Can Catholicism be a place of inclusion and mercy? 

Eric Horne is 90 years of age and a parishioner at St Leonard’s Parish, Glen Waverley, Victoria. He reflects on becoming a Catholic as an adult and where the Church is going at this time.[s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, lofty origin of all being. Graciously let a ray of your brilliance penetrate into the darkness of my understanding and take me from the double darkness in which I have been born. An obscurity of both sin and ignorance (St. Thomas Aquinas, OP).

It is with some trepidation that at my ninety years of age and my fifty ninth year since I entered the Catholic Church that I dare as a novice to offer my view of our church and its contemporary situation. A view which must be coloured by my first seventeen years as a member of the Plymouth Brethren—a sect which has been described as a purely spiritual fellowship of true believers and is quite distinct from the empirical ecclesiastical bodies known as churches. 

On Sunday in the 1930s our family in the morning went to the breaking of the bread. In the afternoon it was Sunday School until the teens then Bible Class. In the evenings we attended the preaching of The Gospel. Some Sundays in summer after the Gospel we would take a portable organ and speakers stand into one of the narrow streets nearby to give our testimony, people often listened from their front doors or upper windows. A chorus which we often sang was ‘Jesus died for all the people, all the people in the world, red and yellow black and white, all are precious in his sight’. A concept indelibly printed in my mind in my life as a policeman, soldier and tutor of anthropology and history. 

At seventeen years of age I left the Plymouth Brethren to attend the Chapel of the Open Book in the City of London on Sunday mornings with a friend. Afterwards, both of us being members of the St Johns Ambulance Brigade we attended at a medical centre for street people under the Charing Cross railway station. 

In the evening we went to an Anglican service. In 1948, although almost a conscientious objector, I began two years army service in Germany which was a life changing experience and became a non-denominational christian until I entered the Catholic Church in 1961. Marrying a Catholic woman was an incentive as were a number of catholic friends at my work, army reserve and priests that I had met.

For most of my fifty nine years I was your average parishioner regularly attending Sunday morning mass, social events, work, army reserve and the occasional holiday. I knew nothing of Church history or its contemporary affairs but like most people mildly interested in the changes of Vatican II. But as evidence of a growing list of priests charged with sexual crimes against children and the exposure of considerable efforts by cardinals and bishops to protect the offenders from police investigation, concerned members of the laity including myself began to take a keen interest. 

I remembered some years past on a country police patrol I had stopped a car in a country lane driven by a 14 year old boy with a youngish priest in the passenger seat giving him a driving lesson, he said. My respect for priests was such that I would never have doubted that explanation. A friendly word of caution sufficed. As the scandals progressed many Catholics began to discuss and ponder on what the laity should and could do to help restore the respect long enjoyed by the church. 

At St. Leonard’s Church group of parishioners sent a well-reasoned request to the Australian Bishops Conference for suggested improvements to our religious life including the ordination of women. After considerable delay a telephone message was received at our parish office to the effect that the bishops were not competent to deal with the parishioners’ request. Competency apparently meaning the non-approval of Vatican officials. 

The parishioners’ disappointment at this response, thought to be unpastoral, resulted in the forming of a parish study/discussion group. I became a member. A program of study was prepared to include Church History and Contemporary Affairs. Our studies, as well as describing glorious periods of christian history revealed years of decadence, corrupt popes, struggles for worldly power and injustice. Our studies suggested to us that our church was going through a dark time in its history. 

However regardless of the bad news about the corruption, undercover disloyalty to the pope and a legacy of widespread concealment of crimes supported by the nebulous Vatican, a regular reading of The Tablet records an abundance of good news stories and achievements by Catholic Christians. For me the reportage in the journal gives me optimism for the future of our church. It also strengthens my opinion that the strength of the church lies with the priests and the laity, the power of the church lies with the Vatican. 

I hope that, in Australia, at least some of that power will devolve to the laity. As a guide to our studies we consulted the apostolic exhortations of Pope Francis in his encyclical letter The Joy of the Gospel (Evangelii Gaudium).

Another reference for me was Paul Johnson’s book, The Quest for God. Johnson, a Catholic historian, wrote:
This is how I have come to see the Church as a fallible institution……but in some ways radiates the divine. I watch it with a wary and critical eye. This view I think reflected the views of our study group. Of interest to me was his observation that I do not believe that there is no salvation outside the church. 

This doctrine makes no sense at all. As a non-denominational Christian attending many differing Christian services as a relieving constable in Victorian towns, I never failed to find Christ’s message present. This and my later anthropological studies tell me that God has spoken to all the people of his creation in differing ways including The Plymouth Brethren, Eastern Religions and those who are close in affection, such as the people of Islamic faith.

Does the Australian Church have a future? Peta Credlin, a politically informed astute columnist thinks not. In the Sun Herald she wrote that only about ten per cent of Catholics now attend Mass on Sundays. Despite the New Testament being the foundational document of Western culture more than seventy per cent of Australian students have never read the Bible. 

A few years back, I asked a bishop to describe Australian Catholics in one word. With little hesitation he said, indifferentism. My own choice of a word was complacency.

Paul Collins (former priest) in his book Believers is optimistic that Catholicism will survive, with less numbers certainly. To achieve this the church will need genuine local leadership. Church failure, he asserts, lies squarely within its own structure and with its own leadership. 

The St. Leonards parishioners’ message to the Australian Bishops Conference made a similar assertion. My view is that necessary decisions for the propagation of our faith need to be made by our own elected bishops not Roman religious bureaucrats who are unfamiliar with our culture. The devolution of power from Rome and the ordination of women, the other half of God’s human creation, are imperatives. As Chris Geraghty says in The Forgotten Feminist (p22), Jesus never founded a church. He was interested in promoting a kingdom, a world of inclusion and equality, of freedom, of love and mercy.[/s2If]