Cover Story
Karen Kissane   The ancient belief system of witchcraft is on the rise because of modern technology. Karen Kissane reports.

Witches tend to keep to themselves; magick doesn’t lend itself to the scrutiny of unbelievers. But this ritual circle, up in the hills at Olinda, is to be open to all. It’s about witchcraft “coming out of the broom closet”, says organiser Jennifer Sunderland. It is also to heal the earth, suffering from war and to mark the autumn equinox by giving thanks for summer and welcoming the cold to come.

But she phones on the appointed Friday to postpone; it seems it’s too wet and chilly to welcome the cold. “We’ll try for the Sunday,” she says confidently: “We have a hunch it will be better.” Witches, after all, are meant to be in tune with the elements.

When I express doubt, she offers the prediction of a more prosaic science. “And I’ve been watching the long-range weather forecasts.”

Someone got it right. The evening turns out crisp and clear, with long shadows falling across the grass. Cockies squawk in the eucalypts above as the witches create a scene of storybook prettiness on the grass below.

A harpist in a greensleeves dress plays Scarborough Fair as Sunderland strews flowers in a large circle. At its centre, high priestess Buddhy Eldridge, in a black velvet cloak, covers a small table with a purple cloth to make an altar. She lays it with candles, a ritual knife and chalice, a wand, statues of a god and goddess and a beribboned basket of autumn produce – bread and fruit. High-church incense drifts on the air.

A dozen people who had been standing around in jeans or trackie daks don hooded velvet cloaks. Among them is Peter Schofield, a retired policeman with a pencil moustache and military bearing, who likes witchcraft because “it’s not so materialistic”; Annette Dunn, a pre-school teacher, who teaches her children “to respect the earth” and to cast
spells; and a manager with a utility company, who declines to be named “because I’ve got a lot of people with dead fish stuck on the back of their cars at work”.

They are the new pagans. “Pagan” used to be a pejorative, used by People of the Book to deride those who had not discovered the one true God and were, therefore, ignorant or unenlightened. Now the name has been reclaimed by free-thinkers who follow an earth or nature-based belief that does not have a central deity at its heart. They are the hippies of the divine supermarket, their offerings colourful, quirky, romantic and highly individualistic.

Their numbers are growing. In the five years to the 2001 census, they more than doubled to 39,000. Pagans follow many traditions and include Druids, who use pre-Christian Celtic rites, and Heathens or Odinists who follow Norse gods such as Odin and Thor. The pagans at Olinda this evening practise witchcraft, now the fastest-growing belief system in both Australia and the US.

The number of declared witches in the Australian census rose from 1849 in 1996 to
8755 in 2001. Many believe that number to be understated. Douglas Ezzy, senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania, estimates that between one in 100 and one in 50 young women have an interest in witchcraft. When he asks any witches in first-year lectures of 200 students to come and see him, “I get three or four every time”.

Since the mid-1990s, things witchy have loomed large in television shows, movies and popular books. Suburban malls have shops filled with crystals and dream-catchers, mojo bags (for holding charms) and texts on astral travel, auras and tarot. In the heart of bourgeois Hawthorn, the fragrant Esoteric Bookshop sells the stuff of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley: hawthorn wands, crystal balls, 300 kinds of herbs, divination tools, runes and spells.

Popular culture is drenched in magick (spelt with a ‘k’ to differentiate it from what conjurers do with rabbits) – Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed on TV, J.K.Rowling’s teen wizard, Harry Potter, in books and blockbuster movies. Home-grown episodes of Blue Heelers and House Rules have featured witch characters, courtesy of Melbourne-based Cassandra Carter, scriptwriter, long-standing “wisecraft practitioner” and author of the book Everyday Magic.

Even the law is changing to reflect the increasing acceptance of witchcraft. Attorney-General Rob Hulls has announced the repeal of the Vagrancy Act, which outlaws witchcraft and fortune telling. “We govern for all Victorians, and that includes witches, magicians and sorcerers,” he said in April. “These offences are going to ¤ disappear in a puff of smoke.”

Witchcraft is based partly on a yearning for a mythical past.

But here’s the paradox: it owes its real-life rise to modern electronics and the information revolution.

Ezzy, editor of a new book, Practising the Witch’s Craft: Real Magic Under a Southern Sky, says witchcraft used to spread by word of mouth but now many people first make contact through websites. “It’s very much a religion of the internet,” he says.

In such a supposedly rational age, what is it with broomsticks, cauldrons and cats? Do witches dance with the devil, as the medieval folk who burned them believed? And what does this interest in the occult and do-it-yourself ritual mean for Western Christianity and its rapidly emptying pews?
There is nothing eerie about Eldridge’s ritual. She lights four candles at the compass points of her circle and holds up a censer of incense, praying silently for the blessing of the lord and lady. Another witch uses a broomstick to sweep the circle free of any ill. The chanting is of love and trust, calling on the power of earth, air, fire and water. The hooded figures join hands and Eldridge “casts a spell”:

Raise your voice in Magick Rite

Send your power into the night

All the witches hand in hand

Raise the spirits of the land

Let love and healing come to birth,
Revitalise our ravaged Earth.

They “raise the cone of power” – draw up energy to send out with the spell – by walking a slow circle and chanting. Eldridge then blesses cakes and wine, the products of “passion’s grace” (the union of lady and lord that keeps the earth fertile). Those in the circle share them, saying to each other: “May you never hunger, may you never thirst.”

Two elderly Argentinian tourists who had come up to Olinda for the day stand quietly in the circle too, not quite sure what is happening but respectful of this quaint native rite.

Eldridge and other witches all have the same answer to questions about their relationship with the devil. You have to be a Christian to be a Satanist, they point out. You have to believe in the Christian God and reject him in favour of the Christian devil. They are pagans and do not believe in Satan.

Working out what witches are not (“I do not sacrifice black cats at midnight,” says Carter with dignity) is easier than trying to define what they are. Like magpies, witches nab whatever they fancy from other occult and spiritual traditions and have no single guru, a tolerant state of anarchy that Wiccans – one kind of witch – call “non-prophet disorganisation”.

They do tend to share a sense of the divine feminine, and of the body and the earth as sacred, as well as a conviction that “energies” can be manipulated. David Tacey, Jungian analyst, associate professor of arts at La Trobe University and author of The Spirituality Revolution, says witchcraft focuses on Western religion’s “missing trinity” – woman, body, earth.

“These three things have enormous popular appeal because they are missing elements, and whatever’s repressed from the mainstream has a natural interest of its own,” Tacey says.

“Throughout the millennia, religions based on the feminine have been earth-based. Patriarchal religions are suspicious of the mythical feminine and assume that the realm of creation is inherently evil, that sex and the body is the realm of sin.”

For 37-year-old Fiona Horne, witchcraft is a refuge from teachings about women that she found abhorrent. Witchcraft’s Australian pin-up girl, the blonde and beautiful Horne personifies its cool image and multi-media savvy. Her celebrity gigs have included the television panel of Beauty and the Beast and an FM radio talkback show in which she created spells to order. Her website is a barometer of interest in matters magickal; last month, she says, it scored 633,000 hits.

Horne grew up Catholic and disliked what she read in the Children’s Living Bible – “that women are doomed to bear children in pain and suffering to atone for the sins of Eve” – and the view passed onto her by a priest, “that humans are doomed because
we come from between two pieces of filth, the anus and the urethra”.

With Wicca, the branch of witchcraft she practises, “women are seen as sacred and our bodies are a divine expression of the life force and not something impure and only created to titillate men”.

The Judeo-Christian vision of God as male has spurred many a witch. Carter, now in her 50s, was an observant Anglican as a girl. “If there had been anything like the Movement for the Ordination of Women when I was a teenager, I would probably have sought ordination within the Anglo-Catholic tradition,” she says. “But there wasn’t.” When a book introduced her to the idea of a goddess who was equal with a god, “That was quartz-halogen headlamps going, Chung!”

Gary Bouma, an Anglican priest and professor of sociology at Monash University, says: “Why does witchcraft appeal? Because those women are dead sick of paltry patriarchal pontifications.”

Witchcraft also appeals to greenies and “eco-feminists”. It emphasises rituals based around the elements and the seasons, and many of its rites take place outdoors. “We are here to live on the earth and not dominate over it,” Horne says. She finds her sense of the divine most readily when looking up at the sky or studying a leaf. “Surely heaven is here on earth; this isn’t just somewhere we do penance till we get to a wonderful place afterwards.”

Witchcraft has one golden rule: do as you will, and harm you none. Its adherents hold a wide smorgasbord of beliefs: some believe in a goddess as an entity, others see her as representative of a divine force, and the more Freudian tell you she is a projection of their own psyches.

They use the names of ancient female goddesses interchangeably, believing that all those figures are faces of the divine feminine, and call on everyone from Brigid (Irish) to Demeter (Greek) and Isis (Egyptian).

For male witches – up to a third of the total number, according to the census – the masculine principle is represented by the Horned Lord, partner of the goddess. Although witchcraft tends to be seen as a girl thing, it has always had male followers; men made up a quarter of the 60,000 people executed for witchcraft in Europe and America between 1450 and 1750, according to Lara Apps and Andrew Gow in their new
book, Male Witches in Early Modern Europe.

Today, some witches believe in reincarnation, others that there is no life after death. Some work in covens of up to 13 people, timing their rites with solar and lunar cycles, and others work alone. Some say witchcraft provides them with a moral framework while others revel in the way it does not. Most love the freedom of being able to tailor their beliefs, or non-beliefs, to themselves.

“It’s nothing to do with religion,” says Nicole Good, a children’s face-painter who shared in the rite at Olinda, delicate blue garlands painted on her cheeks. “It’s about who I am and what I think about things. It’s not about belief in God or the lack of it. I’m not a Wiccan; that’s just another structured religion, to me.”

Witches also tend to focus on the innate goodness of people rather than on their failings. Carter was pleased to shrug off Christian guilt. She recalls thinking during one Eucharist, “I don’t feel like a miserable sinner not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Thy table, even if Thy property is always to have mercy”.

Carter studies astrology and the Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. She has a prosperity charm in a little satin bag on her desk and has developed her own ritual for sending onto the next world any troubled spirits she meets.

Sunderland, 28, runs a New Age shop in Olinda and says she had out-of-body experiences as a child. Eldridge, 45, is a registered nurse and grief counsellor who says she sees auras.

“Belief is not the key element that leads them into becoming witches,” Ezzy says. “(Pagan) people rarely ask me what I believe; they are more likely to ask me what sort of experiences I have had, or what rituals I have participated in.”

This is a reaction to the dryness of traditional religion, says sociologist Bouma. “The uniform response to, `Why don’t you go to church?’ is `It’s boring’. They don’t want a rational form of religion that’s all words and no experience. They don’t want to know whether you believe in God, they want to know whether you have encountered God recently. The truth is experience; the truth is not words on paper.”

There is also a longing for romance and mystery. Bill Stewart, dean of Ridley College at Melbourne University, has degrees in medieval history and theology and an interest in paganism. He says an influential sociologist, Max Weber, argued that modern science and industry have brought `a disenchantment of the world’.

“Another `missing trinity’. . . is concerned with re-enchantment,” Stewart says. “It is captured in a slogan employed by WitchCraft Magazine: `myth, magick and mystery’.”

He says American witches in the 1970s had a word that summed up how they felt about ordinary life: they called non-witches “mundanes”. That’s not too far off J.K. Rowling’s “muggles”, her name for the ignorant, unimaginative inhabitants of suburbia who have no insight into the parallel universe of Harry Potter’s wizardry.

Witchcraft’s sassy “leaders” are part of its attraction. Horne has helped make witchcraft glamorous (the word belongs to witches, anyway, “glamour” originally being another name for enchantment) and is part of the reason that two-thirds of Australia’s witches are under 29.

She has written several bestsellers on her life as a witch and her latest book is for teen witches. She is now in Los Angeles developing radio and television shows for the US market.

“Fiona is unlike leaders in traditional religions, who are generally either shunned or been largely ineffective in terms of contemporary media,” Stewart says. “(Baptist minister) Tim Costello perhaps could be considered a bit of a media personality but, unlike Fiona, he hasn’t played in a speed metal band and doesn’t have tongue piercings and hasn’t posed for Playboy.

“Fiona has the advantage of being part of (young women’s) world-view. Here’s a young blonde who has a website and answers my emails as opposed to a middle-aged bloke who wears a suit or a dress or something and gives a long-winded and boring talk on Sunday morning when any self-respecting teenager is asleep, recovering
from the night before. It’s no contest.”

But is witchcraft a fashion accessory? For some, agrees Sunderland. “Fashionable Wiccans tend to look, sound and speak just like they consider Satanism to be a music genre; they like heavy metal death movies and music. They work really hard on that image, the Goths. You tend to find them in couples, the musical Satanist and the fashionable Wiccan. One’s the man and one’s the woman.”

Others like the idea of life on the margins and of being linked to a victimised group. David Wilson-Steer, a ceremonial magician who runs the Esoteric Bookshop with his partner, pagan Julie Snodgrass, says he doesn’t like the way some witches “go around Christian-bashing”.

“They’re like reformed smokers,” he says. “There seems to be a great emphasis on witches having been burned millions of years ago instead of looking at what we do now, which is celebrating the forces of nature.”

All this talk of nature makes witchcraft sound as wholesome as stoneground bread and lentil soup. But part of its attraction, at least, has a dark side: the longing for power. Witchcraft involves spells. “Some people think it’s all about power,” Snodgrass says. “They think it’s about gaining control over everyone else. The power is about controlling ourself.”

Snodgrass’s shop has spells for every occasion: to attract love, bless a house or protect against a hex (all carefully labelled “sold as a curio only” to get around laws that forbid charging for charms or fortune-telling). When pressed about spells, Carter and others say dismissively: “What’s the difference between a spell and a prayer?”
There’s a big difference. A prayer calls upon a transcendent being to exert power on one’s behalf; the one who prays is a humble supplicant. A spell is based on the idea that the spell-maker has their own supernatural powers. It takes the idea of sisters doin’ it for themselves to a whole new level.

But Carter says: “In both cases it is the intensity or fervour of the need or wish that powers the magic. It’s just that most Christians don’t think of prayers as spells.

“Gnostic Christianity assumes we are all sons and daughters of God so we all have the power within us; it’s just a matter of recognising it. All the stories of the miracles of the saints would say there is an absolute power in the prayer.”

Witchcraft’s promise of power can be a magnet for the sad case. Carter tells of a woman who rang her asking for a spell to stop her ex-husband’s new wife from turning him against her children. “She’d been to see someone in Thomastown but they wanted $5000 and she didn’t have that much money but she could manage $3000.” Carter suggested she see her parish priest.

Wilson-Steer gave similar advice to a woman who came to his shop seeking to win back her husband – who had left 30 years before.

The pull of power can also lead to black magic, where the elemental forces of nature are called upon not to help or heal but to control the world or people in a selfish or destructive way. “I don’t think a lot of it is the black stuff,” Tacey says. “I think that has a lot to do with maturity. Sometimes when young people get involved in spells and sorcery they do so out of a Harry Potterish desire to gain power over their immediate environment. It’s pure Freudian wish fulfilment.”
He says hostile “sorcery in the suburbs”, while rare, can be dangerous – to the person practising it. “Anyone might have terrible dark thoughts about someone and wish them evil. That’s psychologically and emotionally unhealthy, whether or not you subscribe to a supernatural world view.”

For witches, it’s a matter of math: they believe that the good or evil behind spell-casting returns to them threefold, in itself an incentive to steer clear of the bad stuff. “If you believe what you send out comes back, you don’t need a book of rules,” says Wilson-Steer.

There are some aspects of witchcraft that even some of its strongest adherents avoid. Carter refuses to use “poppets”, little dolls that are ritually named for a person for whom a spell is cast (for example, to cure them of illness).

She doesn’t admit to any wariness of its voodoo-like feel, saying rather that it’s a question of what to do with the poppets afterwards. “Do you have an entire row of little dolls sitting up on a ledge somewhere? What do you do if someone else gets hold of the poppet that has been ritually named? It’s a damn sight safer to work here and here,” (pointing at her heart and her head).

Nor will Carter do love spells, because they interfere with another’s free will. Rather, she recommends concentrating on spells to make oneself more lovable. Horne issues the same warning in Magickal Sex: A Witch’s Guide to Beds, Knobs and Broomsticks. But she nevertheless publishes a “come to me” spell. It involves collecting some of the desired man’s “body bits” (hair or fingernail clippings), carving his name into a candle and making a spice mixture moistened with the spell-maker’s spit – or, for extra oomph, her vaginal fluid. (More tea, vicar?)
Superstition, surely, rather than religion? But Ezzy argues that magical thinking “is part of witchcraft in the same way it’s part of Christianity”. He points to Catholics and their belief in miracles, Pentecostals and their belief in the spirit’s power to heal the body. Is there much difference between a charm and a St Christopher medal on a car dashboard?

Perhaps more confronting is witchcraft’s earthiness: it deals with taboos such as death and menstruation and sometimes uses explicit sexual imagery – and, more rarely, sex itself. Some witches dance “skyclad” (naked) during rituals, and it is not unknown for sex to be used to “raise the power” of a rite.

Have there been rituals where people copulated in the centre of a circle? “There have been,” says Wilson-Steer. “They tend to be people who want to do that. Not everyone joins in. Why is sex wrong? Why can’t it be a method of worship as well? It’s a way of paying devotion to natural forces.”
Ezzy says at Beltane, a festival of spring and fertility, it is common for couples to have sex, but this is generally done privately. “It’s not quite as voyeuristic as it might seem. The idea of an orgy is quite overblown. But sex is part of life and witchcraft celebrates that, rather than saying that sex is something that separates you off from God.”

Ezzy is researching teenage girls and witchcraft and he says it often leads them to be more sexually cautious. “They tell me that whereas before they might have got drunk and gone off and bonked someone, witchcraft has allowed them to take sex more seriously as a spiritual act.” And they find its rituals useful in managing their emotional lives. “I was talking to a young woman who had just broken up with her boyfriend and was feeling very depressed. She used ritual; she wrote a poem about the way she had felt sad about the guy and then burned it within a circle. Witchcraft gives them a ritual way of dealing with important issues . . . Some witches would say magick works on psychological levels.”

Witches talk of a “tradition”. In truth, historians do not know whether there was a matriarchal religion before Christianity, according to Stewart. Their Wicca’d ways have more recent origins; the work of one Gerald Gardner, known as the father of Wicca. He published a book in England in 1954 claiming that witchcraft was a surviving pagan religion and that he had been initiated into it.

But paganism and witchcraft did not begin their resurgence until after the US publication in 1979 of two books, The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk, and Drawing Down the Moon, by Margot Adler. Three years later, the ideas gained wider audience with the best-selling novel The Mists of Avalon, in which author and high priestess Marion Zimmer Bradley rewrote the Arthurian legend as a battle between goddess worship and Christianity.

Unlike Christianity, paganism has no social justice agenda. It is so inwardly turned that it is almost narcissistic in its focus on the spiritual development of the individual. It will note be producing schools or hospitals or strong statements on the inequality gap.

But, says Bouma, not all religions do, either. “Buddhism has no social ethic at all. Meditate and you will feel better, meditate and the rest of the world will go away. It’s only Westerners who think religion should have a social ethic.”

Should the churches be worried? Some of their members are. Carter based an episode of Blue Heelers around a true incident in which a pastor in a Victorian country town gathered up his followers, burst into a local witch’s home and burnt her books on the front lawn.

But when it comes to the numbers, Christianity is so far ahead that it appears to be no contest. Stewart, though, says the bald figures can be misleading. “Most people who identify themselves as pagans are fairly committed to that viewpoint and made a conscious choice. There are stacks of people who tick the census form C of E or Presbyterian and it makes no impact on their lives.

“And also, if you look at the age distribution, it’s mostly young in paganism; in most mainstream denominations it’s predominantly old. I think it is (a threat to churches) if the issues concerned are ignored.”

Bouma agrees that the churches should be questioning themselves. “Can you meet God in this church? If they can’t say `Yes’ with some confidence, they are dying, and they should. They are not offering any product worth getting. People want powerful, numinous, spiritual experiences.”

It’s not just people on the social fringes who are seeking it. At the Olinda rite, the whole Dunn family came. Annette teaches pre-school and her husband, Marcus, is a trained nurse. They are all cheerily open about their beliefs; the children’s school enrolment forms have “pagan” in the religion box.

Rowan, 12, says: “We do magic, our own rituals, at home. Normally we just invoke stuff and we send our energy to people who need it.” Roxanne, 14, adds: “My friends respect it and they’re fine with it. I know kids in class who are weird with it, but nothing serious.”

Their deities? Annette says: “We believe in a god and a goddess. We believe in all gods and all goddesses.”

Marcus hugs her. “This is my goddess.”

She laughs back. “And this is my god.”

And they stand grinning, their New World jeans and trainers topped by their Old World ruffles and cloaks; living proof that witchcraft has sashayed its way off the screen and out of the broom closet. Suburbia will never be the same.

First published in The Age.

It was the Sunday to preach on doubting Thomas, the apostle who would not believe he was talking to the risen Christ until he was allowed to put his hand into the wound in Jesus’ side. Come sermon-time, Father Vincent Peile did not waste words.

Fully robed, he walked over to a side wall of his church and slowly, ceremoniously, stood on his head. Returning to right-side-up, he asked his congregation, who were torn between shock and amusement: “If you were to go home and tell your family that father stood on his head during Mass, would they believe you?”

“I wanted to take them back to something unbelievable,” says Peile, Catholic priest at St Ambrose’s in Woodend. “It was the nearest I could get to offering them something of the experience of doubting Thomas. I believe there’s even a priest in Sydney, with youth and agility on his side, who in full clobber does cartwheels from one side of the sanctuary to the other. He tells people, `You won’t remember what I’ve said today, but you will remember what you’ve seen’.”

Gospel or gimmickry? A savvy way to engage a critical, post-modern audience, or a desperate attempt to overcome the growing irrelevance of a fading tradition? Peile, like most clerics, knows that selling God is tougher than it used to be. It will get harder as the churches’ staunchest adherents – older Australians – start to age and die away. The churches have always been concerned about where the world is heading; now they must worry about their own future. Whither Christianity?

To put it in what Peile would call the language of “affluenza”, Christianity’s market is shrinking and fragmenting. Except for the recent boom in Pentecostal churches, which have now overtaken Anglicans, overall church attendances have been falling for 20 years.

Those who do go to church have become picky. They shop around in what has been called “the divine supermarket”: Protestants swap denominations and Catholics travel outside their parishes to find their preferred style of worship. The result has been a rise in the variety of services – an economist might call it “niche marketing” – but it will be another decade before the churches find out whether their changes are too little, too late.

Their fundamental problem is the big gap between the number of people who call themselves Christian and the number that turn up to church. Most Australians believe in God, but only a minority now believe in a personal God. According to a study by the National Church Life Survey organisation, about 35 per cent of people in the wider community believe in a personal God and 39 per cent believe in a life-force of some sort. Forty-three per cent accept core Christian tenets, including that Jesus was God and that he rose from the dead. (Nine per cent are atheists and 17 per cent agnostics.)

But, while 33 per cent pray or meditate at least weekly, and 43 per cent say they feel close to God, only 20 per cent go to church at least once a month. Those who do are not young: only 9 per cent of church attenders are in their 20s, and less than a third are under 40.

Gary Bouma, professor of sociology at Monash University, says: “The picture is of churches that are increasingly inward-looking, with decreased significant contact between the church and the larger society. They don’t engage with people outside of those who show up, and those who show up are becoming such a strange subset of members of society: they’re conservative, they’re moralistic and they’re old.

“Meanwhile there’s a vast search for spirituality . . . Look at the shelves of spiritual material in bookshops. People are going to meditation sessions, to spiritual fairs – and when they go there, do they find anything from the mainline churches?”
Says Ruth Powell, researcher with the National Church Life Survey: “In a sense, there’s a massive cultural shift happening from . . . Christendom to non-Christendom.”

But Australia is still a Christian country. Powell says a combined total of only four per cent of people describe themselves as Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Buddhists. Christianity also comes out ahead of New Age alternatives; the influence of other kinds of “religion” is not as great as the magazines in dentists’ waiting rooms would have us believe. Eighteen per cent of Australians seek help from horoscopes, 9 per cent practise Eastern meditation and 7 per cent use psychic healing or crystals.

While the churches’ membership might be declining, they continue to be held in high regard. Powell says they come fourth in a list of most-trusted institutions (after the police, health and education systems, and way ahead of the banks.)

But there is some division about what the churches’ role should be. Powell says: “Attenders and non-attenders come up with the same answer: the top thing is providing a moral framework. But the non-attenders say churches should also look after the poor, while attenders say, `Our business is about meaning and purpose, the questions of why we are here and who we are’.”

Many put limits on the perceived legitimacy of the churches’ moral leadership, which is seen as stopping at the bedroom door. “There’s a very clear delineation; in theory, `I want the church to provide a moral framework’, but there’s also, `Don’t tell me how to run my life in terms of issues like (sexuality and) abortion’.”

Says Bouma: “The church is too ready to answer questions that aren’t being asked and too slow in responding to the questions that are there . . . People want assistance and advice in searching for their spirituality, but they don’t want to be told how to do it.”

Up to a point. While many chafe under a church’s strictures, others prefer rules and certainty, even if it involves loss of freedom. The Pentecostal Protestant churches draw 182,000 people into church each week, topping the Anglicans’ 181,500. Pentecostals are known for their exuberance and informality, their contemporary music – and their authoritarian, fundamentalist teachings. “Pentecostals’ belief is much more black and white,” Bouma says. “They offer certainty, along with contemporary forms of communication.”

It’s a winning formula; they pack in young adults.

Rob Buckingham, senior pastor at the Bayside Community Church in Cheltenham, has seen his flock grow from 40 people 10 years ago to 640 today. People travel up to 45 minutes to get to a Sunday service that takes two-and-a-half hours – and that’s not counting the hour of socialising afterwards. “It’s a lifestyle. It’s not something people do just out of duty,” he says.

His church has no organ or statues. “We sing modern songs. We have a fully plugged-in band – guitars, synthesisers, drums – and a great sound system. The auditorium is large and we have comfortable chairs, not pews. The message is 2000 years old, but the packaging is 2002.”
While Pentecostals are also known for their churn rate, the flow of worshippers between them and the other Protestant denominations is two to one in the Pentecostals’ favour.

“Musical pews” works differently for Catholics. They rarely change denomination; they stay Catholic or drop out of religious practice altogether. But those who continue to attend church are more likely to abandon their local priest to travel further afield for spiritual custom-tailoring.

Anna Krohn, acting director of the Pastoral Formation Centre with the archdiocese of Melbourne, says: “Different people have different checklists. A parish like East Camberwell, run by the Dominicans, has a lot of preachers who preach well; people go for a great homily. If what’s really important to you is the spirit of prayer, you might worship with the Carmelite nuns in Kew, where there’s a quiet, contemplative sort of spirit. There’s a Jesuit parish in Parkville which is very intellectual; (the philosopher) Max Charlesworth goes there.

“St Patrick’s (cathedral) has young people who now call it their parish, either because the music’s beautiful and they have a cultural interest in that, or because this is where they feel they can tap into the longer tradition of the church. In Burwood, charismatic groups have formed clusters of housing. Families might move to where they feel young children can be accepted into the Mass without feeling embarrassed when the baby cries.”
Such diversity has always existed in Catholicism, which calls itself a “broad” church. But others are now deliberately experimenting with new forms, Powell says. They include “the meta-church experience of 2000 people in a warehouse and a big band and 50 people on stage; home churches, where people gather together in small and intimate spaces; cafe churches, where a group of younger adults might sit around tables with candles and cake and coffee and you have a much more interactive style of thing, with maybe a multi-media extravaganza of images on walls, or a visit from a poet or a sculptor who has come to share their experience of God – no priest up the front telling you what to do any more”.

Not all the experimenting involves the ultra-modern; some is about reaching back into the past. Powell says the Paize and Iona movements involve an updated form of singing religious chants: “You will gather in a beautiful space, with lovely candles and maybe rich fabrics or beautiful icons spread out for you to look at, and you sing your way through.”
It is not only young people who want to try new things. Mark Dunn, minister with the Pilgrim Uniting Church in Doncaster, started a cafe church and found that parishioners of all ages turned up. He says the problem for many small parishes is now a chicken-and-egg one: they are no longer large enough to offer choices.

Local churches are also at the mercy of local demographics. Sometimes this works in their favour, says Alistair Macrae, Victorian moderator for the Uniting Church. His local church in West Brunswick was struggling 15 years ago because the suburb had filled up with Italian Catholics after the war. Then yuppies moved in as the suburb gentrified, and the church now has a thriving, self-sufficient community of people who share goods, run a food co-op and support each other emotionally. In suburbs that are ageing, Macrae says, the local congregations will reflect that. In suburbs with young families, the successful ministers are those who offer different models of worship and more consultative leadership. People under 40 want to participate, not be passive; they expect to be consulted; they loathe the hymns older people love; and they prefer spontaneity to being read to from a book, he says. What does all this tell us? It seems the search for meaning is as vigorous as it ever was, but it now ranges more widely and is undertaken, by this consummate consumer society, using competitive free-market principles.

Macrae can draw encouragement from the latest figures, which show the Uniting Church’s membership, previously in freefall, has now increased by 2000. Nominal Catholics, too, continue to grow in numbers, as the result of natural increase and immigration. But, while Catholics now make up 50 per cent of Christians, their church attendance continues to drop. Father Maurie Cooney, director of the Catholic Research Office for Pastoral Planning, says 233,000 Catholics attended Sunday Mass in Melbourne in 1984. Now it is 165,000. Cooney says even non-practising Catholics return to the church for rites of passage: christenings, weddings, funerals.

But there is another point at which many “almost Christians” or “once-upon-a-time Christians”, as Dunn calls them, suddenly feel the pull back to church, and an urgent need for ritual. When there is a catastrophe that shakes people’s faith in this world – a deadly bushfire, for example, or a September 11 – it is to churches that people turn for solace and reassurance.

Vincent Peile said Woodend ran an ecumenical service at St Ambrose’s after the twin towers disaster. “It was a `Conquering darkness’ service. I have never seen the church as packed. It was packed with people who believe in God, people who believe in something, and people who have lost belief. They had a need to express grief and loss and uncertainty. Ambulance drivers, the fire brigade, the SES all came in uniform. People were invited to light a taper and put it into two bowls of sand to symbolise that, whatever the darkness, we can rebuild hope.”

This, says Macrae, is the Easter message, one that is as relevant today as yesterday. “The time between Good Friday and Easter really covers the whole gamut of human experience, from desolation, depression and fragmentation on the Friday to Saturday’s limbo of hopelessness through to the Sunday and its hope and new life. For me, this is existentially such a powerful story because it tells us that God is intimately bound up somehow in all the grief and glory of the human experience.”
His church’s fate, however, is bound up in the long-term choice Australia’s Christians will make about the symbol for their Easter: wooden cross or chocolate egg?

First published in The Age.

MELBOURNE’S Catholic archbishop, Denis Hart, is not known to enjoy a fight. He has a reputation as a conciliatory man who would rather talk you into accepting that line in the sand than dare you to step over it. But Hart now finds himself defending a line against a most unlikely adversary: the Vatican.

Hart is not alone. A great divide has developed between Australia’s Catholic bishops and Rome over the bishops’ attempts to deal with priests who have been accused of sexual abuse. The Australians believe any priest or other Catholic employee who poses an “unacceptable risk” to others should be removed as quickly as possible. Canon law, as interpreted by Rome, demands a slower, more certain and, many would argue, less effective approach.

The result is a stand-off. The debate is polite; verbally, due deference is paid to Rome’s authority by those determined to defy it. But defy it they will.

Hart said this week, “I don’t stand back from doing what I need to do.” In two legal rulings this year, Rome has challenged the validity of Australian systems for removing priests accused of sexual abuse. In the latest case, three priests accused of sexual abuse have successfully appealed to the Vatican about the way their cases were handled by the Melbourne archdiocese under a system set up by Hart’s predecessor, Dr George Pell, in 1996.

This follows a ruling in February that undermined the national system for dealing with such cases; the Vatican ordered the reinstatement of a Wollongong priest whose criminal conviction for molesting a former altar boy was overturned on appeal.

Has a creaking Roman bureaucracy pulled the rug from under Australia’s church leaders, weakening their power to weed out predators? Or could it be that Rome has a point; in the rush to protect victims and contain a public-relations disaster, has the Australian church failed to safeguard the rights of accused priests?

The rulings on the Melbourne cases, by the Church’s Congregation for the Clergy, overturned Pell’s decisions to remove the three priests and deny them the right to publicly administer the sacraments, which include holy communion, baptism and confession.

Pell’s decrees on the matter were found to be “null and void and without juridical effect because of serious flaws de procedendo”; that is, Pell’s decisions were invalid because the procedures of the investigation on which his decision was based did
not conform to church law (canon law).

Hart insists that the cases will not be revisited and the priests will not be reinstated. He says Rome’s ruling did not challenge the facts but merely expressed concerns about the process that assessed them. “Basically, they have indicated that the slower and more detailed process of church law hasn’t been followed,” he says.”

The normal provisions of church law are that there’s got to be a first warning, and then a period of time, and then a second warning, and then gradual restriction. Well, the judgment was made here in Melbourne that this is such a serious matter, we have got a public responsibility not to allow the possibility of reoffence, and therefore a decision was made much more quickly.” So the Vatican has made a bad call on this one? “No. I don’t believe the Vatican has made a bad call. I believe that the Vatican is pointing out to us the requirements and graduality of the process.” Hart acknowledges that a system of warnings is particularly unsuitable for cases that involve claims of sexual abuse of children: “Seriously, I cannot, as an archbishop, condone in any way any harm of children by church personnel or anyone else. That’s why I totally endorse the steps taken by Archbishop Pell since 1996.” He would not stand back from removing priests in such cases “because I cannot have it on my conscience”.

And, as a line manager in a prominent organisation, he must know that any other approach would be catastrophic for the church’s good name. In Australia and overseas, the church is struggling to regain its standing following scalding media coverage of allegations of widespread sexual abuse. There is public outrage not only at the abuse itself, and the fact that it was committed by people who were trusted as godly, but at stories of church authorities failing to respond to it or covering it up.

The national system for dealing with clerical abuse, Towards Healing, was finally set up in 1996 after damaging publicity about perverted priests emerged from a royal commission into police corruption in New South Wales. It is used in every diocese in Australia except Melbourne, which uses the Pell system, and by all religious orders except the Jesuits.

Now Towards Healing has challenged the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. Bishops have appealed to a higher Roman forum, the Signatura, against the congregation’s ruling that the Wollongong priest must be reinstated.

Meanwhile, Australian church leaders will continue to remove offenders, says Sister Angela Ryan, executive officer for Towards Healing’s national committee. “I think there’s a situation where the people in the church in Australia are doing what they believe is right,” she says.

More challenges to Australia’s processes might be under way. Asked whether other disgraced priests have appeals to Rome pending, Ryan declined to answer.

The current impasse is distressing for both complainants and alleged offenders. Chris MacIsaac is president of Broken Rites, a support group for people abused within church communities. She says: “It just clearly indicates that the Vatican doesn’t take sexual abuse seriously. That’s the bottom line.” FATHER MICHAEL SHADBOLT, spokesman for the Catholic Priests Anti-Defamation League, believes the commission has generally worked very well but has concerns about whether the process is always fair to priests. Shadbolt says one of the three priests concerned has not been convicted in a court of law or charged by police; the only mark against him was the tribunal’s verdict, and “he was subsequently subjected to extremely hostile press coverage largely based
on that questionable verdict”.”

This is a totally unsatisfactory condition for everyone concerned. The victim can rightly claim he has been robbed of justice. But the priest can also claim that he has received anything but a just trial,” Shadbolt says.

Since it was set up in 1996, the Independent Commission into Sexual Abuse, run by QC Peter O’Callaghan on behalf of the archdiocese, has dealt with 22 offenders and 115 complainants.

O’Callaghan investigates the facts, much like a royal commissioner, and comes to a verdict. The archbishop then decides whether to act against the priest. “Any priest who has received a prison sentence or who has been found guilty by a civil court will never work again as a priest,” Hart says. In most commission cases, the same rule would apply.

The commission has jurisdiction over the 334 priests of the Melbourne archdiocese only.

Priests from other parts of Victoria, or who belong to orders rather than the diocese, would face the Towards Healing process.

Hart says six of the 22 Melbourne offenders have been jailed by criminal courts and three have received suspended sentences. Five have died. All 115 complainants have received compensation from the church, with payouts averaging $25,000. Altogether about $3 million has been paid in compensation and it has cost the archdiocese another $1.5 million to run Carelink, a counselling service for victims.

A national picture is harder to get. The Catholic church is not a monolithic organisation with a central control but a collection of loosely aligned fiefdoms. Ryan says Towards Healing does not keep national figures because each case is handled independently by a bishop or the provincial of an order and settlements are confidential.

But she estimates that there have been more than 100 Victorian cases outside the Melbourne system, and several hundred nationally. Most of the early complaints involved the sexual abuse of children but there are now also allegations of adult “boundary violations”, such as a priest having sexual contact with a parishioner, she says.

Broken Rites says that at least 43 Catholic priests and 27 brothers have been sentenced in Australian courts for sexual crimes since 1993.

According to MacIsaac, “It’s the tip of the iceberg.

Thousands of people have made complaints to us about sexual abuse nationally.” Unless they voluntarily leave the priesthood, priests are never off the church’s books. Those suspended for offending in Melbourne are still fed, clothed and housed by the archdiocese, says Hart, “because a bishop has a responsibility in charity to support all his priests”. Offenders live privately, “and we normally insist that they live somewhere away from schools or children, if that has been their particular difficulty”.

MacIsaac says victims usually find the Melbourne system fair, but she believes it does not compensate victims adequately (payouts are capped at $55,000). Many people who were abused as children have broken lives: “They’ve not been able to work because of substance abuse or their state of mind is such that they are very limited. Often they have lost an education.

They have lost an enormous amount.”
She says a Queensland girl recently won $800,000 in a court case over abuse by a non-Catholic minister.

She is more concerned about Towards Healing, which she says performs well or badly depending on the individual church authority dealing with the case. Ryan acknowledges that there were initial difficulties but says many of these have now been overcome.

Canon lawyer Tony Kerin says the church’s response to the problem of sexual abuse is not yet perfect, “but they’re getting better at it because of experience. It’s like a magistrate in his first year on the bench; after a while he acquires a wisdom about cases.”
Shadbolt says the church should update canon law to ensure that processes are legal and effective. Rome is committed to addressing sexual abuse, Hart says, and he will not appeal the Melbourne rulings because talks with Rome are continuing.

Wider questions remain. The bishops who set up Toward Healing also promised a review to examine whether there were aspects of Catholic culture that had contributed to abuse. Ryan says one issue is celibacy, but she points out, “Sexual abuse takes place in families, in society, so it’s certainly not totally related to celibacy.

“I suppose at the root of the questions we are looking at is what are the reasons that brought people to the priesthood or religious life, and does the trust that was placed in these people give them privileged access to an availability of people?

“At another level, you have got a real question about the ability to talk about sexuality in society 30 to 40 years ago, which is when a lot of these people were trained in the spirit of the times and with the taboos of the times.”

When it comes to trial and punishment, it seems that the Australian church will continue to go its own way while it waits for Rome to catch up with this particular dilemma of the modern world.

Hart plans to proceed with care. “I think I have to show more respect for what the church asks of me and the way I go about it. I will continue the discussion. But the church acknowledges that bishops have serious responsibilities and some of them are not always written down.”

First published in The Age.