidable. 4. Ideology is imbedded in

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all writing. There is nothing ‘natural’, nothing eternally the same, nothing essentially stable or isolated from human construction. Postmodern theologians do not begin with methodology. They begin with narratives of God’s presence in the world and Christian self – description of their experiences. Most interesting is her conclusion that while the critics of postmodern thought are preoccupied with the postmodern epistemology, the postmoderns themselves are focused on justice. Joseph Maréchal has long influenced me to pursue the notion of process in all that is human. A copy of Norman Pettinger’s, God in Process (Pettinger 1967) has been mine ever since it was published. I read whatever I could on the nature of the processes of theological discourse – our Australian thinkers Richard Lennan (ed.) The Possibility of Belief (2004), international scholars Terrence Tilley (ed.) New Horizons in Theology (2004), Brown 2000, Dickinson 1999 and Miller and Stancil 2001. I read Ormerod 1997 On Contemporary Theologies and went to Keating 1989, Grisez 1997 and Odozor 2003 so that I might compare them with the moral theology manuals with which I was familiar, such as Genicot nd. Teilhard de Chardin’s writings are prolific: Chardin 1962, 1964, 1965 and 1965a. His words on the mass are to be found in Chardin 1965a, p. 19. John Shelby Spong 1991, 1992 and 2000 has attracted my attention for many years. I learned from him what a parish eager to educate its parishioners to their twenty-first century world might look like. I read a wonderful collection – Creative Fidelity. American Catholic Traditions (Appleby 2004) and dreamed of writing of Australian Catholic creative fidelity, but I guess Edmund Campion has already done that in Catholic Voices: Best Australian Catholic Writing (1996) and Great Australian Catholics (1997). Karl Rahner’s The Practice of Faith (Lehman and Raffelt 1983) and Spiritual Writings (Endean 2004) inspirit all I write. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner (Marmion and Hines 2005) marked the hundredth anniversary of his birth and is a most comprehensive review of his contribution to theology. Harvey D. Egan’s Karl Rahner. Mystic of Everyday Life (1998) is perhaps more comprehensible.

3 Hopefulness The bulk of the material cited here – the statistics, the debate on renewal, Arrupe’s interests – is to be found in the Parish Archives and Jesuit Archives. Paul Ricoeur’s influence on theological discourse is described in the Cambridge

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Companion to Postmodern Theology (Vanhoozer 2003). His own three volume Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1984–1988) might overawe an ordinary reader, but Oneself as Another (Ricoeur 1992) is the best place to get a sense of his thought. Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), French novelist and essayist, dramatised a religious understanding of the world through the problematic lives of priests. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius are translated both literally and in a contemporaneous language in Fleming 1980. Many of my ideas on hope come from Images of Hope (Lynch 1965). But I confess that my hopefulness was lifted greatly by John Paul II, The Encyclicals in Everyday Language. Definite Edition of all Fourteen Encyclicals (Donders 2005) and his Memory and Identity. Personal Reflections ( John Paul II 2005). Clodovus Boff ’s quotation is to be found in Theology and Praxis (1987, p. 123). Les Murray, Collected Poems (1994, p. 235) has his thoughts on religion. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words are to be found in his Letters and Papers from Prison (Bethge 1953, p. 226).

4 Breaking bread Because my professional anthropological interests have lain mainly among Tahitian and Marquesan peoples who practised human sacrifice, I have long been teased by René Girard’s chilling statement: ‘Violence is the secret heart and soul of the Sacred’ (Hamerton-Kelly 1987). I once wrote a reflection on two Spanish Franciscan friars offering the sacrifice of the mass in Tahiti while human sacrifices were being made a few steps away (Dening 1996). Josef Jungmann, SJ’s classic study of the sacrifice of the mass in his The Mass of the Roman Rite ( Jungmann 1951–1952) fascinated me. I haven’t dared go back to my notes. I haven’t wanted to go into the debate on sacrifice and communion. Instead, I wanted to absorb what I could about the early history of the Eucharist to which Vatican II returned us. So I went to The Mystery of Faith (McEvoy and Hogan 2005), where I met Cardinal Daneels (2005), and to the inestimably valuable The Eucharist in the New Testament (LaVerdiere 1996); The Celebration of the Eucharist. The Origin of the Rite and the Development of Its Interpretation (Mazza 1999); Models of the Eucharist (Irwin 2005); and a number of more pious reflections: Keeler 2005, Kelly 2001 and Moore 2004. I found Philip Tovey, Inculturation of Christian Worship. Exploring the Eucharist (Tovey 2004) a most valuable entry into the whole question of Vatican II’s notion of inculturation, and the Church-in-Rome’s backing away from it.

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The documentation for ‘A Family-centred Parish Program for the Sacraments of Reconciliation, the Eucharist and Confirmation’ are in the Parish Archives. Marty Haugen’s ‘Gather Us In’ is Hymn 12 in As One Voice. Carlo Carretto quote, Carretto 1994: 139; Torevell on story, Torevell 2000, p. 10.

5 Word and song My richest experience of Deep Time was at Lake Mungo where the burial of Mungo Man and Mungo Woman showed how careful the First People were to make the transition from life to death a cultural, ritual act. Forty-three thousand years ago, men and women made sacraments of their life passages. I have written on this extraordinary experience of mine in Beach Crossings (Dening 2004: 52–4). Dominic O’Sullivan, Faith, Politics and Reconciliation. Catholicism and the Politics of Indigeneity (O’Sullivan 2005) has the fullest and clearest narrative on these issues, both in Australia and New Zealand. The quotes from Archbishop Polding, John Paul II and Frank Brennan, SJ, are to be found in O’Sullivan. My principal sources for the material on the Samaritan woman were Brown 1997 and Byrne 2004. But Wayne Jackson has a marvellous article ‘Jesus and the Samaritan Woman’, Christian Courier, 1 November 2000, and it is to be found on the Christian Courier web site. I am influenced greatly in my thoughts on translation by A. L. Becker, Beyond Translation. Essays toward a Modern Philology (Becker 1995) who quotes Ortega y Gasset. Bill Dalton, SJ’s autobiography, Seeking the Word (Dalton 1996) was an affectionate pilgrimage for me. I have counted him as my mentor since 1942. Everything I learned of scripture came principally from him. I am sure that everything I say on the Word would have his approval. Because I am nearly illiterate in music, I had a wonderful time among liturgical musicians. I found the musicians to be the most reflective of the liturgists and theologians, and most in step with my thoughts on worship. Jan Michael Joncas, composer, liturgist and historian, is the place to go for a history and critique of Church music from the Motu Proprio of Pius X, 1903, through De Musica, the 1958 instruction of the Congregation of Rites, and see the Milwaukee Statement 1992 and the Snowbird Statement 1995 for responses (From Sacred Song to Ritual Music; Twentieth Century Understandings of Roman

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Catholic Worship Music, 1997). But for me the most inspirational reading came from Music in Christian Worship (Kroeker 2005) where I met up with Don Saliers (Kroeker 2005, p. 17ff.), and Full, Conscious and Active Participation. Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Today’s Liturgy (Prendergast 2003). I chased the musicians wherever I could find them: Mazza 1999, Jones et al. 1992, and Adams and Moynahan 2002. I found Cardinal Ratzinger’s thoughts on music in M. Francis Mannion, Masterworks of God. Essays in Liturgical Theory and Practice (Mannion 2004). Josef Gelineau, SJ, has a beautiful essay in the Study of Liturgy ( Jones et al. 1992, pp. 493–506). And how I wished to hear more often something as creative and humane from cardinals of the Church as Cardinal Godfried Daneels on the liturgy 40 years after Vatican II (Daneels 2005). William Baumann’s The Ministry of Music is quoted in Prendergast 2003, p. 64. ‘Here I am Lord’ (Don Schutte), As One Voice, Hymn 90.

6 New church, new priest The sources for Vatican II’s imagination of the New Church are many: Ball and McKamey 2005, Bausch 1989, Doyle 2002, Dulles 2002, Greeley 2004, Lennan 2004, Prendergast and Ridge 2004 and Tanner 2005. Bernard Haring’s views on moral theology are quoted in Collins 2001, p. 111. Paul Lakeland’s quote is to be found in Lakeland 2003, p.103. Vincent Buckley’s The Incarnation in the University (1957) makes inspiring reading after nearly 50 years. I happen to have a collection of Newman Society papers, journals and newsletters from Newman Societies in almost all the universities in Australia. David McKenna, one of the activists in The Intellectual Apostolate has recently donated his full collection of Prospect, the socio-religious magazine written and published by many in the apostolate, to the Xavier Archives. Suenens is quoted in Lakeland 2003, p. 106. Brown’s judgement on the importance of the Council of Jerusalem is to be found in Brown 1997, p. 306. Cardinal Suenens is quoted in Lakeland (2003, p. 106). There is perhaps no better theological and historical discussion of the laity’s role in the Church than in Lakeland. William Blake’s thoughts on imagination are quoted in Greeley 2001, p. 1; and John Keat’s thoughts on the same subject by Ted Kennedy (2000, p. 144). As One Voice (1992) and the North Sydney Parish Hymn Book (nd) are my sources for my quotations of hymns.

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7 The Christ and women There is much despair and cynicism in the Church. It was heightened, not lessened by the 2004 Church-in-Rome letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church On the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and the World (Anon 2004a). Claiming that the Church is ‘expert in humanity’, the letter immediately shows how inexpert it is by presuming that ‘faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power’. It is not my obligation here to describe feminist theology, but it was certainly my duty to understand it by reading some of it in Ruether 1998, and around it in Ormerod 1997, Lennan 2004, Vuola 2002 and Pope 2004. I learned much from listening to ‘Catholic Women in Dialogue’ in The Church Women Want ( Johnson 2002). I read of women’s aspirations in such works as Jeanne Porter 2005, who wrote on insights on the leadership of women of the Bible, and Sally D. Sharpe 2004, who wrote on meditations for women by women. Perhaps most important – because it fitted all my notions on the role of stories – was And the Dance Goes On. An Anthology of Australian Catholic Women’s Stories (Commission for Australian Catholic Women 2005). John Paul’s words on dialogue are to be found in Donders 2005, pp. 301–5. I did not want to go into the question of women’s ordination. It seems obvious to me that the current embargo imposed by the Church-in-Rome is just another one of those mistakes that the Church will own up to in time, and I will do all in my power to make that happen in whatever way women will want to make it happen. But I did read John Wijngaards, The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church. Unmasking a Cuckoo’s Egg Tradition (Wijngaards 2001). On the title page of his book, he quotes John Henry Cardinal Newman’s reply to a toast proposed to the pope at a dinner in his honour when he had been made a cardinal. ‘To the Pope, yes, but to Conscience first’. Truly Our Sister ( Johnson 2004) was truly eye-opening for me. But I also treasure the beautiful book, Mary. Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspectives (Pelikan et al. 2005). The Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission’s, Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ: The Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, An Agreed Statement (Anon. 2005) is the sort of gentle, inspiring document that one would hope any ecclesiastical institution would write. The quotation comes from pages 78–9. Eugene La Verdière. The Annunciation of Mary (LaVerdiere 2004) will satisfy both spiritual and intellectual desires. Ann Ball, The Other Faces of Mary (Ball 2004), ranges the whole world for understandings and images of Mary.

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Leo Madigan (2003), The Children of Fatima, is just one of hundreds of sources for the Fatima apparitions. To understand the changes in women’s religious life, I went to Sandra Schneiders’ two-volume (so far) comprehensive study, Finding the Treasure (2000) and Selling All (2001). Placher 2000 provided Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation. Mary Cresp, RSJ, has given us a history of the commitment of the Josephites around the world, In the Spirit of Joseph (2005). Burford 1991 and Foale 1989 provided histories of the Josephites in Australia and New South Wales. Carey 1991 and Rankin 1975 describe the healing and educational apostolate of the Sisters of Mercy. The ecclesiastical fundamentals on education are to be found in Anon. 2004. Elizabeth Johnson’s quote is to be found in Appleby et al. 2004, p. 244. Michael Fallon’s quote on the Trinity is to be found on the CACW (Commission of Catholic Women) web site. Tertullian quote, Johnson 2004, p. 24.

8 The prophetic imagination Walter Brueggemann (1978) gave me the metaphor, prophetic imagination. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer has inspired me for many years on what it might mean, The Cost of Discipleship (1959), Letters and Papers from Prison (Bethge 1953), Ethics (Bethge 1955), Meditations on Psalms (Robertson 2002) and his biography (Bethge 1967). No doubt I am joined by many others in being inspired by Dorothy Day (Ellsberg 2005), Ted Kennedy (2000), and the collection of prophets in A Cloud of Witnesses (Wallis and Hollyday 2004). Bishop John Heaps, A Love that Dares to Question. A Bishop Challenges his Church (1998) showed us that Australian bishops could be prophets, too. The Schillebeeckx conversation is to be found in Schillebeeckx 2004. St Augustine’s Sermon 340 is quoted in Miller 2005, p. 55. The Study of Liturgy ( Jones 1992, pp. 339–98) is my source for the issues on orders. The Passion and Death of Jesus is our sacrament of prophecy. It sustains the culture of sacrifice among the people of God. While I was researching Church Alive! in the early months, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ startled the world. The local bishops welcomed the film exuberantly and wrote to all the parishes urging the priests to encourage the faithful to see the film. They then triumphed in the apparently increased Easter numbers. I thought that the bishops had missed the point. Statistics won’t tell them what happened. The people have reduced the narratives of their believing to the bare essentials – the narratives of hope in Advent and the birth of Jesus, the narratives of sin and

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sorrow in Lent, the narratives of compassion and wonder of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of the Christ. The people of God are building their prophetic imagination on those narratives performed humanely in their liturgies. For myself, I understood the Gibson episode more when I read Sophie Masson’s article in Doyle 2005, Best Catholic Writing 2005. It describes the pain of those, like the Gibson family, who felt betrayed by Vatican II, and why the disaffected arch-conservative and conspiratorially minded might be attracted to the visions of a sixteenth-century mystic rather than the advances in scriptural knowledge of the last century. I found my own spiritual comfort in The Passion and Death of Jesus (Wansbrough 2003) and A Crucified Christ in Holy Week (Brown 1986). There is also Hans Urs von Balthasar’s classic study, Mysterium Paschale. The Mystery of Easter (von Balthasar 1990). He plays on the paradoxes of the divine revealing and hiding itself simultaneously. Michael Hogan’s editions (1990 and 1992) give the documentation on social justice in the Australian Catholic Church to 1987. Judith A. Merkle, From the Heart of the Church. The Catholic Social Tradition (2004) has been a valuable aid, and American Catholic Religious Thought (Carey 2004) and Creative Fidelity (Appleby et al. 2004) gives a broader perspective. Kevin A. McKenna (2000) has A Concise Guide to Canon Law. A Practical Handbook for Pastoral Ministers. For me, the most important study on the laity in the Church was Paul Lakeland, The Liberation of the Laity. In Search of an Accountable Church (2003). But Lay Ministry in the Catholic Church. Visioning Church Ministry through the Wisdom of the Past (Miller 2005) and Common Calling. The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church (Pope 2004) were equally inspiring. The more professionally engaged in the pastoral ministry might be interested in Avis 2005 and Klimowski et al. 2005. The Catechism of the Catholic Church with Cardinal Josef Ratzinger’s imprimatur has been on my desk since the beginning of Church Alive! (Anon 1994). I learned much of the spirit and practicalities of catechetics from What Do I Do Now? A Guide for the Reluctant Catechist (Pearson and Stark 2005). Dispirited as I was by the Church-in-Rome’s – and the local churches all over the world – ‘bad faith’ in the face of sexual abuses by its priests and religious, I decided not to go in that line in my research. As far as I could see, the parish was untouched by this scandal, except indirectly with the diminished respect for both the Church and the priesthood in the rest of the Church. Donal Cozzens, Sacred Silence. Denial and Crisis in the Church (2002) is as good

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an entry as any into the issues. Bleichner 2004, Greeley 2004 and Rosetti 2005 are witnesses to the faithful face of the priesthood that tends to fade in times of crisis like this. Perhaps because my whole life as been engaged in the public conversations of the social sciences and humanities, nothing has scandalised me more than the Church-in-Rome’s lack of Christian hope in public theological discourse and its cruel injustice towards individual scholars. I leave it to Paul Collins (1997, 2001 and 2004) to speak to that blindness and injustice. The quotation from Martin Luther King’s Nobel Prize Speech is copyright to The Estate of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. King Jr is quoted in an ‘Introduction to Boston College and its Jesuit and Catholic Tradition’, What are We? Centre for Ignatian Spirituality, Boston College, 2002, p. 80.

Epilogue: Pilgrim parish The citation from Piers Plowman is taken from the entry ‘Pilgrimages’ in The Catholic Encyclopaedia. Online Edition 2003. WWW.Advent.Org. Copyright Kevin Knight.

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Anne Kearney Living History Prayer Oils on Canvas Easter Painting. Within a vertical format we are confronted with agitated brushwork in charcoals and black tones, substantially relieved by delicate mauves and a fern-like pattern. Faces peer – images of abandonment, fear, entreaty or endurance. Guided by the network of restless brush strokes we arrive into a more open area. An explosion of rich reds, yellows, cream and magenta streak horizontally across the canvas. These luscious colours inundate our senses until they launch us back down into more tense spaces where the figures re-emerge and the process is repeated.

Sacred Space Untitled Photographic collage with mixed media My response to the suggestion of a painting in honour of Sacred Space was twofold – enthusiasm accompanied by apprehension. I knew just as quickly, that I would not want to depict the internal spaces of places of worship. Already there are both words and photos to amply record that aspect of Christian history. Enriched by the concerns of feminist, environmental and political theologies,

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sacred space now has wider implications for us even as it incorporates earlier understandings. To focus exclusively on internal spaces, places set apart from ordinary living, or places devoted exclusively to ritual would seem to reinstate the separation between the sacred and profane spheres, a dichotomy which has at times had a history of creating a gulf between groups – effectively those deemed acceptable within religious fraternities, and those rejected. If we take seriously the Incarnation, we find that ‘setting apart’ is the very opposite of what the mystery has to say to us. God has gone to the ultimate lengths in pain and suffering to remove the barriers between us, to be with us. Struggle as we may, we can never fully understand such unrestrained graciousness. Consequently, the sacred penetrates our everydayness, our messiness, right to the very tensions of our lives. Our profanity, our brokenness is potentially turned around itself becoming the subject of transformation. We struggle with the challenge to allow even our anxieties to be overcome by this all-encompassing Reality. A stone Buddha is positioned slightly off-centre in the design. Its presence lends gravity and composure. Around the borders and throughout the work, varied fragments of traditional patterns appear in rich and vibrant pastel hues. Where the surfaces are built up a two-dimensional effect takes place, adding intensity. Within an animated surface other cultures are glimpsed, other mythologies are referenced. The concern here is to make these inclusions naturally without disrupting the flow of the work. Neither clear definitions, nor exactness are striven for, rather the intention is to allow the richness, the sensuality to be enjoyed, the possibilities to be freely explored.

Sacred Time Ancient Land Collage with mixed media Approaching the elusive subject of sacred time, I had only a single idea to guide me. I did not have any particular subject or theme that presented itself as right or adequate. None were forthcoming. I had made copious notes in visual diaries in the preceding months along with related reading and listening. Finally, with time running out, there was only one diary entry that gave me the impetus to begin. It suggested: let it start with reverence … Leave space for awe … A parched pathway leads through layered surfaces to a lush rain forest canopy,

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passing a lifeguard’s lookout perched on a deserted beach. We encounter scraggy branch-like lines throughout, juxtaposed with stylised or highly organised foliage motifs. Predominantly cool tones finally turn into dark blue-blacks suggestive of profound watery depths.

Mystery Ceramic Tablets Clay, underglazes, crackle glaze Working with clay, one is immediately in touch with some of humanity’s earliest, most touching and dazzlingly creative endeavours. Egyptian craftsmen fashioned clay vessels in the fourth millennium BCE. Pre-Columbian societies were using handmade clay objects by around 3000 BCE. Anthropologists have found prehistoric statues of gods and dignitaries, decorative objects and strikingly abstract sculptures throughout Mexico.The great British sculptor Henry Moore is said to have openly declared his debt to these works, acknowledging that the courage to create spaces within his own forms was due to the influence of these early works. Visits to museums throughout the world yield a rich viewing of clay artefacts intended as drinking vessels, storage jars for grain, water, wine, oil – the staples of human existence and a mode of preservation for precious documents. The desires invested in those items by their creators have recognisable counterparts in our own time. We feast off authentic hope, only to topple backwards into fear and self-doubt. Above all we thirst for evidence and reassurance that the God in whom we hope will continue to journey with us. We long for a new awareness of that presence and the confidence it brings. The handmade tablets are simple forms relying on subtle markings rather than bold statements. Occasionally the crackle glaze gives the surface a worn and weathered appearance. The charcoal green underglaze is restrained in distribution at times, giving way to a barely perceptible basket-weave pattern.

Believing Landscape Monotype with photographic collage Collage is an endlessly challenging and fascinating medium. The nature of the process requires that one selects a number of disparate materials, each capable of creating its own mood, and brings them together to form an entirely new entity. In order

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for this to happen satisfactorily, their once unrelated edges, torn or cut, must be placed in new relationships that are convincing. A temple complex photograph is superimposed on to a landscape. A mask-like image is on the surface, perhaps exposed where the land surface has been disturbed. The skilfully crafted and positioned blocks of stone create a massive sculptural form, which in turn suddenly bursts open to give us a sweeping slice of sky. This openness sits in contrast to the denseness of the earth, which is not yielding any lushness or shelter to our view.

Celebrating Eucharist Ceramic Window with Hand Painted Tiles We are looking into a group of familiar objects that signify domestic connections. We already have the experience to accommodate them effortlessly. They invite easy interaction and we can move freely among them. The patterns and the translucent glazes might suggest calming effects or revive treasured connections. Out of the same clay, a window has been formed with traces of lace over its surface. Draped across the top is a small necklace of rare Ocean Jasper and Mother of Pearl. Viewed as an entity, this group evokes fond memories of family, domesticity, security, places of acceptance, of things deemed precious, experiences that have nurtured and sustained us. While each piece is positioned as carefully as an altar set for liturgy, our expectations are raised and then dashed. Not everything within the arrangement is familiar or predictable. Blocked out windows stare blindly back at us. More attention to its parts, more patience might temper the impact. Who/what is acceptable for inclusion?

Priestliness Antique Woven Farmers Coat Dry point etching ‘It’s a pathway.’ ‘It’s a passage emerging out of rocks.’ ‘It’s a turning, taking you off into unexplored directions.’ ‘There is a cross at the bottom.’ These comments sprang from a group of friends on first seeing this print. As they were generally unaware of the real nature of the book for which all the images were being created, the spiritual connections in their responses caught me by surprise.

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Yet, you may be wondering: why such an open-ended image for priestliness? Where are the traditional symbols: the holy oils, the stole, the blessing hands? It will be obvious to viewers of this and the following images that their personal responses are legitimate, that no single ‘correct’ interpretation is required. Rather, the nature of the works encourages a variety of responses. My experiences of the power of images leads naturally to a hope that the very absence of symbols which so effortlessly evoke our ideas of the priesthood – holy oils, the stole, the blessing hands – can facilitate fresh understandings. As soon as I began to explore the idea of the coat, I was excited by the possibilities it offered. It seemed to announce stillness and receptivity, to be about fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, to be a powerful symbol of abundance and deprivation. There is an obvious strength, or a quality of endurance in the tightly woven garment, even while it waits for human intervention and completion. This waiting, however, is not about passivity. It has a history. It has a certain awareness and nobility. Already the garment has been altered beyond its original plainness by detailed embroidery, lovingly added to it over hours of painstaking work. The outstretched arms indicate readiness for muscle, for bones and connective tissue, for Mass and weight. It feels like a gesture laden with risk and vulnerability. When I prepared the plate for printing, the areas beneath the arms were comprehensively cleaned and scraped – whether deliberately or not, it is difficult to recall. When it emerged from the press, I was surprised to find the effect this had – the viewer now has unlimited spaciousness to explore. Ultimately, the image speaks to me of unconditional tenderness.

Calling Woman Monotype with Ceramic Tablet This type of medium sprang readily to mind for the subject matter above as it offers scope to work on the print after it leaves the press, hence the possibility of added surface treatments and further readings. One day prior to the nine o’clock Mass, Fr Peter Quin stood before us and outlined a situation he had just left. ‘I have come from visiting a good friend in hospital,’ he announced. ‘She has been looking forward to giving birth to a baby for years. Now she is nursing a stillborn child.’ Visibly shaken, he admitted to having no words adequate to assuage her grief.

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What struck me at that moment was his willingness to remain present to those parents, despite a keen awareness of his own inadequacy. It seemed to me then that all of us present – for we had all become connected to the loss of that couple – were looking into the very heart and essence of compassion. His willingness, along with that of many pastors before him, to stay with his friends and later to reopen the wound with us, spoke powerfully of the presence of The Other throughout our various tragedies. The extended grief of those parents finds an echo throughout the world in everyday grief, but also with parents whose sons and daughters will not return from war, in families where innocent children are destroyed in zones of conflict, by those who speak out against inhumane regimes only to disappear forever, by the families who refuse to pick up arms to kill another, only to see their homes destroyed, their wives and children violated. The ‘grieving woman’ made to honour these experiences is the courageous dissident who speaks out, the one who can tell us about random acts of violence. She waits for the power of a corrupt dictatorship to crumble precariously clinging to hope. Superimposed on her face is a ceramic tablet, partly obscuring it. The tablet itself has been ruptured; its fine edges are irregular. It is now merely a shard. Its glazed surface is scratched and agitated in places. Among the marks impressed into the surface are remnants of human figures running frantically.

Ministering Landscape with Buddha Collage with mixed media A Buddha sits centrally in the lower part of the work. Photographic collage, pastel and works on paper have been freely used throughout. The work has probably been constructed from top to bottom, but we can enter at any point, from which a variety of experiences are likely. Different elements of landscape intersect – sometimes with a body of water, at others with architectural details. Frequently behind these, black linear areas show through, lending emphasis to the carved lines. The shifting planes take us briefly into areas with busy linear patterns, but on the whole the textures construct a mood of deep reflection and repose. The colours contribute to the prevailing mood. Although we are drawn into an area of tropical reds and orange to the left of the Buddha, cool colours – from lime greens to purple prevail. Neither the playful treatment of foliage on the left of the Buddha, nor the more brittle, angular forms to the right disrupt the play on attentiveness and awareness.

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O’Malley, John W. 1993. The First Jesuits. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. O’Malley, John W., SJ, John W. Padberg, SJ, and Vincent O’Keefe, SJ, 1990. Jesuit Spirituality: A Now and Future Resource. Chicago: Loyola University Press. Odozor, Pulinus I. 2003. Moral Theology in an Age of Renewal. A Study of the Catholic Tradition since Vatican II. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. Ormerod, Neil 1997. Introducing Contemporary Theologies: The What and the Who of Theology Today. Newtown, NSW: E. J. Dwyer. O’Sullivan, Dominic. 2005. Faith, Politics and Reconciliation. Catholicism and the Politics of Indigeneity. Adelaide: ATF Press. Padberg, John W., SJ, (ed.) 1977. Documents of the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus. St.Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources. —— 1996. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complementary Norms: A Complete English Translation of the Official Latin Texts. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources. Park, Margaret (ed.) 1996. Naming North Sydney. North Sydney: North Sydney Council. Parratt, John (ed.) 2004. An Introduction to Third World Theologies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pelikan, Jaroslav 1965. The Christian Intellectual. New York: Harper & Row. —— 1993. Christianity and Classical Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pelikan, Jaroslav, David Flusser and Justin Lang, OFM, 2005. Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Pierson, Dan and Susan Stark 2005. What Do I Do Now? A Guide for the Reluctant Catechist. Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum Publishing Group. Pine-Coffin, R. S. (ed.) 1961. Saint Augustine, Confessions, tr. R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin Books. Pettenger, Norman 1967. God in Process. London: SCM Press. Pixner, Bargil 1997. ‘Jerusalem’s Essene Gateway’, in Biblical Archeological Review, May/June, www.centiury one.org/essene.html. Placher, William C. (ed.) 2005. Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans. Pope, Stephen J. (ed.) 2004. Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church. Washington: Georgetown University Press. Porter, Jeanne. 2005. Leading Lessons: Insights on Leadership for Women of the Bible. Minneapolis: Augsburg Books. Prendergast, Michael R. (ed.) 2003. Full, Conscious and Active Participation: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Today’s Liturgy. Portland, Oregon: Pastoral Press. Prendergast, Michael R. and M. D. Ridge (eds) 2004. Voices from the Council. Portland, Oregon: Pastoral Press. Rahner, Karl, SJ, 1990. Ignatius the Theologian, tr. Michael Barry. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Rankin, Baptista 1975. The History of Monte Sant’ Angelo College, North Sydney. North Sydney: Sisters of Mercy. Ricoeur, Paul 1984–1988. Time and Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —— 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, Edwin (ed.) 2002. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Meditations on Psalms. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan. Rosetti, Stephen J. 2005. The Joy of Priesthood. New York: Ave Maria Press. Rowland, Tracey 2003. Culture and the Thomist Tradition after Vatican II. London: Routledge. Ruether, Rosemary Radford 1988. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Rumley, Katrina 2003. Roland Wakelin: Master of Colour: A Newcastle Regional Art Gallery Exhibition. Newcastle, NSW: Newcastle Region Art Gallery.

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Russell, Eric 1990. The Opposite Shore: North Sydney and Its People. Surrey Hills, NSW: John Ferguson for The North Shore Historical Society and Council of the Municipality of North Sydney. Schillebeeckx, Edward 2004. God Is New Each Moment, Edward Schillebeeckx in Conversation with Huub Oosterhuis and Piet Hoogeveen, tr. David Smith. New York: Continuum. Schneiders, Sandra M., I. H. M. 2000. Religious Life in a New Millennium, Volume One: Finding the Treasure, Locating Catholic Religious Life in a New Ecclesial and Cultural Context. New York: Paulist Press. —— 2001. Religious Life in a New Millennium, Volume Two: Selling All, Commitment, Consecrated Celibacy and Community in Religious Life. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. Schreck, Alan 2005. Vatican II: The Crisis and the Promise. Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press. Schweizer, Eduard 1991. A Theological Introduction to the New Testament, tr. O. C. Dean, Jr. London: SPCK. Seasoltz, R. Kevin 2005. A Sense of the Sacred: Theological Foundations of Christian Architecture and Art. New York: Continuum. Sharpe, Sally D. (ed.) 2004. 365 Meditations for Women by Women. Nashville: Dimensions. Sheppy, Paul P. J. 2003. Death, Liturgy and Ritual, Volume I: A Pastoral and Liturgical Theology. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. Slater, John 2004. Through Artists’ Eyes: Australian Suburbs and Their Cities, 1919–1945. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press of Melbourne University Press. Spong, John Shelby 1991. Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture. San Francisco: Harper Collins. —— 1992. Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus. San Francisco: Harper Collins. —— 2000. Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love, and Equality. New York: Harper Collins. Strong, David, SJ, 1995. Jesuits in Australia: An Ethnographic History of the Society of Jesus in Australia. Richmond, Victoria: Aurora Books. —— 1997. The College on the Harbour. Sydney: Hale & Ironmonger. —— 1999. The Australian Dictionary of Jesuit Biography, 1848–1998. Rushcutters Bay, NSW: Halstead Press. Sword, Meg 1976. ‘St. Mary’s North Sydney—120 Years’, North Shore Historical Society, 16: 1–2. —— 1977. ‘Jeremiah Crowley, North Sydney Schoolmaster, 1860–1900’, in North Shore Historical Society, 17. —— 1980. ‘Centenary of St. Francis Xavier’s Church, Lavender Bay’, in North Shore Historical Society, 20: 6–7. —— 1981. One Hundred Years. St. Francis Xavier’s, Lavender Bay, 1881–1981. Surrey Hills: Westworth Press. —— 1981a. A History of St. Francis Xavier’s, Lavender Bay, 1881–1981, Unabridged Version. Parish Archives. Szpak, Cheryl 1998. ‘A History of Aboriginal Occupation of the North Shore’, North Shore Historical Society. Tanner, Norman 2005. The Church and the World: Gaudium et Spes, Inter Miriofica. New York/Mahwah, NJ: Pauline Press. Taylor, Richard 2003. How to Read a Church: A Guide to Images, Symbols and Meanings in Churches and Cathedrals. Sydney: Random House. Tilley, Terence W. 2000. Inventing Catholic Tradition. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. —— (ed.) 2004. New Horizons in Theology. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books. Tillich, Paul 1965. The Courage To Be. Clinton, Massachusetts: Colonial Press. Torevell, David 2000. Losing the Sacred: Ritual, Modernity and Liturgical Reform. Edinburgh: T and T Clark.

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Index Entries in bold print indicate colour section. A Seed that Grew 30–1, 87 aboriginal, dispossession of 131 aggiornamento 9, 17, 108 Alaqoque, St Margaret Mary 58 ambiguity 137–8 An Agreed Statement 198–9 Anderson, Peter and Joy 229 angelus 23–4, 35, 97,100 anthropologists 13, 25, 31 archives 46, 67 Arnold, Deirdre 254 Arrupe, Pedro SJ 63–6, 81, 83, 108, 159, 166, 173 and Australia 81–2, 166 and compassion 64 as modern man 64 at Hiroshima 173 Assumption 194, 197 Auerbach, Eric 69–70 authority 118–19 Baird, Diana 254 Balthasar, Hans Urs Von 17 baptism 46–7, 147, 178 Barry, Sr Margaret RSM 265, 254 Bashir, Professor Marnie 202 Bateman, Dr T. 173 Baum, Gregory 17 Baumann, William 142, 254 beatitudes 71–2, 186 Becks, Paul SJ 181

Bekkers, Willem 235 Belfrage, George SJ 85, 86, 165, 167, 173, 189, 226 beliefs 116, 119 believing 117 Bellew, Juliana 254 Benaud, Lou and Joan 229 Benedict XVI 25, 79, 143–4 see also Ratzinger, Cardinal Joseph benediction 50 Benedictine Adorers 204 Berthier, Jacques 140 Better World Movement 44 Bishop, Pat SJ 140, 242 Blake, William 158 Bobola, St Andrew 41 Boff, Leonardo 222 Boland, Jenny 202 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 112, 225 on religion 71 on the Magnificat 73 on worldliness 77, 79 Bowman, Judith 220 Boys, Ron 254 Brady, Bishop John 33 breaking bread 101, 103, 263 Justin Martyr on 105 Paul on, St 114, 115 Brennan, Frank SJ 130, 131, 149, 150, 254 Bristow, Kerry 106, 254 Brothers, Marist 46, 81, 190 Brown, Raymond SS 138, 174 Bruegemann, Walter 225, 227, 228

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Buckley, Vincent 169 Bullen, Andrew SJ 141, 254 Burger, Henry 254 Burger, Jenny 254 Byrne, Ambrose ‘Sam’ SJ 82ff Byrne, Brendan SJ 138 BVM, Sodality of the 47, 197 Cahill, Margaret 255 calling 209ff Camara, Helder 186, 225 Cameron, Ida 254 Cammeray 26 Cammeraygal 129 candles, votive 148 Canisius College 45 Caretto, Carlo 101 catechism 109, 111, 233 catharsis 55, 60–1, 113 Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace 226 Catholic identity 21, 37–8, 49–50, 204–5 Caulfield-James, Brendan SJ 156 celebrating 120, 146 centenary 40–4 Certeau, Michel de 32 change, religious 63–75 Chardin, Teilhard de SJ 64, 74, 75, 108, 115, 174, 222 charism 118, 121, 146, 206, 209, 215, 231 Chikarowski, Kerry 202 Children of Mary 47, 197 Chisholm, Caroline 186 Christ, and gender 193, 200 Christmas 150-1 Christoph, Peter 254 Church and triumphalism 76, 79 and women 201 bad faith of 159 Eucharistic community 98 fortress 225–6 institutional 98, 119, 180, 185 metaphors of 158, 164 scandals in 48, 79 Pilgrim 41, 76, 80, 124, 201, 252–3 ‘Perfect Society’ 48 Coleman, Paul SJ 86, 124, 125, 165, 167, 227, 234 collegiality 65, 160, 165, 228 Collins, Catherine 46 Collins, John 46 communion 146 communion of saints 111, 196

community 104, 123 companionship 108, 167 confession 58, 118–19 confirmation 147 Congars, Yves 17, 64, 169, 174 Connolly, Mgr Tom 206–7 Conroy, John 255 Conroy, Linda 254 conscience 78, 121, 124, 235 Cooney, Mavis 254 Costello, Emmet SJ 95, 100, 185 Costelloe, Tom SJ 164 Costigan, Michael 19, 228, 254 Costigan, Siobhan 254 Cox, Frank 225, 248–9 Cox, Harvey 227 Cranfield, Julie 254 creed 117 Cresp, Mary 254 Daly, Bernard 32–3, 35, 46 Daly, Tom SJ 162 dancing 94, 129–30, 207 D’Arcy, Genine 254, 255 D’Arcy, James 254 Darmody, Louise 255 Davey, Genevieve 254 Day, Dorothy 186, 225 Deplanke, Jean-Michel 255 depression 92, 98 Dettlinger, Josef 164, colour devotions 197–8 Dezza, Paoloa SJ 66 dialogue 78–9, 201–2, 203, 253 Dillard, Annie 109 docetists 61 Duffy, Eamon 61, 62, 75 Doogue, Geraldine 202 Dowick, Stephanie 202 Drover, Anne 254 Duffy, Marie 254 Duncan, Carmen 202 Durkheim, Emile 17 Dwyer, Caroline 254 Dwyer, Des SJ 96 Dynon, James SJ 86, 164–5 Easter 101, 106, 114 Egan, Jim 254 Elijah 28–9 Emmaus 102–3, 115 Empereur, Jake SJ 110, 230 epiousios 14

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Epiphany 93 Essene 12, 103 Eucharist 101, 188, 238 and real presence 54, 56–7 consecration 57 ministry of 91, 245, 250–1 names for 104 faith 69, 75, 125, 235 Family Ministry 106, 147, 247–8 Farrell, Jennifer 255 Farrell, Noreen 254 Fatima 58, 195–6, 197 First Communion 108–9, 147 First Reconciliation 108–9, 112, 147 Flannery, Rosemary 173, 254 Folk Mass 129, 141, 156, 179 Forsythe, Jackie 125 Fowell, J.C. 171 Fox, Bill 229 Fraser, Morag 202 freedom 119, 219 Frings, Cardinal Joseph 18 fundamentalism 110, 132, 200 Garner, Helen 202 Gasset, Ortega y 127 Gaudium et Spes 19, 20–1, 80, 219 Gelineau, Joseph SJ 17, 129, 143 Gemmell, Tricia 254 gender 193–4 Geogheghan, Bridget 46 Gibbons, Bill 254 Gibbons, Josephine 254 Giglio, Michael 255 Gillespie, Bruce 254 Gilroy, Cardinal Norman 18, 40–1, 44, 164 Giveney, Claire 229 Glacken, Maire 255 Goggin, Denys 254 Golden, Jeremiah SJ 168–171, 246 Good Friday 101, 102, 152–3, 218 Gould, Bishop John 34 Grail 46, 204, 219, 220–1, 251 Gray, Antoinette 254 Gray, Michael 255 Green, Philippa 254, 255 Greiner, Kathryn 202 Gribble, Jenny 254 Gutierrez, Gustavo 222 habits, religious 211–13, 216–17 Hall, Claudia 255

Hamilton, Andrew SJ 255 hands, laying on 161–2, 231 Haring, Bernard 17, 161 Harmer, Wendy 202 Harrington, Mrs 254 Hartnett, Cornelius SJ 154 Harris, Richard SJ 182–3 Harte, John SJ 156 Haugen, Marty 140 Head, Ellen 46 Healing, Sacrament of 179 Heaton, Mother Philomena IBVM 204 Hebblethwaite, Peter 68 Heywood, Paul 254 historians 25, 32, 67 history, living 9, 24, 259 Hogan, Michael 226 Holborrow, Barbara 202 holiness 109, 112, 143 Hollows, Gabi 202 Holy Name Society 47, 197 Holy Thursday 101 Hood, Graeme 254, 255 hope 16, 21, 26, 62, 65, 86, 202 Humanae Vitae 21, 78, 165, 184, 222 humanity and the divine 30 of Jesus 71, 138, 191 Hunter, Sophie 254 imagination 158–9 Catholic 47–8, 51, 59, 61 prophetic 21, 26, 30, 62, 65, 206, 267, 224ff, 228 Immaculate Conception 27, 194, 197 inculturated 65, 74, 81, 230 infallibility 36, 67 ‘Irish Bishops’ 37–8 Jesuits and prophetic imagination 227 apostolate 45, 82–3, 162, 188 Australian identity 45 Arrupe on 82 come to North Shore 38 Indian Mission 229–30 martyrs 42 passion for translation 27 renewal 82–4, 166–7 Jesuit Refugee Service 191 Jesus, Society of see Jesuits John Paul II 65–6, 74, 79–80, 84, 106, 112, 130, 143–4, 159, 196, 201

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John XXIII 62, 122, 132, 200 and modernism 68 as historian 67 caged in papacy 16–17 death 19 on faith 69 on modern world 108 on prophets of gloom 61 opening Vatican II 15–21, 68–9 Johnson, Elizabeth A. 193, 199–200 Johnston, Henry A. SJ 30, 42, 87, 88, 168 Joncas, Michael 140, 142 Jones, Caroline 202, 254 Jones, Gerald SJ 185 Joose, Danielle 152 Joseph of Nazareth 196 journey 125, 201 Jungmann, Josef SJ 17 Justin Martyr 105 Kearney, Anne 9, colour, 22, 89, 116, 145, 177, 208, 236, 254, 255, 270–4 Kelly, Austin SJ 30 Kelly, Kerry 254 Kelly, Peter SJ 48 Kennedy, Bridget 254, 255 Kennedy, Douglas 254 Kennedy, James SJ 38 Kennedy, Sr Marnie 125, 126, 251 Kennedy, Noel 173 Kennedy, Ted 225 Kenny, Dean John 36, 42, 204 Kerrin, Patricia 255 Kiarabilli 26, 129 Kim, Andrew SJ 162 King, Martin Luther Jr 112, 186, 224 kings 225 kiss of peace 54 Koch, Sr Clare 125 koinonia 14 Kricker, Jan 254 Kuhn, Thomas 201 Kung, Hans 17 Lachal, Louis SJ 185 laity 174 Lakeland, Paul 176 language 30, 56, 62, 74, 80–1, 129, 137, 138 and gender 193 and prophecy 227 as instrument of power 56 of liturgy 128 Lee, Dorothy 202

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Lees, Tom SJ 162 Legion of Mary 47, 197 Lent 44, 99–100, 121, 132 Leo XIII 186, 226 L’Estrange, Dr T. 173 Liber Status Animarum 52–3 Link, Vera 202 litany 194–5 Lithgow, Wiliam 35 Little, Peter SJ 43–4 liturgy 53, 104 and justice 231 as performance colour, 110, 138 postmodern 54 Vatican II on 61 Lock, Kath 229 Logue, Sr M. Cleophas RSM 207 Lombardi, Ricardo SJ 44 Lonergan, Claire 255 Loreto, Sisters of 46, 81, 204, 218–19 Loughnan, Louis SJ 185 love 122, 123 Lowery, Bede SJ 162 Loyola, Ignatius 27, 63, 65, 135 Loyola College 45 Lubac, Henri de SJ 17, 64 Lumen Gentium 80, 219 Lyotard, Jean-François 228 Macey, Rosemary 255 MacKillop, Blessed Mary 34, 130, 186, 204, 211, 213, 225 MacKillop, Donald SJ 130 MacMahon, John J. SJ 166 McCarthy, Dennis 229 McCurdy, Tony 254 McClemens, Justice ‘Jock’ 229 McKenna, David 254, 265 McEvoy, Patrick SJ 174 McCormack, Sr Irene 186 McInerney, Jim SJ 185 McInerney, Phil SJ 185 McMahon, Geri 153 McNab, Duncan 130 McNamara, Sheila 255 McQuoin, Sr Ignatius RSM 203 McRobie, Pat 173 Madden, Eileen 229 Madonna 19, 43, 198 Magan, James SJ 42, 164 Magnificat 71-2, 196–7 Maher, Frank SJ 162 Maréchal, Joseph SJ 174, 179

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marriage 46 Martin, Patricia 254 Martin, Philip 5 Mary, Mother of Jesus 13 see also Miriam of Nazareth mass 181 Arthur Stone’s 51–60 children’s 120, 125, 147, 247–8 dialogue 56 for the dead 43 St Francis Xavier’s 92, 139, 154 weekdays 97 Masterson, John 54 Mayne, Charles SJ 185 Meagher, Terry and Dolor 229 meditation 100, 153–4, 156 Memorare 24, 194–5 memory 24, 134, 227, 228 Mercy, Sisters of 33, 36, 46, 81, 203–4, 222–3 Merrick, Moya 173 Merton, Thomas 225 Merwick, Donna 23, 254, 255, 263 metaphor 41, 62, 74, 117 Mina, Thuma 140 ministry 191, 232, 237ff Eucharistic 91, 238, 240–1, 245, 246–7, 250–1 Music 141–2, 243–4 Teaching 215 Theology of 219 Miriam of Nazareth 27, 73, 193ff see also Mary, Mother of Jesus Messenger of the Sacred Heart 43 mission 44–5 Monahan, John SJ 162 Montcheuil, Yves de 169 Montini, Cardinal Giovanni see Paul VI Moor, Stephen colour Moran, Cardinal Patrick Francis 36 Morgan, Joy 254 Mounier, Gabriel 169 Mung, George 233 Mungoven, Barney 46, 254 Muldoon, Bishop Thomas 170 Murphy, Carmen 202, 203, 249 Murphy, Michael 254, 256 Murphy, Richard SJ 30 Murray, John Courtney SJ 17, 166 Murray, Les 9, 77 music, sacred 140–44 ministry of 141–2, 149, 241–2 mystery 90, 178, 181, 187

names 26–30 Nazareth 196 Newman, Cardinal John Henry 40, 64 Newman Society 81, 169 Norquay, Youlla 255 O’Brien, Anne 254 O’Brien, Joan 255 O’Brien, Trish 254 O’Connor, Des SJ 185 O’Dea, Michael 255 Oder, P.H. 254 O’Donovan, Tom SJ 240, 246 O’Hara, Tom SJ 152 ordination 45, 94–5, 161, 190–1, 231 women’s 200, 201 otherness 193, 225 othersidedness 27, 253 orthodoxy 183–5 Ottaviani, Cardinal Alfredo 17 Our Lady of the Way 98, 106, colour paradigm 70–76 parish book of 52–3 Byrne on 82-4 collegiality of 65 creating tradition 132 extent of 36 future of 86, 108 statistics 46–7, 78 without boundaries 41–2 Parish Councils 87, 172, 173–4, 189 Parish Survey 88 Passover 11, 12 Pastoral Meeting 135, 240 Pastoral Associates 106, 132, 234, 238–9, 249–50 Pastoral Ministry 84–5 Paul VI 19, 79 and Humanae Vitae 21, 78 and anti-modernist oath 68 closes Vatican II 20 Paxton, Michael 152, 254, 256 Pearson, Anne 254 Pentecost 11–15 People of God 19, 21, 76, 123 Perfectae Caritatis 206 performance 117 Philips, Gerard 17 Pike, Annalise 254 pilgrimage 41, 65, 90 123, 251 Pirola, Teresa 202

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Pius IX 27, 36–7 Pius X 49, 67, 68, 142 Pius XI 226 Pius XII 17, 194, 212 Polding, Archbishop John Bede OSB 35, 131 Pooley, Celestine 254 postmodern 54, 107,193–4, 201, 261 Powell, Rev Dr Peter 32–5, 42, 253 prayer 124, 126, 222 preaching 94, 119, 147, 175, 179, 182 priestliness 86, 161, 163, 178–91, 225 process 65, 262 processions 44 prophets 14, 225 Pyne, Nicholas and Mary 32 Pryke, Roger 81, 169 Quade, Janet 255 Quarrell, Yvonne 254 Quen Vu SJ 163 Quadragesimo Anno 226 Quiberee 26, 129 Quigley, Hugo SJ 185 Quin, Peter SJ 23, 25, 86, 93, 94, 100, 124, 147, 165, 167, 173, 175, 185, 227, 249, 254 Quinlan, Tim SJ 174, 254 Rahner, Karl SJ 17, 64, 143, 174, 193, 228 Rankin, David SJ 156 Rawi, Mahboba 202 reading 32, 132, 234 real presence 54 reconciliation 95–6, 155 registers, parish 46–7 relics 41–2 Rerum Novarum 186, 226 Ricoeur, Paul 78 Riordan, Tom 153 Rite of Christian Initiation 175, 234, 249–50 ritual 53, 55, 102 Roche, Catherine 46 Rofe, Sr Deirdre IBVM 202 Rolheiser, Ronald OMI 126 Romanin, Celso SJ 86, 140, 156, 185, 254 Romero, Oscar 112, 186, 25 Roncalli, Angelo see John XXIII rosary 196 Ruhan, Tony SJ 254 Rush, Margaret 254 Russell, Letty 202 Ryan, Martin 255 Ryan, Noel SJ 88 sacramental 14, 16, 180

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Sacred Heart 47, 58, 197 Sacred Space colour conflict over 168–171 Sacred Time colour saints, communion of 27 Saliers, Don E. 128 salvation 65 Samaritan woman 134–37 Scanlon, John 173 Schillebeeckx, Edward OP 17, 64, 143 Schutte, Don 139, 140 scripture 133 Shakeshaft, Margaret 254 Shavu’ot 11–14 Sheen, Mgr Fulton 60, 179 Shepherd, Janine 202 Sheridan, Denis SJ 86, 156 signs 53 silence 137, 181, 231 Silk, Tom colour, 254 sin 58–9, 112 sisters, religious 203ff Smedt, Emile-Joseph 18, 159 Smith, Anthony SJ 86, 106, 112, 113, 152, 155, 185 Smith, Cecil SJ 185 Sneddon, Henry SJ 248 Smyth, Tim 255 Sobb, Joseph SJ 86, 156, 185, 254 Social Justice Statements 226 social justice 149, 185, 186, 228 Society of Mary, Missionary Sisters of 204 song 13, 129, 139–44 Soubiroux, St Bernadette 37 Spirit at work 14, 15, 18, 121, 125, 258 in Christ 193 Spiritual Exercises 85, 135, 136–7 spirituality 85, 148, 213, 214 St Joseph, Sisters of 46, 81, 123, 210–11, 212–13 St Francis Xavier’s colour St Mary’s colour consecration 41–2 wooden church 35 St Vincent de Paul 47, 230, 244–5, 248-9 Stamp, Jack SJ 173 Star of the Sea colour, 28, 29, 154 Stations of the Cross colour, 101, 102, 164, 218 Staunton, Kevin SJ 86, 156, 164 Steele, Peter SJ 141, 189 Stone, Arthur SJ 48–60, 248

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Stoney, Brian SJ 173, 186 stories 13, 26, 71, 110, 111, 202, 205–6 Suenens, Cardinal Leo Joseph 18, 174 Summerhayes, Kathryn 254, 255 symbols 53, 54, 180 Taize 139, 140 Talbot House 186, 244–5 Taniane, Peter 255 Taylor, Brendan 254 Taylor, Donal SJ 152, 185, 254 Taylor, Judi 202, 254 Tertullian 199, 200 Teresa, Mother 112, 186 theatre 16, 41, 57, 97, 110, 137, 147, 152, 205 Teresa House 32, 38–9, 42 Therry, Archpriest John Joseph 32, 34, 38, 253 theology dialogue in 228 education in 215–16, 223, 233–4 environmental colour liberation 28, 73, 105 moral 59, 161, 162 The Other Side see Wallumetta Thompson, Joanne 255 Thompson, Ruth 255 Thuan, Cardinal Van 186 Tighe, Christine 254 Tillard, Jean-Marie 17 time see Sacred Time deep 130 Timmoney, Sheila 229 Toohey, Vince 254 Toner, Gabrielle 202 Tothill, Ann 255 Torevell, David 110 tradition 65, 74, 75–6, 133, 141, 187 translation 27–8, 130, 137, 138 transubstantiation 109 Travers-Ball, Ian SJ 187 Treseder, Robyn 255, colour Tusino, Judy 255 Tyacke, Elizabeth 254

Uniya 130 Upper Room 11, 12, 13, 80, 103, 106 Vatican Council I 16, 76 Vatican Council II 15–21, 54, 61, 79, 80–1 Vaughan, Archbishop Roger OSB 37, 38 vestments 53–4, 55 Visitations, Episcopal 47 Wakelin, Roland colour Wallumetta 23, 26, 30, 129 Wallumetta, The Other Side 33 Walsh, Robert SJ 86, 185, 248 Walsh, Thomas SJ 43 Walton, Jane 230–1 Ward, Mary 204, 219 Watts, Trish 202 Weigel, Gustav 169 Ward, Rachel 202 Ward, Joan 229 Wardell, William Wilkinson 164, 173, colour Weaver, Jacki 202 Webber, Molly 254 Webster, Anne 202 Wilde, Deborah de 202 Wilken, John SJ 130 Wilkins, ‘Herbie’ SJ 19, 185, 198 Willcock, Christopher SJ 141 Wisdom 192 Wiseman, Margaret 202 women 199ff at birth of Church 13 at Vatican II 21 Spirituality Nights 120, 127, 132, 202–3 Woods, Tennison 34, 213 word 94–5, 129, 130–1 word-pictures 9, 24, 90 Xavier Institute 206–7 Xavier, St Francis 27–8, 66 Zucker, Margaret 255

CH U RCH A LI VE !

C hu r c h A l i v e ! is an account of the living hi s to ry o f t hr e e J e s u i t p a r i s h e s o n t h e No r t h S ho r e o f Sy d n e y H a r b o u r f o r t h e y e a r s 19 56 to 2 0 0 6.

UNSW PRESS

PRESS

1

Pi l g r i m a g e s i n f a i t h 1956–2006

This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

UNSW

ChurchJacket2print.indd

A LI VE !

This book is an ethnographic history of the prophetic imagination among ordinary believers in times of great religious change. It is a narrative about behaviour, symbols, rituals, sacred spaces, sacred times, that tells of the cultural system within them. The broader context of post-Vatican II Catholicism and a religion that led the community to this point in time is the backdrop. The history is a living one in the sense that it taps both the way the past suffuses the present intellectually, spiritually, emotionally and culturally, and describes the actual experiences of many – rather than the rhetorical expressions of institutions. Dening’s creativity is expressed in the imaginative structuring of his books. Church Alive! is no exception. The author weaves the ‘word pictures’ that parishioners write for him of their actual religious experiences and the images that photographers and artists make for him, and adapts these different voices into one intriguing narrative.

GREG DENING

Emeritus Professor G R EG D ENING is a world-renowned scholar in his chosen f ield of research and writing: the encounter between indigenous and settler societies. From his f irst seminal book, Islands and Beaches (1980), to his most recent, Beach Crossings (2004), he has had a global reputation in cross-cultural and crossdisciplinary scholarly writing. All his books are in the great libraries of the world and are featured in postgraduate studies across the USA, the UK and Europe. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992) was published by the History Book of the Month Club. Performances (1996) is much used in postgraduate courses and The Death of William Gooch (1996) is counted as a cross-cultural murder mystery written in near poetical prose.

Church

In Church Alive!, Greg Dening turns his anthropological, theological, historical and philosophical education, as well as personal experience, to writing the living history of three Jesuit parishes on the North Shore of Sydney Harbour for the years 1956 to 2006.

GREG DENING

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