A new Church paradigm needed

05-JUN-2012

The Catholic Church must change the way it approaches ministry if it is to continue to minister effectively to people across Australia, Fr Michael Kelly SJ told parishioners at Our Lady of the Way, North Sydney, last week.

In a talk titled, ‘The Elephant in the Room – Ministry Past, Present and Future’, Fr Kelly said the culture that sustained the Church in Australia for its first century-and-a-half had ‘cracked open’ in the years since the 1960s.

‘That’s a good thing because the culture of tribalism and ritual practice and conformity, the clericalism and management by command and control, the centralism and authoritarianism that shaped Church governance may have worked well for a poor, embattled and uneducated immigrant minority as it struggled to shape an identity and lay claim to a destiny. But they are plainly unable to meet the challenges that life in Australia today sets the Church as a community’, he said.

‘The very success of the Church’s biggest investment in its future in Australia – the Catholic education system – has produced what education aims to provide: resourceful people who can think for themselves, choose their directions in life and make their own evaluations.’

In addition, he said the Church can no longer expect people to simply accept the teachings of the Church uncritically, but needed to show visible evidence of what faith in action means.

‘Attraction to Catholicism will be by invitation and persuasion rather than interdict and control’, he said. Distinctive service to the world that plainly flows from faith and a deepening and discerning spiritual wisdom are antidotes to the pervasive forms of escape in our culture and the real home for believers in a world grown weary of religion.’

Fr Kelly said the declining number of priests in Australia means that the old ministry structures will soon be unsustainable, and there is little chance of addressing the issue by importing priests from Africa and Asia where priests are also in short supply. Instead, he said, a new Church was beginning to emerge in Australia, one in which lay people provided the leadership.

‘Today, leadership of the Catholic community rests more in the hands of school principals, religious education coordinators and lay chaplains and pastoral workers than it does in the hands of the declining number of ageing clergy’, he said.

Source: Cathnews

Image: Our Lady of the Way Parish