Searching for the essence of Islam

There is the Islam of peace and compassion: Christians and Jews are recognised as fellow travellers, human life is precious and attacks on innocents are grave sins. And then there is the extremist Islam of jihad (holy war): unbelievers are to be slayed, violent martyrdom wins a special place in paradise, and the whole world should submit to Allah.

At the same time as Westerners have been confronted with images suspected of being linked to the extremist line, they have also been told that this is not the real face of Islam. Newspapers such as The Age have received deeply wounded letters from moderate Muslims appalled that their faith could be seen as having any role in justifying the mass slaughter of innocents.

For the non-Muslim seeking the truth about the essence of Islam, picking up the Koran is as confusing and contradictory as it would be for a non-Christian to open a Bible, which advocates both love for others and stoning to death for blasphemy. Professor Abdullah Saeed, head of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Melbourne University, says texts from any religion can be quoted selectively or misused as a political rallying point, with people emphasising some elements and ignoring others: “It can
be used like a football; you just play it in any direction you want.”
The first line of the Koran is “This book is not to be doubted.” Chapter nine, Repentance, has many references to the duty of good Muslims to fight for Allah: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” If idolaters revile the faith, “make war on the leaders of unbelief”.

Those who fight for God are promised his joy and mercy “and gardens of eternal bliss”. And God sent forth Mohammed “with guidance and true faith to make it triumphant over all religions, however much idolaters may dislike it”.

But like any religious text, the Koran suggests different things in different places. It also says: “Whosoever kills a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he has killed all mankind; and whosoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.” It urges forgiveness of unbelievers and says that even in times of war, Muslims are not allowed to kill anyone except those who have confronted them face to face. There are particular rules against killing women, children, old people and religious figures.

A Melbourne Muslim who did not wish to be named says: “There are two interpretations of the Koran. The first one is literal … and it means kill those who don’t believe in God, who don’t accept your religion. Another possible way of interpreting it is in historical context. Those verses weren’t revealed in a vacuum; they were revealed on a certain occasion. What was their purpose? That was revealed for a particular type of situation faced by Muslims at that time, and we can’t generalise (from that).

“Fundamentalists go for a literal interpretation of the Koran, but this (historical view) is the way of liberal or moderate Muslims.”

According to Khaled Abou El Fadl, an acting professor at UCLA law school in America, Islamic law considers terrorism (hirabah) a grave and predatory sin punishable by death. It forbids the taking or slaying of hostages as well as stealthy or indiscriminate attacks against enemies. “Classical jurists considered such acts to be contrary to the ethics of Arab chivalry and therefore fundamentally cowardly,” he writes in the Los Angeles Times.

But he argues that an “ethically oblivious” strand of Islam has developed since the 1970s that dismisses the juristic tradition and the notion of universal and innate moral values. Instead, it relies on a literal interpretation of texts and the technicalities of Islamic law, and is rooted in the sense of defeat and alienation being experienced by many in the Muslim world.

Professor Saeed says there are many different schools of thought in Islam: “We are dealing with 1400 years of history, almost every single nation, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic group you can think of. It’s inconceivable that all these people would be thinking the same way on these issues.”

Professor Saeed said many Muslims now interpret “jihad” as the struggle against sin and oneself. The notion of jihad as physical warfare is more problematic and is meant to be confined to defending Islam and Muslims against serious, actual or imminent attack. The Russian invasion of Muslim Afghanistan, he says, legitimatised a jihad against the invaders.

Islam does consider itself to be the final word of God, says Dr Sharam Akberzadeh, lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University, but many Muslims acknowledge there are modern challenges not addressed by the Koran, as well as some Koranic concepts that are no longer appropriate. “Very few Muslim scholars have argued that popular will and democratic elections should be abandoned because sovereignty, as suggested in the Koran, resides with Allah.” But it is that principle that government-by-mullah has relied upon, he agrees.

Dr Akberzadeh says the rallying point for those advocating jihad is a growing sense in the Muslim world that Muslim identity is threatened by globalisation and the cultural penetration of western values, and that Islam is under siege.

Professor Saeed says extremists look at many disparate developments – such as the dispossession of Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, or the way women are prevented from wearing the hijab in certain Muslim countries fearful of fundamentalism – and see a pattern of suppression.

But in Melbourne, Muslim students hear little of the concept of war as jihad, says the principal of Minaret College in Springvale, Mr Mohamed Hassan. “To be honest, we hardly touch on it,” he says. “What we are concerned about is teaching our children Islamic morality and to be good Australian citizens.”

Islam in Australia: from the outback to suburbia

Even before the arrival of Captain Cook, Muslims visited Australia’s north coast. Each summer Macassans and Buginese, from the Indonesian archipelago, would travel from west of Darwin to the Gulf of Carpentaria to catch and dry trepang, or sea slug, and trade with local Aborigines. Later, Afghan cameleers and hawkers helped open up the interior and build the overland telegraph.

The past 25 years has seen the rise of significant Muslim communities throughout Australia, with just over one in every 100 Australians now identifying as Muslim.

In the 1947 census, no respondents identified as Muslim. By 1971, there were 22,000 (0.2 per cent of the population) and in 1991, 147,500 (0.9 per cent). At the last census, in 1996, the number had grown by 36.2 per cent to almost 201,000 (1.13 per cent). Of those, 67,047 live in Victoria. Some believe the figures are understated due to a reluctance to identify as Islamic and that the actual number could be as high as 300,000.

While 35 per cent of Muslims living in Australia were born here, the other 64 per cent have immigrated from more than 60 countries.

Muslim migration rose after the lifting of the White Australia policy. Recent immigration patterns have been linked to tensions in the Middle East: the Lebanese fleeing civil war in the 1970s, Iranian refugees fleeing the mullahs’ revolution in 1979, and Iraqi refugees escaping after the Gulf War in 1990-91.

Muslims live in every local government area of Victoria but are centred in Broadmeadows, which has more than 10,000 Muslims, and Dandenong, Preston, Coburg, Brunswick, Sunshine, Keilor and South Whittlesea.

First published in The Age.

A faithful translation: The King James Bible

KAREN KISSANE

A TRANSLATION, a French writer once said, is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is not beautiful.But that’s the French for you. The English would say that if it was both faithful and beautiful, it must be the King James translation of the Bible. It is so revered for its literary grace and the way it has shaped English that even non-believers study it as they would Shakespeare.

But while its text may be sublime, it was conceived in ignoble, self-aggrandising politics, commissioned in order to cement the privilege and power of the British Establishment.

The story of the King James Bible, first published in 1611, shows how greatness can spring rather undeservedly from shabby beginnings. It shows how people with power fight the spread of ideas that threaten them. And it offers reassurance to those who fear we are speaking a “dumbed-down”, degraded form of English today; their concerns echo centuries-old anxieties among intellectuals about the way language evolves.

In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture, is a new book on the subject by a professor of historical theology at Oxford University, Alister McGrath.

McGrath writes with a scholar’s eye for detail and disdain for frivolity. He devotes six pages to the technology of the first printing and a mere aside to the titillating fact that good King James, whose name for centuries has been linked through this Bible with conservative religious righteousness, had strong homosexual tendencies and was given to lecherous fondling of his favorites in public.

James was a man with an eye to the main chance in other ways too. According to McGrath, he snatched at the idea for a new translation of the Bible in an attempt to placate Puritans who had expected him to reform the Church of England along their severely Protestant lines. James, who feared Protestantism because he saw it as linked to republicanism, had no such intention.

But he was happy to authorise a new translation that would eradicate the alarmingly democratic language of the then-popular Tyndale New Testament of 1526, which often translated “king” as “tyrant”, “church” as “congregation” and “priest” as
“elder”, thus undermining both monarchy and episcopacy.

The Geneva Bible, from which Shakespeare drew the quotations for his plays, was even more open in its challenge of the divine right of kings. It suggested royal orders should be disobeyed if they conflicted with the will of God and warned that tyrants’ days were numbered.

English authorities had tried unsuccessfully to ban English-language biblical texts and the next best thing was to produce their own authorised version. For James, writes McGrath, political and religious unity were to be achieved through him as monarch and through a single version of the Bible issued with his authority as king and as head of the church.

Luckily for literature, the 50-odd Oxford and Cambridge scholars given the task tried to translate faithfully from the Hebrew and Arabic of the original Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament. They aimed for accuracy, not beauty, but the unexpected byproducts were poetry and pungency.

For centuries, the King James Bible was the main book illiterate people heard read, and those who were literate often learned to read from it. It was a unifying force in that it set modern, standard English.

Before then most people spoke strong dialects, and spelling was idiosyncratic (according to Melbourne linguist Dr Mark Newbrook, the Elizabethan seafarer Sir Walter Raleigh signed his name at least five different ways). The King James also enriched the vocabulary and imaginative power of English. The many Hebrew idioms from the Old Testament now taken for granted as English include “to pour out one’s heart”, “the land of the living”, “sour grapes”, “like a lamb to the slaughter” and “to go from strength to strength”.

New Testament translators drew from the earlier work of William Tyndale, to whom English owes much. He coined pithy expressions such as “the powers that be”, “my brother’s keeper”, “the salt of the earth” and “a law unto themselves”. He also invented new words to accommodate Biblical ideas, including “Passover”, “scapegoat” and “atonement”, although his aim was to produce a text that even a ploughboy could understand.

Let’s hope he received his reward in the next life. In this one, he was burnt at the stake – mercifully strangled first, it is thought – by church authorities in Belgium. Clergy were enraged by translations into the vernacular from Latin, the official language of the church spoken only by elites, because it threatened their control of religious belief.

Temporal rulers were anxious too. The term “liberation theology” may not have been coined, but it was feared that if ordinary people could read and interpret the word of God themselves, they might revolt.

After the publication of the King James Bible, an archbishop publicly burned a Geneva Bible and England banned all English-language Bibles printed in the more radical atmosphere of Europe. The excuse was that it protected the livelihood of English printers; in reality, it prevented the importation of ideas that challenged authority.

The divine right of kings is no longer an issue, at least in the West. But the translation of the Bible into English was opposed for another reason that still resonates today.

In 16th century England, the elites spoke English only to their inferiors, confining themselves otherwise to the more “refined” French or Latin. They feared religious texts would be cheapened if translated for commoners. “To translate into the language of the people was to vulgarise and trivialise the message,” says Dr Peter Horsfield, a lecturer in communications at RMIT.

Today, paradoxically, the English translation they feared is held up as a beacon by those who think 20th century English has become impoverished. “It seems to me it emerged from the period where the English language was at its most expressive and beautiful,” says David Silk, Anglican bishop of Ballarat and a member of the church’s liturgy panel. “It has a music, a poetry, a rhythm and a vivid style which the English language hasn’t really aspired to since. When people start to recite the 23rd psalm, `The Lord is My Shepherd’, it’s the King James version they still slip into.”

He says modern English is verbose and has replaced the active and the vivid with the passive and the abstract. “If Columbus set sail not in 1492 but now, he would not have said the world was flat, he would have said the world is an open-ended on-going situation.”

Newbrook, a lecturer in linguistics at Monash University, acknowledges the force of the King James Bible in the development of English; it was so dominant that many did not realise it was a translation and opposed change to it with the argument that “If the King James Bible was good enough for St Paul, it’s good enough for me”.

But Newbrook takes a more cynical view of its claim to grandeur: “Often something does sound very august and full of dignity and nicely written when it’s a bit archaic. At the time of Jesus, it was thought that really good Greek was speaking as Athenians had spoken 500 years earlier.”
Much of the impact of the King James Bible is being undone by the march of history. Its unifying effect on the language boosted English nationalism, but colonialism has since made English an international language. The King James Bible helped standardise usage and spelling, but email and cybertalk are “de-standardising” again with grammatical shortcuts, abbreviations, phonetic spellings and neologisms, according to Horsfield.

After electronic media, advertising is the main influence on language today, he says. “Advertising is continually working with language to make it do new things, such as creating ambiguous sentences that connote rather denote; `Just Do It’, for example, or `We do it all for you’, where it actually invites the reader to share in the construction of meaning.”

HORSFIELD says there is still debate about which level of culture should carry faith. In Sweden, entrepreneurs plan a glossy new version of the Bible aimed at young people in which mass-media icons are photographed as Biblical characters; supermodel Claudia Schiffer is tipped for Eve and Pamela Anderson’s ex-lover Markus Schenkenberg for Adam. There will be some nudity, said one of the promoters, “because the Bible is very sensual and we are going to exploit that”. Some church figures are appalled; others think anything that draws people in is a good thing.

“This is another attempt to translate the Bible into the vernacular,” Horsfield says. “The same struggle is going on now: Should Christian faith be preserved in an elevated language which is no longer the language of the marketplace?”

Alister McGrath would say no. McGrath loves the King James Bible. Like every child born in Britain in 1953, the year of Elizabeth’s coronation, he was given a copy by command of the Queen. Probably unlike most of them, he pored over it, fascinated by the words and the stories. But, discussing the pressure from traditionalists who wanted to retain the King James Bible, he argues that they “actually betray the intentions and goals of those who conceived and translated it – namely, to translate the Bible into living English”.

The man who preached to the poor and the dispossessed in marketplaces 2000 years ago would probably agree.

In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How it Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture, by Alister McGrath, Hodder and Stoughton, $34.95.

First published in The Age.

A modern prophet

He’s been called “Prophetic Peter”; certainly his childhood was prophetic of his adult life. When he was 10, Peter Carnley was walking down a dirt road in his country town. “I remember thinking about why there should be anything; a philosophical question, I suppose. Why should anything be?“And I began to think about what would be if things weren’t there, if you subtract things: take away the fences and the houses and the dirt road, what would be left? It would all be blackness; but then I thought, ‘Blackness is something.’ And I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck.”

A different child might have been filled with dread, or with helplessness at the absurdity of human life in the face of the cosmos. But Carnley experienced it as a positive revelation; he felt “awe, and the mystery of it all. And I think that’s still with me”.

That moment shaped the rest of his life, and its reverberations are now felt in the life of the nation. The Most Reverend Dr Peter Carnley this year became an outspoken and controversial primate of Australia’s four million Anglicans.

He is the darling of the leftie intelligentsia and the bane of conservatives, exasperating Liberal politicians and religious fundamentalists in equal measure. His stance is a novel and – to those whose sense of humor is wickedly inclined – amusing one for a leader of the Christian denomination that has historically had the closest links with Australia’s establishment.

In the 1998 docks war, Carnley told the federal Liberal government it should be acting as an independent umpire, not a player, in the dispute. The Anglican Premier of Western Australia, Richard Court, has had to fend off claims by Carnley that opposition to Aboriginal land rights is akin to Hitler’s dispossession of the Jews. Anglican MP Wilson Tuckey threatened to leave the church over Carnley’s criticisms.

Carnley’s stance in theological matters triggers similar divisions in his flock. He is the hero of the Movement for the Ordination of Women. Boldly going where no bishop had gone before, he ordained Australia’s first women priests in Perth in 1992, defying outrage, litigation and years of stalemate.

A grand vision underlies his grand gestures. In his sermon that day he said, “Today we ordain 10, but we liberate tens of thousands from the stereotypes with which they have been bound.”

His refusal to wait for national consensus on the issue earned him the soubriquet “the Episcopalian cowboy”. He responded lightly, “I don’t think I’ve ever been on a horse, and I’ve certainly never been on a cow.”

But the large and powerful Sydney diocese has never forgiven him, and there is speculation that the divide between it and Carnley might develop into a formal schism.

Sydney is a diocese unlike any other in Australia. Anglicans there call themselves “evangelicals” but liberals call them “fundamentalists”. They emphasise faith over reason and see a fairly literal reading of the Bible as the source of truth and authority. They oppose female ordination, minimise the use of prayer books and ritual and want lay people to be allowed to give communion (“lay presidency”).

They are appalled by what they believe to be Carnley’s views on Christ and the resurrection and by an article canvassing these views in The Bulletin published at Easter. The week after the article appeared, Carnley’s inauguration took place in Sydney. It was accompanied by the kind of dramas more typical of the Bible belt of America’s deep south than a cosmopolitan Australian capital.

Leading Sydney clergy, including two bishops, boycotted the service. Others who attended said they were “saluting the uniform, not the man”. Demonstrators outside the cathedral carried placards saying “Anglicans are dead” and “Peter Carnley, repent of heresy”.

The church’s dilemma is that one man’s heresy is another man’s vision for leading a declining institution into the modern world.

CARNLEY has long been a leader. In most families it is the parents who decide the child’s religious orientation but it was the other way around for the Carnleys. His father was a postal worker and his mother stayed at home with Peter, born in 1937, and his younger brother and sister.

In the years following his mystical experience on the dirt track, Carnley surveyed the various religious offerings in his home town of Young, NSW (“the cherry capital of Australia,” he says with a wry, sidelong glance).

He had been taken by a neighbor to Methodist Sunday school, which didn’t really engage him, although he has always remembered the message of a banner hanging in the church: “Be still and know that I am God.” Today his little weekend farm is called Stillpoint.

Carnley was part of a scout troop that did Sunday “parades” at the church of each denomination in turn, and he decided he liked the Anglicans: “Robes. Candles. The liturgy.”

“I still do love worship, and the big cathedral occasions,” he says. “Grandeur and drama and tradition is part of it, but also the idea of transcendence, that there’s more to this world than we dream of.”

His non-religious family tolerated his decision as a teenager to get himself confirmed but was shocked when, in his 20s, he decided to abandon law studies to become a priest. “They thought I was daft at the beginning but after a little while they got themselves confirmed and Dad became the sidesman – you know, handing out hymn books.”

Carnley is said to be a shy man who is protective of his privacy. He certainly shields himself in this interview in his book-lined study in the Victorian mansion he inhabits as Archbishop of Perth, the diocese he has run since 1981.

A renowned scholar and theologian, he adopts the desiccated, donnish manner of a Mr Chips or a Casaubon, choosing his words with care. He will discuss his views but evades questions about his feelings. He is impervious to the journalistic trick of allowing a pause to develop in the hope that the subject will feel obliged to fill it. He simply falls into an unperturbed silence, gazing at the carpet. This man knows how to play chicken.

But while he keeps his face and voice impassive his slender, expressive hands give him away. He distractedly touches the symbols of his office as though they are talismans, twisting the episcopal ring or fingering his ornate Huguenot cross. Laughter emerges only in quick, rare flashes, as if he has to be ambushed by his own sense of the ridiculous.

`THAT’S because of what his role is at the moment,” says an old friend from theological college, Reverend Ian Brown of St Stephen’s, Richmond. “He’s got a droll wit, but once you become purple you’ve got to watch what you say. It’s like a life sentence; it just surrounds you.”

Or perhaps it is just Carnley’s natural reserve. The writer Tim Winton, an Anglican in Carnley’s diocese, says, “He’s probably more respected than loved. He’s not a man of the people but he’s interested in people, curious.”

Carnley is also curious about his own make-up. In this interview he comfortably dissects, for the world’s interest, his results on a Jungian psychological test called the Myer-Briggs Personality Inventory. He proffers as titbits his test result (INTJ), his wife Ann’s (INFJ) and even that of their mutual friend actress Jackie Weaver (also INFJ).

“The `I’ is the Introvert but I’m midway between `I’ and Extrovert,” he says. “I quite like being with people and going to parties and that sort of thing but to regenerate or recreate I go away.

“`N’ means Intuitive, rather than a Sensate person. It means that when I go to meetings, I know what the outcome of the discussion’s going to be but I have to sit and wait for everybody else to work through it. You intuit somehow, you can just grasp what is to happen, or where the truth is or something … And I certainly notice it at meetings. I have to bite on my bottom lip and just wait for people because I’ve learnt to understand that other people aren’t intuitive.

“`T’ is a thinker rather than a feeler. I’m a typical man, in that sense … And I was raised on Wittgenstein at Cambridge, I suppose. And then a `J’ is a person who is able to make judgments, whereas a `P’ is a perceiving person who keeps seeing other possibilities and will put off deciding until something else has been looked at.”

When the tester saw Carnley was an INTJ, “He said, `Oh yes, that’s the kind of guy institutions need at the top.’ The other clergy’s jaws dropped.” Carnley grins, amused by his Jungian imprimatur.

Carnley didn’t begin his priestly life as the kind of Anglican who would be open to depth psychology. Today he talks about the nexus between the spiritual and the subconscious, and how he believes some people project on to him the religious doubt they deny in themselves. But in his 20s he was as literal a believer as any Sydney evangelical.

He found his views challenged at theology college. His fellow student Ian Brown says, “We had to talk about the lives of Christ and how everybody doctored them to suit the age they lived in; in the First World War for the troops in the trenches; how with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara (Christ) was seen as the great liberator.”

Carnley was at first threatened, says Brown: “It was quite a tempestuous time for all of us. But Peter came from the law courts where he’d heard a lot of argument and he (began) to apply that sort of argumentation.”

Carnley says, “I remember being absolutely amazed that all this belief in angels and things that I had might not be quite literally true. Theological college shook me out of that into a much more critical historical approach. I think most theological students find that very liberating … It’s not possible to believe it all literally.”
Does he now believe in the devil? “Not with a tail and pitchforks, no. But I certainly believe there is a positive evil. St Augustine, for example, had a theory of evil as the absence of good … But I think it’s much more positive than that, much more sinister.”

And how does he see grace? “As something manifested in gifts. Life is a gift. And certainly love is. If you look at people’s lives, you can very quickly pick up when they’re trying to be loving. As soon as you try to do it, you’re found to be patronising.

“I think real loving is much more spontaneous. It’s a gift, a grace. It happens. You fall in love and love wells up like a spring of deep water.”

He fell in love with one Ann Dunstan, whom he married in 1966. They met at Melbourne University when she was training to be a teacher and he was studying biblical archaeology.

She remembers him as dynamic: “You couldn’t not notice him. It was probably his energy that captured me, but also his silence. He’s actually quite shy and if you move him from one social scene to another he finds it quite hard … I’m immediately more easy with people than he is; I think it’s partly a woman thing. And we both love nothing better than to be on our own together. We both need lots of quiet space.”

They retreat down to their 5hectare tulip farm at Nannup, south of Perth, where Carnley spends a lot of time on his knees planting and harvesting flowers, in part for love and in part for the mortgage.

Ann Carnley says, “We’ve got a tiny little house, and we’re building an extension and he’s taken out an owner-builder licence,” – she chuckles – “and he can’t work the video, you know. But he’s actually very good, he’s come to terms with some very complicated plans.

“We sit in the evenings with a drink, and watch the kangaroos. We go to bed very early. We read. We bore everybody by saying we saw a splendid blue wren …” She looks apologetic, uncertain whether their joy in the simple things will be understood.

Their marriage seems close – they kiss goodbye before parting after a charity breakfast function – and mutually supportive. Soon after they were married he won a scholarship to Cambridge University that did not include a fare for her. Ann Carnley tried to earn extra money by accepting a local newspaper editor’s invitation to write the society column.

“So Peter and I used to sit up the night before the deadline, and I’d be trying to make sense of `Bride wore mother’s tiara’ or `Interstate guests come for wedding’. And Peter would often run down the street to put the copy underneath the door to meet the deadline.” It has left him with a lifelong sympathy for the fourth estate, she laughs.

Carnley completed his PhD – on the interface between theology and the philosophy of history – at Cambridge in 1968. But he chose not to pursue a career in England as an academic theologian because he disliked the gap between his quality of life and his wife’s.

He says, “As a fellow I had a stipend in the college, and part of the stipend was all these dining rights. But that was only for me. My wife and child – we had Ben – were at home having mincemeat and I was there having college feasts and wine circles afterwards. And snuff!”

Ben, now 31, is a doctor training to be a physician. His sister, Sarah, 29, is a lawyer. Ann Carnley says, “She had a couple of years in a law firm but she’s not litigation-minded and now she’s into mediation.” Blood will out.

The Carnleys also seem united in their views about how Christians should engage with the wider world. They downplay proselytising zeal in favor of respect of difference.

Ann Carnley’s most recent job is that of part-time lay chaplain in a state primary school in Subiaco. She doesn’t see herself as a missionary: “God has created people who are unique and have integrity, and I’m not in the business of interfering with that creation. If I thought that people thought I was relating to them as a person who’s a possible subject for conversion, I’d be so unhappy. I think you give what you are, who you are, and that’s really it.”

In his Easter essay in The Bulletin, “The Rising of the Son”, Carnley sharply criticised “hostile and self-righteously condemning Christian attitudes with respect to … other religions”. He wrote of an ecumenical service he runs each year at which members of various religions are invited to come and say prayers for peace, each in their own way.

“If this service happens to be televised, we receive a spate of communications from angry people … who are hell bent on exclusion and condemnation – for, they say, salvation can come from Christ and no other, save Christ alone. Christians should have no dealings with Buddhists and Muslims and Samaritans!”

This and other comments in the article led Sydney church leaders to unleash a torrent of criticism of Carnley, accusing him of undermining the basic Christian tenet that the only way to God is through Jesus.

Carnley’s views on the resurrection have led some to believe he is not even Christian. He has been interpreted as suggesting that the resurrection was more a spiritual event that did not necessarily involve Christ’s body. Such an approach is not uncommon in modern theological circles but is anathema in Sydney’s evangelical ones.

Carnley says conservative Christians “picture that Jesus sat up and rubbed his eyes and pushed his way out of the tomb and started walking around on the ground”.

“That’s what happened in the story of Lazarus; it’s effectively a resuscitation … A person is pronounced dead and sits up and resumes life in this world. Whereas a resurrection – there’s only been one. It’s an entry into the mystery of God. The raised Christ isn’t just restored to this world; he’s transformed, never to die again. It’s a different thing altogether.”

Did Christ’s body get up and walk around again? “Not in that kind of way. When he appears in the stories, he appears from heaven, as it were, in the radical hiddenness of God. The raised Christ, for example, appears and is not recognised until the breaking of bread, and then he disappears … They want to describe the raised Christ in literal terms whereas I want to say the raised Christ is a mystery like God is a mystery.”

The man who led the Sydney boycott of Carnley’s inauguration, Reverend John Woodhouse, says, “My understanding is that he believes that the bones and flesh of Jesus rotted somewhere in Palestine. That’s a different view from both the view of the eyewitnesses who were present and the view of Christians down the ages. It’s a very significant thing to prevaricate on”.

In terms of the Bulletin article, Woodhouse says the main concern was the suggestion that Christ is not the only way to God, that there were people in this world who don’t need Jesus Christ as their savior.

Anglicanism has no “central control”. Bishops and dioceses function fairly independently of each other; Carnley has little executive power and must rely on moral suasion to influence others.

It is theoretically possible for Sydney and the rest of Australia’s Anglican “communion” to live with their growing differences. But it is also possible that lay presidency or some other contentious issue will trigger a formal schism.

Carnley has vowed that he will not be “bullied by fundamentalists”. He says he finds it “very hurtful” to be told he’s not a proper Christian: “I think any ad hominem abuse is undesirable.” How does he deal with it? “Oh, I grind my teeth at night a bit,” he chuckles. “And if necessary I write them a letter, pointing out that what they’ve been saying is defamatory and what do they plan to do about it.” His voice is suddenly steely: “I give them a few sleepless nights for the good of their souls.”

He takes a broad view of division. “It’s funny, isn’t it, that in a time when the world becomes more global it also becomes more tribal? Break down the Berlin Wall and then the whole Soviet Union breaks up into little groups.” He believes something similar will happen as Anglicans, Catholics and Lutherans move to unite: “I think as the ecumenical movement becomes more real, there are those who are going to opt out.”
BUT there are others who opt in because of Carnley’s inclusiveness. Jackie Weaver says, “Sydney’s very strange. There’s only about three churches I can go to. Whenever I read or hear what they’re saying about him in the Sydney diocese, that’s not the same person I know. The Carnleys are the epitome of what Christianity is all about: tolerance, and purity of heart, and generosity and forgiveness …”
Says Winton, who sees Carnley as a “useful moderate”: “It’s a fiery time for a normally lukewarm church – you can only wish the bloke luck.”

OUTSIDE the church it is his politics, rather than his theology, that has made Carnley controversial. He favors prescription heroin and injecting rooms, and opposed the GST on food.

His hero is Ernest Henry Bergmann. “He confirmed me; he was the bishop of Canberra-Goulburn. He was a wonderful Australian. He led the striking steelworkers down the streets of Newcastle during the depression demanding double the dole.”

In 1998 Carnley received an Order of Australia for his own contributions to theology, ecumenism and social justice. Most visible has been his support for reconciliation, which flowed from an earlier commitment to the anti-apartheid movement.

Carnley has a special relationship with the Ngarinyin people of the Kimberley following an approach several years ago by one of their elders, David Mowaljarlai.

Mowaljarlai had lost several children to problems including alcoholism, drugs and suicide, and wanted his last two boys to escape a similar fate. He offered a cross-cultural exchange: Carnley would find them places in a church boarding school, and in return Mowaljarlai would teach about Aboriginal art and culture. But Mowaljarlai died, leaving Carnley “Uncle Archbishop” – supplier of Walkmans and Reeboks – to a group that eventually grew to 11.

Carnley has been to “bush university” on their tribal lands. “There are galleries and galleries of ancient art, certainly more than 20,000 years old. It gave me a huge new perspective on this culture,” he says. “They have this figure called Wandjina … and Wandjina has no mouth because Wandjina is a manifestation of Wungud, sort of God. So it’s like an angel in the Old Testament, a manifestation of God himself.

“And the Ngarinyin people, when they see reflections of trees and rocks and cliffs in the water, they don’t see it as a reflection of the real cliff but see the reflection in the water as Wungud’s idea of the cliff. It’s wonderful; it’s like Plato, almost.”
But while his intellect delights in the play of their ideas, even Aborigines have been known to cop Carnley’s sometimes acid tongue. At one human rights awards function that ran late because of a routine by an Aboriginal comedian, Carnley, peeved that he might miss his plane, startled the liberal audience by remarking from the podium, “We seem to be running on Aboriginal time here today.”

“He can be blunt, and I suppose bluntness doesn’t always go with kindness,” says an old friend, the former governor-general Sir Zelman Cowen. “But underneath there’s a genuine warmth and caring.” Cowen, who is Jewish, read the first lesson at the church service for Carnley’s inauguration as primate.

Weaver was enlisted to a more worldly project: reading a play called Love Letters to raise money for charity during Carnley’s Anglican Awareness Week (slogan: “Anglicans make better lovers”.)
These are canny recruitments of a modern prophet who can read the signs of his multicultural and generally more tolerant times. It’s a world Carnley is keen to engage.

He believes that this is the difference between a sect and a church; the sect defines itself ever against a world it condemns – “I see that certainly in pockets in Sydney” – whereas the church connects with the world in order to transform it.

He has been criticised for placing what he believes to be right ahead of church unity. He has no regrets: “If there’s a tension, you’ve got to do what is right and that will be best for the unity of the church in the end. Like the ordination of women: You might say, `Let’s not do anything for a while until everyone agrees’ but that wouldn’t have produced unity … It would have exploded had we not moved.”

The revelation on the dirt road – that there is more to the universe than the material world – continues to underpin Carnley’s political views. In his inauguration address, Carnley quoted Vaclav Havel as saying that Marxism was wrong to assume that if you get the outward physical circumstances of human life right, that right morality, human relationships and culture would follow.

Carnley pointed out that it is now the West that needs disabusing of this idea. “In a curious inversion of dialectical materialism, we hear … that if we can get the economy right, then everything else will fall happily into place. Thus, Aborigines are told that what they need is housing and health services and all will be well .. .

“But something else is missing, something to do with consciousness: right fundamental attitudes, generosity of spirit, an open preparedness to acknowledge and honor the original custodianship of the land, and to own the many injustices of dispossession; in a word, spirituality is the essential nub of the matter.”

It is not a popular view in the corridors of power. But it has ever been the fate of the prophet to foresee what should happen long before people are ready to make it so.

First published in The Age.

The good son

HE WAS a nice Baptist boy from Blackburn with an urge to do good. She was a prostitute, the first of many to enter his life. She arrived at his office in St Kilda with her face all bruised. She wanted his help as a lawyer to get her off charges she faced in court that day. The night before, anxious and unable to find a vein in her arm, she had injected heroin into her face.

He kept her out of jail, that time. Delighted, she told him, rather indelicately, precisely how many clients she would have to service in order to pay the court’s fine. She invited him to lunch to celebrate the win; her choice of venue, a local soup kitchen. There she introduced him to the assembled street people as “the best legal eagle in town”. From a distant table came the wry observation: “God, things must be bad if lawyers have to eat here.”

The Reverend Tim Costello could have had no better introduction to St Kilda’s fringe-dwellers: their courage, their humor, their openness and their brokenness. The prostitute, Julie, told him she had been raped at 15 and had decided that no man would ever do that to her again. So she made them pay. “In a tragically coherent way, Julie was taking power back over her own life,” he writes. “Who was I to judge?”

“Who was I?” is the question central to autobiography. In Costello’s new memoir, Streets of Hope, he promises an answer, describing the book as a highly personal account of his life’s journey. In fact, the chapters that follow demonstrate what a private person such a public figure can be.

Costello gives a detailed picture of his social and political development; of how he came to be a lawyer, a preacher/prophet and, briefly, a politician. We hear much about his views on the dark forces rending Australian society; it is probably for his persistent critique of economic rationalism and its effect on community that he is best known – certainly to Premier Jeff Kennett.

But Costello offers only sketchy outlines of the forces that would have shaped him most profoundly: his relationships with his mother and father, with his wife and their children, and with his famous brother, Treasurer Peter. Costello shields them as carefully as he does his own deeper self; not for him the bruising intimacy of Frank McCourt or Nuala O’Faolain. “One of the reasons the book sat on the shelf for two years was that it was autobiographical,” Costello admits. “I actually have a fear of being too self-disclosing.”

He believes this is partly related to the fact that he wrote the book at 40: “It’s very difficult to be disclosing midway through your life. There’s this sense that it’s more appropriate at the end, when you have a better sense of what it all means and who you are.

“Secondly, it involves others. You aren’t just an individual who has this right to be open and vulnerable and show your wounds. You are in relationships with people. I knew that anything I said that was too revealing of family stuff would have all these ripple effects. I kept asking myself, `Is this fair to family, to wife, to colleagues?’ By the end of your life, your parents have gone, the kids can cope.”
The book was originally written as therapy, as a private exercise in finishing unfinished business. Costello is now a minister at the Collins Street Baptist Church, with a parish that covers street kids, the Stock Exchange and the Crown Casino.

But back in 1994, he faced the closing of several doors. His single term as St Kilda’s last mayor had been cut short by the council amalgamations he had fiercely opposed. Then the Democrats offered him a safe Senate seat. He initially accepted but later refused, for the sake of family harmony.

It must have hurt. Even now, a spasm passes over his face as he remembers. “It was about my parents, who would have found it just too painful,” he says, dragging his hands over his face as if suddenly tired. “We discussed how, once under a national spotlight where, potentially, the Democrats would hold the balance of power on Peter’s budget, the strains would be so great they’d blow family relations apart.

“It was also a bit about my wife – and she was right, I think, and now I accept this – saying, `Well, you’re not just a politician. In terms of calling and vision, there’s other aspects of who you are, and once you become a politician, that’s all you are’.”

He was sorely tempted because the Democrats allow conscience votes; he would probably have been as much his own agent as he is in his church. Unlike most other denominations, the Baptists have no central hierarchy to whom spokesmen are answerable. When Costello makes public comments, he is not representing any stance other than his own.

In religious terms, he says, “The Democrats have the prophetic role; that is, they’re not the priestly caste who governs and makes the laws. The prophets are always the ratbags who come from the margins and shake up the system …”
After the decision was made, there was still more emotional housekeeping to be done. Costello had already told the St Kilda community that he was leaving, and he stuck to this despite his grief at the prospect. His wife, Merridie, suggested he write it out of his system. The result is Streets of Hope, which he offered to Allen and Unwin two years later when they approached him to write a book.

He says he wants the book to answer the question he is most often asked: “Why do you see the world so differently to your brother, even though you’ve grown up with the same family and the same religious training and world view?”

The book provides a glimpse of one possible answer. He writes, “I remember my father often saying to me and my brother, `I do not care who is right or wrong; I am going to punish you both.’ As a parent, I now fully understand that it was borne of the weariness involved in adjudicating endless sibling disputes. But back then, that always struck me as flagrantly unfair.”

He thinks that this is what propelled him into law. But perhaps it also propelled both of them into struggling to differentiate themselves from each other, to be recognised in their separateness.

COSTELLO’S own answer to the question is that the family years are not the only formative ones, and that as a young man he was exposed to different people and ideas to Peter.

He writes of studying theology in Switzerland and discovering from his fellow seminarians that there are many perspectives: “The Italian students were always attuned to the revolutionary nuances and preferred Jesus in Che Geuvara garb. A Balinese student opened up the … possibilities of `the rocks crying out’, which resonated with an animistic world … The Africans never failed to observe the unmistakable struggle against imperialism in Jesus, a Jew, being executed by imperial Rome.”

It would have been an eye-opener for the boy from Blackburn. A minister who once lived in a Baptist community believes that Costello would have been exposed to rather a smug, narrow view of religion when growing up: “Blackburn Baptist is an enormous, wealthy community. Their theology is on the triumphalist side; because they are wealthy, they see that as a sign of God blessing them.”
If he needed any more to trigger a reaction against bourgeois complacency, he could not have picked a better place than St Kilda. He found himself passionately defending streetwalkers and abusing johns. He used his own car as an ambulance for locals having psychotic episodes, explained to his young children about the condoms and syringes littering the local park, and pacified residents when mentally ill parishioners ran naked down the street or urinated in letterboxes. His working life could not seem more removed from the power-suited world of his brother’s.

But some who know Tim Costello see him, too, as a very political character. A woman who worked in welfare at St Kilda at the same time he did says: “I’ve worked in social justice for years and in the main it’s made up of men like him, who are there because it provides them with a platform of sorts and fits in with their view of the world.

“It suits them to think there are forces of darkness and forces of good, and that the world is divided into people who care intensely about their fellow man and selfish bastards who don’t give a shit; it validates them because it puts them on the side of the angels.” Mind you, she admits, “He usually is on the side of the angels.”

And he does it with such style. Costello was recently up on the Gold Coast speaking to a gathering of 10,000 pentecostal and evangelical Christians. He’d caused a furore beforehand by telling the local paper that Hansonism was a form of paganism.

“There’s hysteria as I’m pulling up,” he says. “Churches have been pulling out; the organisers are upset and beg me not to say anything about Hansonism.

“Well, I preached a very evangelistic sermon. I said that in olden times, if we were Jews, we would take a goat here and we would ask the mayor to place all the sins of the Gold Coast on that goat, and then send the goat out into the wilderness. That was a scapegoat; that’s where the word comes from. And I said, `But we’re not Jews, and we’re not living in that period of time. We actually believe as Christians that Jesus is our scapegoat, that he bears our infidelities and lies and abuse of kids and drug abuse and crime; that he took them upon himself. And that, therefore, to scapegoat anyone, particularly the indigenous, Asians or single mothers, is actually to undermine the work of Christ.’

“And I saw these conservative people looking at each other, wondering, `Has he mentioned Hansonism or not?”‘

The preacher, the lawyer and the politician grin in mischievous solidarity.

Streets of Hope is published by Allen & Unwin at $19.95.

First published in The Age.

The gospel according to George

FEATURES
GEORGE PELL is a big man. He stands six three and a half in his stockinged feet, towering over most of his fellow Catholics even without his archbishop’s hat. The slight stoop of his shoulders, as if he is forever leaning down to listen, does  little to compensate.

His height is what ordinary Catholics first notice about him when he’s out doing the rounds. They remark on it in an undertone, some slightly awed, as if his physical size is an outward sign of his spiritual stature. His height seems fitting for his place in the hierarchy: George Pell is the Pope’s man in Melbourne. In every sense.

His intense loyalty to Rome makes his appointment one of the most controversial in Victoria’s church history. To conservative Catholics, it is like the second coming: a promise of renewal based on a return to tradition, a chance for the liberal drift within the church to be arrested, a doctrinal cleansing. “At last we have a real archbishop!” read a placard at his enthronement ceremony in August. “God-sent,” said a letter to a newspaper.

To liberals he is, theologically speaking, a dinosaur in a dog collar; a hard-liner with a romantic longing for the past who resists the need for the church to change in the modern world. They fear his orthodox vision will alienate more people than it attracts. “George will dig a hole for the church to fall into,” says one Melbourne priest.

Pell certainly has a clear sense of where he wants to go. The question is whether he will be able to take what’s left of his flock with him. Some parish priests are already uneasy. He has told them that being a good priest in the field is all very well, but they must also look to their “spirituality”. For this, some read “orthodoxy”.

Today, Pell is at centre stage at a comfortable Catholic scene. He is at St Michael’s church in North Melbourne to lead Mass and bless a new school library. St Michael’s has a lovingly carved marble altar, lavish with angels and cupolas and gilt trim. High above Pell is a huge painting of St Michael the Archangel, his sword at Lucifer’s neck as he enforces the fallen angel’s banishment from heaven.

St Michael’s was built in 1907 and reflects Catholicism’s view of itself then: grand, soaring and certain. If you missed Mass on Sunday or ate a meat pie on Friday you knew you’d broken the rules. Today, there is debate is not just about which rules matter, but about to what degree the church hierarchy even has the right to insist on them.

PELL was born in Ballarat 55 years ago. He was preceded by twins; one was stillborn and the other died soon after birth. “As a result of that, I certainly got my share of affection,” he says.

His mother was a third-generation Australian of Irish stock. His father was a publican and an Anglican. “I had a good family,” he recalls. “They were both strong people, both warm. Mum was deeply religious. Neither of them were highly educated . . . but both could speak English well in the sense that they were entertaining speakers. They expressed their point of view succinctly.”

And forcefully? He chuckles. “Yeah. People talk about women having been downtrodden in the past – and I’ve no doubt that is and was true – but it certainly wasn’t in my mother’s family. She and her sisters were used to having their say and used to being heard.”

Pell’s easy manner with parishioners probably owes something to having grown up in his dad’s pub, mixing with all kinds of people as he pulled beers behind the counter. His early sporting prowess echoed his father, who was a heavyweight boxing champion.

The young George was a golden boy at St Patrick’s secondary school in Ballarat. He stood out in football, rowing and athletics (he was not just big, but fast); he was a prefect, won prize after prize in public speaking and debate and was a star scholar. He took a leading role in the school play, the cadet corps and Catholic activities. “He was just at the top of the tree,” says Tony Joyce, a lawyer who went to school with Pell. “He was a big man and, in some ways, ungainly, but he was very determined to succeed and worked terribly hard at it.”

What drove him Pell to such effort? Joyce puts it down to the school’s ethos that the boys should do the best they could with the gifts they had. Pell says his parents were ambitious for him “but if it was a pressure, I found it congenial”.

Somewhere in the background is an even younger George, a child who missed a lot of primary school due to repeated operations for a tumor in his neck. “I was sick and miserable on and off for some years,” is all he wants to say about that. But perhaps by the time he reached St Pat’s, he had a lot of ground to make up; or perhaps he felt he had to compensate for his background. Having a non-Catholic father made him a rare specimen. The closed world of 1940s Catholicism had few kids from “mixed marriages”.

Pell’s rise in the church, based on the twin virtues of intellect and orthodoxy, has echoed his school career. He is now seen as a golden boy in Rome, where he has a much higher profile than your average bishop and certainly more than the man he succeeded in August, Sir Frank Little. He has been rewarded for his loyalty to the Vatican team. He belongs to several organisations, including the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the prime organ for preserving the purity of church teachings, or the Catholic thought police, depending on your point of view).

Sources close to the archdiocese say his Roman connections helped get him the job. The story goes that Little had asked for a coadjutor archbishop to help him as his health was deteriorating. Rome offered Little one candidate and it is presumed that this was Pell. Little said he wanted to submit a list of candidates. Rome refused to consider them and suggested that, given his ill health, Little should resign. It is also believed that Archbishop Little was feeling worn down by conservative Catholics who had been “delating” – or reporting – him to Rome for being too “soft” on some matters of church discipline.

A spokesman for the archdiocese, Father Mark Coleridge, said he had no doubt that Little was delated and that this would inevitably happen to Pell, too. But he said that Little’s resignation was a far more complex matter: “Be very cautious when you hear simplistic accounts of church politics. I’m not sure that anyone – and I mean anyone – would know the full story of the transfer of authority from Archbishop Little to Archbishop Pell.”

PELL downplays his hard-line image on doctrine: “I don’t think there would be radical differences between me and any other Catholic bishop who remains in his job,” he says, raising his eyebrows in amusement at the obviousness of it all.

But he does stand out as a churchman who calls a spade a heathen shovel. He has introduced terms such as “pagan” into public debate. He likened philosopher Peter Singer to King Herod’s propanganda chief when Singer discussed euthanasia for newborns (in the Bible, King Herod ordered a slaughter of babies). But although he is still an arch-opponent of the ordination of Catholic women, he has given up using the term “priestesses”. “People seem to object to it, (and) I don’t want to offend people unnecessarily,” he says.

Pell’s manner of speaking is as weighty as his position. He talks gravely and with a practised timbre. He has a reputation for intellectual fierceness (he has a PhD from Oxford) and for straight talking, but he can also be very personable.

He has some unpretentious ways. His ceremonial life is full of pomp but his pocket diary is a battered little plastic number held together by the grace of God and lots of sticky tape. Father Michael McGirr, editor of the magazine Australian Catholics, was once asked by an elderly priest who knew Pell to deliver the archbishop a pot of home-made marmalade. An embarrassed McGirr feared Pell might think he was being sent up, but “George was really delighted with it and laughed and laughed. Maybe he has to eat marmalade out of tins”.

In this interview in his office in East Melbourne, Pell is pleasant and courteous and chooses his words with a politician’s deftness. He loses his poise only when asked for his favorite joke. “Oh my God,” he mutters in dismay. “I don’t think I have one.”

Pressed on controversial issues, such as what he would do with priests or organisations who do not toe his doctrinal line, he says merely, “I’d hope it would be rarely necessary.” It seems he abides by the rule he sets for his clergy: keep divisions in the family. He has likened church leadership to cabinet and suggested that those who could not maintain solidarity should leave – “leave the cabinet, not the party”, he clarifies today.

“He’s very much a rules and regulations man,” says John Stuart, a Catholic and former priest who was a seminarian with Pell. “There was a saying in the seminary, ‘You keep the rules and the rules will keep you’. The danger in that is that if it’s just a rules and regulations thing, there’s no life in it. The rules become little truths rather than an expression of what can help people to grow and to love.” It also leaves little room for dissent: “George’s problem is that he sees debate as disunity, if not disloyalty.”

It is understandable that Pell feels protective of his church. In Australia it is in decline. On any given Sunday only 19 per cent of Catholics attend Mass, down 10 per cent in the past seven years. On current trends, within 15 years 80 Melbourne parishes will be without a priest.

A church that preaches strict sexual restraint has been repeatedly shamed by revelations about its paedophile priests and brothers and by its own inadequate response to the problem. This has hurt the church’s credibility with the outside world and shaken the morale of those inside it.

There are two readings of the church’s problems. Conservatives like Pell want to revive tradition and fundamental values. They argue that people need certainty in the form of clear guidance, especially in an age where almost nothing else can be relied upon. They emphasise that the Pope’s teachings are divine guidance and believe that, as the Pope requested in 1993, the faithful should be “guarded” from alternative doctrines.

Another reading is that there can be no going back, because the world is different now. Catholics no longer grow up in a cocoon. The church’s own education system has taught lay people how to think and question more than it might like. Liberals believe they should take the church’s teachings into account on moral issues but emphasise the role of individual conscience.

“The spirit of Vatican II hasn’t triumphed, but it has had an effect,” says Max Charlesworth, a liberal Catholic and emeritus professor of philosophy. “Lots of Catholics made up their own mind to be Catholics in their own way.”

Pell acknowledges that people do not sin if they believe that what they are doing is right. But he points out that conscience can be mistaken, and “if you give an unfettered right to private conscience, you can destroy the cohesion of any group of people”. While his limits on public dissent might be tighter than some other bishops’, he is “not interested in unchurching my opponents or those who differ from me”.

If Pell’s vision is to prevail, he must sell it to young Catholics and to his priests. Some have already taken a stand against him. This month he instigated changes that will turn back the clock on the training of parish priests. Five staff at Melbourne’s largest seminary resigned rather than implement his directives.

Ordinary Catholics will notice that things are different when Pell swings their children’s religious education to the right. “People get a tiny dose of religion, imagine it’s the real thing, and then they’re inoculated against the real thing,” Pell says. “I’ve had parents and kids say to me that it’s easier to be a good Catholic in some state high schools than it is in some Catholic secondary schools, because there is such hostility to people who stick their neck out for firm, clear, Catholic teaching.”

Church surveys have found that many teenagers are indifferent to their religion and up to 20 per cent are hostile, Pell says. But his belief that they need better explanation of the reasons behind church teachings sits awkwardly with the fact that the hostile kids already resent the church’s doctrines on sex. (They forbid premarital sex, masturbation, contraception, abortion, divorce and homosexual activity.)

“They don’t like that,” Pell says. “They reject it. And also there’s a dimension of sadness in the children of broken families, who feel their parents are rejected (by the church). One answer is to say that we mustn’t speak about the ideal of lifelong marriage because we’ll make the kids of broken marriages feel guilty. I think that’s a colossal mistake, because if anybody needs to hear about the advantages of lifelong marriages it’s these kids.”

He doesn’t believe that the church is out of touch with young people because it is authoritarian. “The problem with young people today is not that they are being belted into line in an authoritarian way but that they haven’t got enough to hang on to in a difficult and changing world. They’re not being given a clear straight line for them to accept or reject.”

Pell’s theological conservatism does not necessarily extend to wider issues. “Economies exist for people, not vice versa,” he says. “A narrow, primitive economic rationalism which excludes much of a role for government could be disastrous for society.” He warns that Australia must work “with might and main” to avoid creating an underclass.

“He does have a very deep social conscience on issues of justice and honesty, hard work and poverty,” says Father Geoffrey James, who worked with Pell at Corpus Christi College. His weaknesses? “Perhaps, like most of us, he has a big struggle to keep on listening.”

Father Peter Norden, associate director of Melbourne Catholic Social Services, found him able to listen on one issue. Norden was once on a panel with Pell, consulting the public about the prison system. Pell began with a layman’s knowledge of the justice system but after several days of hearings, “What he heard mobilised him and he became an enthusiast for spreading the word for the need for reform . . . he displayed a capacity to observe and to respond, to modify his position.”

So it is possible that Pell will grow into the job in ways that might surprise his critics. As a bishop he was not at the forefront of efforts by the Australian bishops’ conference to develop a national policy on sexual abuse by clergy. But his first big initiative as archbishop was a strategy to deal with victims’ needs.

He acknowledges that the church has not responded quickly or well to this “frightful mess”. He puts that down to “ignorance, fear, shame. A natural tendency to inertia. And we didn’t talk about these things 20, even 10 years ago the way we do now”.

But he resists any deeper reading. Some paedophile priests argue that as they have spent their whole lives in a Catholic bubble, they are “creatures of the church”. The bishops’ conference has commissioned research into whether factors unique to the church have encouraged paedophilia.

Pell says: “It’s something we’ve got to look at, but I don’t think it is greater in our Catholic community than it is in the wider community . . . It’s just that the spotlight has been put on us. And that’s no excuse; given our principles, there should be much less of it (with us).”

IT IS a grey spring evening and across the sloping lawns of Xavier College, Melbourne’s most prestigious Catholic school, trail women. Hundreds of them: grandmothers and professional women, housewives and hairdressers.

They have come for a “women’s spirituality night” at which three women will talk of their personal journeys. A similar event in Sydney attracted more than 2000. It’s a novelty for Catholics to hear women speak from an altar. The Pope has said women will never be ordained and that there is no room for debate. The bottom line seems to be that because Christ and his apostles were men, men must be more God-like.

The church’s limits on entry to the priesthood threaten to fail its followers on a practical level. Many are more concerned about the prospect of having no one to say Mass for them than they are about priests’ sex or their marital status, according to the archdiocese’s own report, Tomorrow’s Church. Unasked, 60 per cent of Melbourne parishes suggested that the church consider allowing married priests and 46 per cent suggested it consider the ordination of women.

Tonight the first speaker is the journalist Geraldine Doogue. She talks about women as nurturers and about why it is that men sometimes find it hard to nurture back. She tells of the husband in a dysfunctional family who was asked by a social worker why he found it hard to give his wife credit. “Because it would rob me of my self-esteem,” he says.

Asked whether the church nurtures its women, Pell says: “I don’t think any institution in the Western World has done more for women than the Catholic church. We introduced monogamy, as distinct from polygamy . . . There’s the ideal of womanhood; one example is the blessed virgin Mary.”

A dutiful mother who was sexually inactive? Isn’t that rather a passive ideal? “Motherhood is not a passive role,” he says. “Not having sex – that can be an active struggle too.”

The clergy who advise Pell have no women in their ranks. There are some on the boards of the church’s welfare and education organisations but he admits that communication between women and their bishops is not what it should be. So how does he know what the concerns of ordinary women are? “A lot of people are very keen to inform me of that and do regularly, and I try to listen.”

The question makes one of Pell’s close associates, the arch-conservative Bob Santamaria, impatient. “I don’t hear anyone else but women talking in the church these days,” he says. “The feminisation of the church is one of its real problems. Women run schools, women run hospitals, they are lecturers in the Catholic University. This thing that they’ve got no voice is garbage. When you find that more and more of the liturgical structures are filled by women, the great danger for religion is that it will come to be seen as soft and unmanly.”

Pell has a good 20 years ahead as archbishop of Melbourne, so his commitment to male clerical leadership sends a Siberian chill through those who want more say for women and lay men. Their views were summed up by Veronica Brady, a nun and academic, who told Pell in a 1993 debate: “The Roman Catholic church to which I belong doesn’t just belong to the papacy or the bishops . . . I find it difficult to square that the teaching authority of the church doesn’t also have to listen to the experiences of the people who live out these problems.”

Marie Joyce, an associate professor with the Australian Catholic University, told a Catholic Education Commission conference in May that a “crisis of authenticity” was emerging because the church fails to live by the values it preaches.

It talks about the poor but clings to its property and worldly power, she said; the sexes are supposed to be equal but women are locked out of its structures. Joyce claimed that many priests are forced to espouse beliefs they do not hold. “Within the church there is a culture of fear about speaking out, arising from the punitive experiences of those who have spoken out and suffered.”

Pell denies that there is a culture of fear: “The Catholic Church in Australia is probably mildly remarkable for the fact that so many leading people in the past four or five years have publicly dissented from the Pope and remained in leading positions.” But several people contacted for this story felt they could not put their names to their comments.

IN OLDEN times, bishops were princes. Catholics still call Pell “Your grace” and he has his own coat of arms. (He chose the motto “Be Not Afraid”.) At a funeral service in Fawkner, there is a scene that echoes this earlier age.

The service is for a Chinese priest who worked in nine Melbourne parishes with large Italian communities. Today, 700 people cram into a bare modern church and sing hymns in Italian to farewell this Chinese refugee who cared for them.

After the service they spill on to the concrete outside and the older Italians line up in front of Pell to pay their respects. They reach for his hand, then bend and kiss his knuckles or his ring in an ancient gesture of homage. Some wipe away tears. Pell is unsurprised and responds to each one with a few words or a blessing.

Later, when he tries to pose for a photograph, he is surrounded by a flock of giggling nonnas half his size who want to get in the picture too. They are quite unembarrassed; he is their archbishop, the face of their church, and he belongs to them. This is Catholic faith in the old style, ritualised, tribalised and unquestioning.

But it is only one face of today’s church. Outsiders tend to view Catholicism as monolithic, but it is not so much an Uluru of belief as a vast ocean in which swim many schools of thought.

Pell recognises this. “The Catholic Church is a great church. It’s not a sect,” he says. “Often a sect is a small number of very devout and committed people with a very tight set of beliefs . . . Now the Catholic Church has one billion people in it. We’ve been going for 2000 years. There are different theologies. There are different emphases in pastoral practices. There are very different styles of spirituality. There are possibly more than 100 religious orders.”

It is his task to help hold all that together. He is meant to personify the church’s unity; he is the conductor of the orchestra. If he fails to carry people with him, his real power will be limited indeed, says one of his priests. “Everyone will jack up and won’t cooperate. That’s what’s happened in (New Zealand), where an ideological sort of appointment ended with the archbishop retiring to a Benedictine monastery.”

When Pell is asked whether he can cop the flak he might face, he smiles. The answer he gives would serve for all those other questions about the direction of the Catholic Church in the next millenium. He says: “Time will tell.”

CATHOLIC MELBOURNE

Catholics: 978,844.

Parishes: 233.

Diocesan priests available for appointment: 309.

Primary school pupils: 75,541.

Secondary school pupils: 58,690.

Hospitals: 10.

Amount spent on welfare: $110 million.
Parishes that face being without a priest within 15 years: 80.

Parishes suggesting unasked that married priests should be considered: 60 per cent.

Parishes suggesting unasked that women’s ordination should be considered: 46 per cent.

First published in The Age.

Heaven’s asunder

The priest roared, she walked. KAREN KISSANE tells why she left the Catholic Church 17 years ago and why she continues to feel excluded.

ONCE A Catholic, always a Catholic, the nuns used to tell us. Up to a point, sisters. For me that point first came at a Sunday Mass when I was 17. Come sermon time, the priest roared at me from the pulpit.Good Catholic women, he thundered, looked to their duties as mothers and wives and stayed home to perform them. Good Catholic women did not seek careers, challenge husbands, query the dictates of the church.

Good Catholic women who sought liberation or the pill were doing the devil’s work for him. Part-way through the tirade, this Catholic girl mustered all her courage, stood up and walked down the long, long aisle to the exit. There was no place for me here. Seventeen years later, it seems that nothing has changed and everything has changed for women in the Catholic Church.

Then I could see only a choice between abandoning the faith or losing my sense of self, between my Catholicism and my soul. Now I look back on that priest’s outburst with amusement; only the winds of change could have blown up such a storm in this man. So it seems good news indeed that conservative Catholics this month felt forced to pamphleteer schools and churches on why there will never be women priests. Could it be that at last the issue is being taken seriously? The document, published in Melbourne by Mr Joe Santamaria’s Thomas More Centre, was written by Bishop George Pell, Anna Krohn and Mary Helen Woods, and claimed to put the official church view. It contained such unsubstantiated jewels as the assertion that “many, perhaps most Catholic women throughout the world support the church’s teaching”, and took a patronising swipe at Anglicans for their different views on women’s ordination.

The document also said it was not unjust that women could not become Catholic priests because no person has a right to be a priest, as the priesthood is a vocation or calling from God. One does not choose, one is chosen. If it is true that there is no human element in such decision-making, how does one account for terrible mistakes such as the many Catholic clergy in America accused of sexually abusing children? How does such a tragedy sit with the notion of perfection in the current selection criteria? The document argued that Christ did not ordain women to celebrate the Eucharist (he did not ordain men either, but told all his followers to do this in his name), and listed several different kinds of feminists, making clear that the only ones who can truly call themselves Catholic are those who accept the status quo. Others range from revolutionaries to pagans who want to destroy Christianity.

And then last week came the news that the Pope is about to launch another encyclical condemning artificial birth control. The bottom line with both moves is that Catholicism is still failing women, but both have been responses to enormous pressure for change that shows no sign of abating. The Catholic Church is big, is controlled from the centre, and can be unbending in its views, but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is not a monolith and that there is room for dissent on certain issues.

Why should I care? Because there is so much that is precious and good about Catholicism: its schools and hospitals, its emphasis on cherishing the family and valuing every human life, its commitment to social justice and the willingness of so many of its members to get
their hands dirty working for it. In a world obsessed with material struggle, it holds fast to the importance of inner values.

I treasure the beauty of its rites of passage. As a bride I wanted my marriage blessed, not merely registered. As a mother I glowed through the christenings that formally welcomed my children to the world. And when loved ones were lost long before their time, Requiem Masses gave unexpected comfort and a sense of continuum; it was an Irish Catholic community that gathered like neighbors in a village around my grieving family. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

Religious identity often becomes more important with motherhood. An Anglican friend who stormed out in the ’70s has surged back into her local parish; a Jewish friend is searching out the right congregation for her growing sons; a Muslim friend who grew up with no connection to her faith is sad that she has no heritage for herself and her child. Although values begin at home, many would like them reinforced by their communities. But if women need churches more as they raise families, so do the churches need women; it is mothers who are the keepers of the faith, who decide whether children will go to Mass, or attend a Catholic school.

My children, I hope, will grow up in a community where not everyone toes the party line on the status of women in general, and the issue of their ordination in particular. There are many traditionalists who point out that Jesus was male, no apostles were women, and that parts of the New Testament forbade women to teach or to tell men what to do _ ergo, women should not be ordained. But other Catholic theologians and Biblical scholars, including many men, point out that it was a woman, Mary Magdalen, who first saw the risen Christ and was sent to spread the good news _ not a bad definition of an apostle. A group of women accompanied Jesus and the 12 on their missionary journeys, and many followed him to the foot of the cross. Other passages in the New Testament challenge not only patriarchy but colonialism, racism and slavery, proclaiming “no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all are one in Christ Jesus”.

What would such iconoclasts have made of today’s debates? In Catholic scholarship there also is a growing understanding of how women were written out of the records. One Bible passage describes the woman who anointed the feet of Christ just before the passion narrative, saying that wherever the gospel would be told, her act would be recorded. Her name wasn’t. Another woman who was greeted by Paul with the title “apostle”, Junia, lost her gender in the translation of the text from Greek to English; the translator assumed that if she was an apostle, she must be a man.

But when opposing sides in the ordination debate are reduced to hurling verses at each other like school debaters trying to score points, the real point is lost. Such decisions should be made not in an adversarial tussle but against the backdrop of the spirit of the gospel. To argue, as the More Centre document did, that the church cannot ordain women because it never has is nonsense. Theology is not handed down from on high and set in stone tablets. It is a man-made construct, a human endeavor; the classic definition is “faith seeking understanding”. It develops and changes as human consciousness evolves; up until the 19th Century, for example, Christians used a text about slaves obeying their masters to justify slavery.

That the Catholic Church has not yet grappled with outdated views that leave so many of its women feeling hurt, devalued and excluded is a failure of courage or insight or both. American author M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist and committed Christian, writes about the nexus between psychological development and spiritual growth. He sees the two greatest sins of Christianity as its exclusion of so many (the divorced, homosexuals, women) and its traditional intolerance of doubt and doubters. It is a duty to question and to wrestle with the big ones, Dr Peck argues, as any individual or group on a path of spiritual growth must pass through periods of doubt to move forward.

Such winds of change may not have reached the Vatican yet, but there are growing pockets of Catholicism where the cobwebs are in tatters. A Melbourne priest recently asked his startled congregation to refer to God as “she” throughout one Mass, as a reminder that God is beyond gender. Perhaps there is room for women like me now. And, you know, once a Catholic, always a Catholic.

First published in The Age.