Ed Campion attended the Hunters Hill Convention of priests from across Australia in 1970 which spawned the idea of a national association of Catholic priests that would become the National Council of Priests (NCP) the following year. As NCP celebrates 50 years, Ed offers his reflections on the event first published in Report No 46, 22 May, 1970. Reprinted with permission. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

There were some wry comments on last week’s National Convention of Priests at St. Joseph’s College, Hunter’s Hill in Sydney. Widely quoted as Father John McKinnon’s (Ballarat) mot: “We came with the answers and we’re departing without then.” Another version of this came from Sydney Blessed Sacrament Father Tony McSweeney: “We came with answers and were departing with questions,” At the final plenary session on Thursday night Priest Forum editor Father Val Noone gave a depressive summation to the convention: “This convention may well be remembered as the convention which set up the national association. It is just possible that it will be remembered as the convention which dodged major issues: it dodged the War; it dodged the future of the ministry; it dodged the question of celibacy.”

In fact, the convention made several important advances. It took the first laboured steps towards setting up a national association of priests. There is now no doubt in anyone’s mind that an association will get going this year, next year, sometime. The national committee elected by the convention to act as midwife to the association has a range of useful talent, Head of the poll was Father Julian Miller of Sydney, the urbane, Oxford-educated historian, who won convention-wide appreciation for his skilful chairing of plenary session. Next was the Melbourne Senate’s organisation man, Father John Lanigan, whose expertise on the technicalities of new structures, sharpened by a five-weeks study tour of the U.S.A. last year, will be much needed. A surprise third in the poll was 60-years-old Townsville ex-Serviceman Father John Garvey, who throughout the convention wore his R.S.L. badge even on his overcoat. A member of the Roman old boy net (Propaganda Fide College), Father Garvey should prove invaluable in convincing older men of the association. The four other members of the national committee are known in their regions as renewalists: Fathers Laurie Hoare (Hobart), Pat O’Sullivan S.J. (Melbourne), Terry Williams (Maitland), John Butcher (Sydney).

As Ursula O’Connor of The Sydney Morning Herald reported, there was unresolved tension in the convention between the centralists and the federalists. Most observers thought the mind of the convention favoured some form of federalist structure for the new association. Also unresolved was the scope of action of the new voluntary body. Was it to be, as priests from the Newcastle coalfields advocated, a trade union style body with plenty of sharp teeth? Reflecting the upward social mobility of the Australian clergy, most priests rejected this line of thinking and spoke rather of a gentler professional association. But whether a trade union or a professional association, the as yet unborn body has plenty of problems waiting for it.

The first of these is the call for a system of conciliation and arbitration in the Australian Church. Following a paper by Sydney curate Father Terence Purcell, the Commission for the Future of the Ministry unanimously recommended that the convention endorse a request to the Australian bishops and the major religious superiors to set up an arbitration system. Such a system, they said, should be available to individuals and groups within the Church for the protection of their rights. They recognised that this was an important part of the English common law tradition but not of the Roman imperial system on which Church canon law is based. English law, they said, “requires substantively that no fundamental right or freedom shall be denied without adequate justification; and procedurally that every individual be accorded certain specific protections in administrative and judicial procedures.” In his paper Father Purcell said that history indicates that the English system of government and its body of legal principles were major reasons for the absence of violence and the achievement peacefully of major social reforms in Britain at a time when continental Europe was rocked by successive revolutions.

Father Purcell said that the Bible nowhere suggests that the ministry of service, given to the Apostles and their successors, necessarily involves a monarchical or quasi-monarchical absolutism. He cited the practical need to use and adapt some of the democratic processes and methods of procedure of 20th-century society. Vatican II’s ideas of episcopal collegiality and the logical extension to co-responsibility at all levels seemed to Father Purcell to argue for a system of conciliation and arbitration as already operative in the American Church province of Michigan.

In many minds was the recent summary dismissal of Father Patrick Crudden from the post of Director of Catholic Education in Melbourne. Following the Crudden case Priest Forum, whose editors had organised the Coogee meeting of priests last year that led to the national convention, made an arbitration system, sometimes called due process or the right to a fair trial, one of its major expectations from the Hunter’s Hill meeting. In the pre-convention issue of Priest Forum the editors ran a background article on due process and commented on the Crudden case: “What is clear is that no due process was observed, that any priest can be dismissed from any job if the Bishop wants it. Behind the facade of Episcopal Vicars, Education Boards and Senates still remains an impersonal and unjust system, Young Catholic men thinking of becoming priests will not miss this lesson. Since very few young people these days want to join an institution which may treat them the way it treated Pat Crudden it is no wonder that vocations are dropping. For the forth coming national meeting of priests the lesson is obvious. We have an urgent task of setting up some form of the process and right of appeal in the Australian church to protect priests from arbitrary dismissal.”

The Commission for the Future of the Ministry initiated another important resolution of the convention. This concerned greater freedom in the ministry. On the commission a resolution that official approval should be given to experimentation in particular cases was approved by 50 votes to one. A more specific resolution, that a priest should be trusted to take steps that he sees necessary for the fulfilment of his ministry, was approved by only 26 votes to 25. That was the situation when the resolutions came before the final plenary session on Thursday night. Because of the weight of business and because time had been consumed by hours of discussion of the new national association, it was proposed that the separate commission reports should be forwarded to the bishops and priests without being debated or voted on the floor of the plenary session.

Two things happened to bring the matter of the experimental ministry before the session. Halfway through the plenary session a French priest-worker arrived as a fraternal observer. He worked on a ship that had docked in Sydney harbour and was brought to the convention by Sydney port chaplain, Father Vic Doyle. He received the greatest single ovation of anyone at the convention. Probably this was mainly from a sense of hospitality. But his presence reminded the Australian priests that there were more ways of being a priest than the Australian parochial set-up. An Australian priest-worker absent from his diocese, who had given up his current job to attend the convention, commented that he did not think he would get quite the reception his French confrere had received. 

The second thing that changed the temperature of the water was a petition circulated during the convention by Hobart curate Father Denis Corrigan and Dominican Father Terry Butler. Their petition was signed by some 80 priests. It asked the Church superiors to allow priests to engage in experimental ministries outside the present parish structures, even outside their diocese.

It suggested that priests involved in a reassessment of their role be allowed to remain within the pastoral ministry with the approval of the Church, until some solution was reached. The petition called for greater flexibility in clerical living arrangements: perhaps priests could live away from presbyteries in communities of similar ages or interests, or in flats or houses as part of the general community.

The final session on Thursday night was running down to a close. It had just approved with acclamation a fraternal reply to 16 ex-clerics who had addressed a letter to the convention asking for greater understanding of their problems. This letter from the ex-clerics was never discussed; although John Yeomans of The Sun-Herald later claimed that its discussion was “a high spot of the convention”. Then young Father Corrigan got the call and presented his petition to the plenary session. It grabbed the attention of the weary priests and kept them there until 11.30 pm. It proved to be a useful issue to bring together various poles of thinking and was not without drama, as when a Sydney Parish Priest denounced an unnamed priest whom he said had been sitting around presbyteries for five years trying to make up his mind whether to stay–which led to some speculation. In the end the convention resolved to ask the bishops and religious superiors to give urgent consideration to the question of experimental ministries and to draw their attention to the Corrigan/Butler resolutions.

This was not the only issue to stir the convention. On the wings the Vietnam War sat waiting to rush on to centre-stage, but the call never came, As the priests filed into the hall for the plenary session on the first night they were handed Moratorium material by Fathers Val Noone and Tony Newman and others. After the formal proceedings of the night, a low-level discussion of current Church problems emanating from Canberra-Goulburn archdiocese, the Sydney Parish Priest Father Roth Delaney was first to the microphones. He denounced in strongest terms the Vietnam peace priests and suggested that they were members of the Communist Party. Father Delaney then turned to a dramatic presentation of issues confronting the Church which had just been performed. “It was,” he said, “a diabolical, sacrilegious farce. It was clever, but so is the devil.”

Next the venerable Brisbane pastor Msgr, Owen Steele also attacked the proceedings as derogatory of the Church’s best interests. Then Father Darcy O’Keefe of Sydney, a Parish Priest, apologised for his part in the dramatic presentation and attacked those responsible. Most agreed that it was a pretty dull presentation, following absurdly short papers, but this looked like turning the night into a disaster. The tide began to turn, however, with the speech of Sydney TV priest Father John O’Neill, who attacked the Vietnam peace priests and defended the dramatic presentation.

This left the way for Bishop Frank Carroll of Wagga to enter a plea for toleration and a sense of humour. The finest speech of the night came from a Sydney Moratorium marcher Father John Butcher. It was a winning call for tolerating divergent points of view within the Church: “Let’s pretend to love one another”, said Father Butcher. The importance of this extraordinary episode on the first night was that it drew the pus from a lot of conservative wounds. The basic issue was whether a priest should do anything that would jeopardise his sacramental ministry. In a War sub-commission, for example, onetime local R.S.L. president Father John Garvey was proposing that a priest should never take a stand on a public issue if it would keep people away from Mass and the sacraments.

“Why are you wearing an R.S.L. badge then?” he was asked. “That would turn off many of us in the labor movement, since the R.S.L. national president attacked the Moratorium.” This divergence came to a debate on the second day when Father Gavan Fitzpatrick of Geelong put a motion to the Commission on the Secular and Social Involvement of priests: “It is imprudent and unwise for priests to take sides publicly on issues where there is a division amongst Catholic people.” The latter phrase was amended to read “division amongst reputable Catholic moralists”.

Those for the motion instanced the Labor Split of the 1950’s as an example of how public stances by priests can alienate many Catholics. They felt, rather, that a priest’s job was to educate his people in ideas and principles and not to take unfair advantage of the pulpit. Those opposing the motion said that the non-leadership of priests in public issues was a failure of Christian witness. Many people were disillusioned when priests failed to speak out: silence on certain public issues does not mean neutrality but consent.

The motion was defeated in the Commission: 8 votes for, 29 against, 11 abstentions. But such a sectional debate could not hope to heal the rift that was obvious between the Vietnam peace priests and the army chaplains and others who viewed them with real disfavour, yet the convention itself proved to be an occasion of reconciliation. Part of this was because there were ample supplies of drink (Hamilton’s Ewell Moselle and Lindeman’s Pophyry were on the table at the two main meals each day and the bar had plenty of Black and White and Toohey’s Pilsener).

On the last night a white-haired priest stood drinking with younger colleagues: “You know”, he commented, “if someone had asked me about the long-haired radical priests a fortnight ago I would have been livid; yet here I am standing here drinking with you and enjoying your company now.”

Other advances of the convention were less likely to get into the newspapers. The Commission on the Inner Life of the Priest, reflecting on the fact that some members said they felt no obligation to recite the daily Office, called for a modification of the obligation as a way of avoiding harmful psychological effects of a duty-approach to the Christian religion. On sexuality the Commission stated that priests’ affections must be allowed to show, otherwise they would come out in deviant ways. In general, they found less dissatisfaction amongst priests than talk of dissatisfaction.

Although “the battlements of Rome are not dismantled in one day”, the Commission on Improving Communications in the Church, attended by Bishops F. Carroll (Wagga), L. Faulkner (Townsville), and H. Kennedy (Brisbane), suggested some things that might speed the process. They wanted dioceses to be sub-divided, so that a  diocese would have no more than 150 priests working in parishes. They recommended that “Each priest should be accepted as a mature and responsible person, able to choose his particular area of pastoral activity, and so serious consideration should be given to his preferences when allocation of work was made”. Another resolution reflected dissatisfaction in some diocese with the Little Sir Echo role of priests’ senates: “Priests’ Senates should be fully elected, should elect their own Chairman, and allow for a regular interchange of information and ideas between senate and the general body of priests: and that they should acquire the necessary skills of communication, administration and management.”

The In-Service Training Commission recommended a National Pastoral Institute to which priests could go for six-months refresher courses. It wanted to see a band of roving experts at the service of the Australian dioceses. The celibacy question nearly got to the debating stage. The Future of the Ministry Commission decided to conduct a short survey of the convention on the subject. This was printed and was to have been circulated during the final plenary session. When news of it came out, however, the survey was scrapped for fear of alienating priests and bishops who were not at the convention.

As Melbourne’s Father John Lanigan put it: “We all know what the papers are like (applause) – this would be interpreted as the opinions of the whole Australian priesthood.” The opinions of the Australian priesthood, however, will be canvassed in a national survey commissioned by the convention. Probably the single most stimulating suggestion during the whole convention came from Sydney’s Father John Butcher. He suggested a moratorium on all Church law. [/s2If]

Part one of an analysis of Australian Church governance report, The Light from the Southern Cross: Promoting Co-Responsible Governance in the Catholic Church in Australia, by Richard R Gaillardetz, the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College and the current chair of the BC Theology Department. Reprinted with permission from La Croix International, 3 June 2020. Part two is published elsewhere in this edition of The Swag. [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]

As the entire world struggles with the challenges, tragedies, and constraints imposed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, the Catholic Church finds itself in the midst of an altogether different kind of global pandemic, one of a distinctly spiritual and ecclesial nature, the clerical sexual abuse scandal.

Although its import is certainly not as dire, the spiritual life and credibility of the Church are at stake. This, too, is a pandemic of global dimensions and, sadly, there is no vaccine on the horizon.

No, this pandemic must be addressed with a kind of comprehensive, ecclesial hygiene: unflinching ecclesial self-reflection and patient, courageous ecclesial reform.

The Church of Australia has been one of this ecclesial pandemic’s most public hotspots. Sadly, it was not the Church’s own vigilance that brought the pain and scope of the scandal to light, but a government mandated Royal Commission charged with investigating child sexual abuse in Australia.

That commission’s report directed sweeping criticisms at the Catholic Church of Australia. It called on the Church to address a series of problems, principal among which was the systemic, institutional failures in Church governance and management structures. The commission was convinced that these were a major contributing factor in the scourge of clerical sexual abuse.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) and Catholic Religious of Australia (CRA) instituted the Implementation Advisory Group to respond to the Royal Commission Report.

That group, in turn, created the Governance Review Project Team (GRPT). This team was tasked with crafting, ‘in light of Catholic ecclesiology,’ a comprehensive response to the Royal Commission’s critique of Church governance.

After a year of study and reflection, that team delivered to the ACBC a potentially ground-breaking document, The Light from the Southern Cross: Promoting Co-Responsible Governance in the Catholic Church in Australia.

The Australian bishops have decided to delay the release of this document for six months while they engage its recommendations themselves. Fortunately, the editors at La Croix International have obtained a copy and have asked for a review and analysis of its contents.

This is a remarkable and, in many ways, an unprecedented document. It is impressive in its scope, depth of analysis and detailed recommendations. It is also quite long; including a glossary, bibliography, and appendices, the report comes in at 200 pages and includes 86 specific recommendations.

Consequently, this summary will be selective in consideration of the document’s contents and principal contributions, focusing on what might have greater import for the global Church beyond Australia. 

The teaching of Vatican II and vision of Pope Francis

The project takes as its starting point Pope Francis’ call for a synodal Church, one marked by the imperatives of co-responsibility, collaboration and genuine consultation between Church leaders (bishops and others) and the lay faithful (11).

At the same time, the GRPT clearly hopes the document will contribute to the deliberations of the Plenary Council for the Church of Australia now likely to take place late in 2021 and continue into 2022.

The Catholic ecclesiology undergirding this document draws substantially from the teaching of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and Pope Francis. It is thoroughly missiological in its orientation.

The Church does not exist for its own sake, but rather for the sake of its mission to proclaim and embody the Gospel (25). All mechanisms for Church governance, the report insists, must be assessed in light of their service to the Church’s mission. Christ calls us to a life of discipleship in service of the coming kingdom of God.

The report invokes the council’s teaching on the Church’s fundamental sacramentality, thereby highlighting the interplay between the Church’s divine and human dimensions. This sacramentality extends to the Church’s ‘structures and forms of governance’ which are both mediations of grace and human constructs that can impede God’s grace; as such they are subject to reform. 

Mission-oriented and Synodal

The missiological orientation is accompanied by a pneumatology that evokes the work of the Spirit in the life of the Church, a work that unites all believers while affirming that rich diversity manifested so powerfully at Pentecost. The reach of that Spirit is universal, extending beyond the community of the baptized to include ‘all people of good will’ (27).

This Church lives in history as the pilgrim People of God. As pilgrim, it ‘will reach its completion only in the glory of heaven’, as the council put it. This frees the Church to honestly assess its own failings.

As the People of God it is oriented toward the world as what the council termed the ‘seed and beginning of the kingdom on earth.’ And it is here that the report begins to integrate themes central to the present pontificate, particularly Pope Francis’s call for a Church that is synodal in character.

Synodality requires that we become a listening Church. All the baptized must be invited into the Church’s corporate discernment and mission. This theme runs through the entire document. 

People of God, Body of Christ and the sensus fidei

As the body of Christ, the Church is built up by baptismal charisms that play a vital role in matters of Church governance. The report places ordained ministries within this charismatic economy as well. This move is decisive for overcoming the temptation to set the laity and the ordained in a competitive ecclesial relationship.

The report highlights key conciliar texts that consider both the theological integrity of the local Church as more than a mere branch office of the Church Universal and the bishop’s vital relationship to his local Church. This relationship requires the bishop to promote synodality in the local Church by attending carefully to the needs, abilities, and insights of his flock.

The report situates issues of parish governance within a Eucharistic ecclesiology. When the faithful gather at the Lord’s Table, the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ effects as well the transformation of the gathered community into the ecclesial Body of Christ.

The report recalls the council’s teaching that the whole Christian faithful are recipients of God’s revelation. All the faithful possess a supernatural instinct for the faith (sensus fidei). Consequently, all the baptized participate in the traditioning process of the Church. All synodal structures, but particularly those present in parish life, must be attentive to their witness. 

Church governance and the necessary change of the current ecclesial culture

Beyond reflection on these ecclesiological foundations, the bulk of the report offers a perceptive and informed consideration of Church governance at all levels of Church life: the global Church, the diocese, and the parish.

According to the report, “governance comprehends the framework of rules, relationships, systems and processes within and by which authority is exercised and controlled in the organisation (38).

Governance mechanisms always function within a larger ecclesial culture. You can’t change ‘governance practices and processes without a change in culture’ (39). That culture must be informed by key ecclesial principles: subsidiarity, stewardship, synodality, dialogue, and discernment.

The report contends that a consistent application of the principle of subsidiarity is vital to good governance: At the heart of the principle of subsidiarity is vesting involvement and decision-making as close as possible to those impacted by the decision (41). 

Checks and balances

Synodality, the report notes, requires that good governance include a robust set of checks and balances. Synodal governance, in turn, depends on the sustained dialogue and participation of the whole People of God in the life of the Church.

Finally, authentic governance presumes genuine discernment, a careful, deliberate and prayerful reflection that is sensitive to the impulse of the Spirit.

The GRPT considered, as well, principles gleaned from healthy civil governance. Of particular note is the report’s recognition of the need to cultivate an ethical culture. This speaks to a glaring lacuna in current Catholic governance.

It is rare that one finds clearly articulated norms for professional conduct in the Church. Many who work in the Church labour without clearly articulated job descriptions and few benefit from regular performance appraisals. Indeed, the latter are almost non-existent for clergy. 

Strengthening episcopal accountability

Authentic synodality, the report insists, requires far more developed structures of accountability than can be found in the Church at present.

Episcopal accountability has traditionally presented difficulties for Catholicism since in current Church law the bishop is only accountable to the pope, who alone can appoint and remove bishops and intervene in the affairs of all particular Churches, including dioceses (57).

One recommendation for global governance calls for incorporating more robust accountability mechanisms into the bishops’ ad limina or quinquennial visits to Rome.

The report frankly admits the problematic nature of an exercise of episcopal power that is almost entirely without meaningful checks and balances. This contributes considerably to a pervasive clerical culture.

Clericalism is not only an attitude that denotes a distorted perception of relationships in the Church. It is also a behaviour that fails to reflect the equality of all disciples of Christ, an equality that the New Testament underscores (64).

The only adequate antidote, the GRPT contends, lies in cultivating consistent practices of consultation and co-responsibility, features proper to an authentically synodal Church.

Although canon law affords a bishop many opportunities for consultation before making key decisions, few are mandatory and [w]ithout the wholehearted embrace of a culture of synodal decision-making, structures will be ‘simple masks without heart or a face (70). 

Selecting bishops, appointing priests

One of the most important contributions of this document lies in its focused consideration of the selection and appointment of both bishops and parish priests.

The Church in Australia (and many other Churches throughout the world) has suffered from ‘inordinate delays’ in the appointment of bishops (60). Moreover, there is little significant consultation in the current practice.

The report calls for much greater participation of local clergy and laity in both the creation of the diocesan profile that serves as the basis for an episcopal appointment and in the discernment process leading to the appointment itself.

Regarding the assignment of priests to a parish, the document encourages a fuller implementation of canon 524, which allows the bishop to consult the lay faithful prior to making priest assignments.

In current practice, of course, this rarely goes beyond placing a few phone calls. This could be enhanced by allowing select lay persons to participate in meetings of the college of consultors or ‘clergy appointments panel’ when priest assignments are under consideration. 

Reforming the seminary system

The Royal Commission had singled out flaws in current seminary practice as a significant factor in clerical sexual abuse.

In response, the GRPT strongly encourages a far greater role for lay men – and particularly women – in the screening and formation of seminarians. They should also be included in any final decision regarding the acceptability of a candidate for ordination.

Again, given the historical and pastoral context of this report, the widespread clerical sexual abuse in Australia and elsewhere, it is not surprising that concern for the selection and formation of candidates for the priesthood was given such attention.

The GRPT insists that having an individual charism is not sufficient for ordination. The priest today must be able to work collaboratively, celebrating the gifts and contributions of lay ecclesial ministers in ways appropriate to a synodal Church.

Seminarians should be given more time in pastoral placements prior to ordination and have more extended opportunities for communal living outside the seminary.

The document also embraces the Royal Commission’s call for the establishment of a National Protocol to govern the screening of candidates for priesthood and religious life throughout Australia.

The GRPT is to be commended for tackling a particularly sensitive pastoral reality for the Churches of Australia (and elsewhere!), namely the role of international priests for ministry in local Churches.

The drafters call for greater consistency and rigor in the inquiries concerning the history and suitability of international priests for ministry in Australia and attention to their ongoing formation, both spiritually and culturally for service in this country (85). 

Pastoral councils and a greater role for women in Church governance

As the report notes, further development of mechanisms for synodality at both the diocesan and parish levels is clearly required.

The document proposes a change in Church law that makes diocesan pastoral councils mandatory in every diocese and it suggests that the role of these councils in diocesan decision-making be significantly expanded. There is a similar proposal to also make parish pastoral councils mandatory.

Adequate formation should also be provided for clergy and pastoral council members at both the diocesan and parish levels to ensure that the full potential of these synodal structures is realized.

Finally, one of the most consistent themes in this document is the persistent call for a greatly expanded incorporation of lay women in key governance structures.

The document speaks poignantly and directly regarding the negative consequences that follow from the lack of full inclusion of women in Church leadership, including ordained ministry.

There is much more of value in this extraordinary document, but I have tried to focus on aspects of the document of interest to the Church beyond the Australian shores.

In Part Two [found elsewhere in this edition of The Swag] I will offer a broader assessment of the contributions of the document and situate it within the Francis pontificate. [/s2If]