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Living in Interesting Times
During a wide-ranging conversation,
conducted at his offices in March 2000,
Archbishop George Pell spoke candidly about the threats to the faith in Australia, the
effort to
reach out to young people, the need for sound religious texts, and the implementation of
the
joint Vatican-Australian document, the Statement of Conclusions.
Interview by Michael Gilchrist
You had a solid “apprenticeship” prior to your appointment as Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, meaning that you were as well prepared for your leadership role as most bishops could be. Have any aspects of this background preparation proved particularly helpful as far as your role as archbishop is concerned?
Archbishop George Pell: One very important part of my preparation —which was a bit different from many bishops’—is the fact that I had so many years of work in the Catholic bureaucracy and in secondary and tertiary education, as teacher, leader and administrator. I was on the Academic Board of the State College of Victoria, their Planning Committee, and at the meetings of the college principals. I was a foundation member of the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria, as well as being a principal, then seminary rector.
When the other Catholic bishops were going through, there was little Catholic bureaucracy. It’s an enormously important and comparatively new feature of the Church in Australia, and bishops have got to be equipped to deal with it as leaders. If they aren’t, they will be led by the bureaucracy. So I’m grateful for the background I had there.
You have attracted considerable media attention both before and especially since your appointment—more than any other single Australian bishop. How do you account for this and how has it affected you?
Pell: The first big thing is that I’m prepared to talk to the media. Nearly always, I try to give some sort of response. I work at trying to express simply what I’m doing. A lot of people in all walks of life don’t want to talk to the media because they realize that if they do so they will be criticized and might be dragged into controversy. So for some people their first rule is to avoid controversy. That’s not my first rule. I like to say—and I hope I’ve followed it pretty consistently—that I use the media to present the teaching of Christ and the Church.
I say Mass in the Cathedral every Sunday morning. Occasionally there’s 1,500 or 2,000, usually there’s 300 or 400. If I get a piece in the Herald-Sun, it might be read by half a million or a million people. If I get something in the Age or the Australian, it might be read by hundreds of thousands. So in this day and age, we’ve just got to use the media.
How has this affected me? It’s made me more careful, although it’s also made me understand just how powerful the media are, and that most of the people in the media are like the rest of society. A few of them are very good, most of them are decent enough people and a few of them are very hostile to Christianity and some of our moral values.
What has been your vision for the archdiocese since your appointment?
Pell: It’s a very big archdiocese: a million people. I’ve resisted any attempt to have a narrow, tight pastoral plan for the whole archdiocese, because it wouldn’t work. There are major sociological, ethnic, political, and theological differences. The big problem, I suppose, is indifference.
A major element of what I’ve been trying to do is to maintain the leadership position of the priest in the parishes—so that you can see from our planning, our activities in parishes and from what we say, that there’s no effective Catholicism without the priest. We’re a sacramental religion. That’s only a first step. That’s only maintaining the basics.
As I’ve said many times, the greatest challenge is the challenge to faith. It’s even greater than the challenges in the area of sexual morality. But the things are tied together.
In that regard, would you be particularly encouraged by the increasing numbers at the seminary?
Pell: Yes, for sure, but it’s very early days. We need to have seven or eight coming in each year over the next 10 or 15 years and get four or five out a year. That would still mean that we would have fewer priests, but I think that Melbourne will continue to attract—as through the whole of our history—priests from overseas. That will come close to filling our needs.
There’s no great cause for rejoicing. We’re very grateful for the blessings we have so far, but it’s very, very early days.
Now, four years on, how much progress do you think has been made to date and how much further progress would you like to see achieved—in, say, five or ten years time?
Pell: In five to ten years time I’d like to slow the exodus from church-going or reverse it. I think that’s within our capacity.
Of course, what is crucial is the challenge to youth, so we’ve revitalized the Youth Ministry, and that is steadily doing good work. It’s explicitly Christ-centered and Gospel-centered, and encourages prayer. That’s one reason why we’ve encouraged youth leaders from the archdiocese to go to the World Youth Day. But the great challenge is with young people.
There are not going to be any quick, easy solutions. There’s no sociological key that you can turn and immediately the situation will be improved. One of my heroes, Winston Churchill, during the Second World War said that all he had to offer was “blood, sweat, and tears.” Well, we’ve got no easy road ahead of us—even in maintaining our present strengths. Those strengths won’t be maintained or increased by the Third Rite of Reconciliation, or even by married clergy, or by giving Communion to the divorced and remarried. The growth will come from convincing more and more people that the teachings of Christ work, for this life and the next.
The prayer of the Church for Ash Wednesday speaks of us being involved in “spiritual warfare” and taking up the weapon of self-discipline. For a percentage of our Catholics, and even of our leaders and functionaries (priests, religious, teachers, etc), that language is quite alien. They don’t like to talk in those terms.
If I could slightly digress: One of the areas where I’ve found a great silence is on the afterlife. I speak regularly to the Grade 6 students, and many of them have never heard of Purgatory. I’m not saying they don’t believe in the afterlife; I think they do. But it seems to be presumed that God owes us a place in heaven. So the great drama of Christian life, where people have to choose faith or not, or choose goodness and reject evil, is missing. If everybody gets a bonus, why bother? For purely human reasons, it takes a lot of the great drama out of Christian life.
What other deficiencies in Catholic understanding and belief have you encountered?
Pell: A major challenge is that a lot of Catholics just don’t know what the Pope is about. It’s often thinking people outside the Church—some of whom don’t have the gift of faith—who can understand very much better what the Pope is trying to do and what he’s offering.
Going around the parishes and speaking with primary and secondary school kids and people it sometimes seems to me that they know a lot about Christianity in general, but if you ask them to list what are the three or four central beliefs and obligations of Christianity, most of them, I fear, would be reduced to total silence. We’ve got to get back and make sure that by the end of primary school the youngsters understand that the message is not one of being vaguely religious or having a sentimental feeling of goodwill toward everybody. It also means you don’t believe in superstitions, paganism, the New Age, or in worshipping nature.
The key things are belief in the existence of the one true God; that God loves us; and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. A lot of people don’t like to talk about Redemption, the notion of sacrifice. They might be in favor of God, but somehow the idea is lost that there is struggle, that we need to be redeemed from sin, to embrace faith, and to reject evil and choose good. It might even be that we need to reformulate these things more succinctly in a few propositions and ensure that they are at the heart of our primary catechesis, and that the kids know them.
It is one thing to design good quality religion texts containing the key propositions, as you have indicated, but how do you persuade Catholic teachers to put them to effective use? My impression, from talking to people, is there is some suspicion within the schools toward the very idea of any textbook, or any “back to basics” approach to religion teaching.
Pell: Our teachers come from the general Catholic population and a percentage of them come from Australian Catholic University (ACU). A recent survey on the religious knowledge and attitudes of student teachers there shows that the ignorance and confusion of many of our young people is also present among the student teachers. What is happening now is that either many of the lecturers in theology at ACU are not reinforcing orthodoxy, or they are unable to reinforce it effectively. So that means that ACU faces a major challenge to prepare teachers effectively for the Catholic schools.
With all these campuses of ACU scattered around eastern Australia, how do the bishops exercise any say over what the lecturers are teaching, making sure they do it according to the Church’s requirements?
Pell: Well, ACU is a member of the unified national system and is independent. But ACU relies on the Catholic schools to employ its student teacher graduates. Now, whether you’re an engineer or a lawyer, you dialogue with the training authority to ensure that the graduates coming out are suitable for the purposes in hand. Increasingly, the employers—the Catholic Education Offices and the schools—will have to dialogue with ACU to ensure that they do what they can to address this problem.
As I’ve said, we have to take our Catholic teachers from the society which we have. We’re not going to find thousands of people magnificently committed, theologically articulate, and completely orthodox. They reflect the society in which we live. But the religious education texts will help. The overwhelming majority of teachers are people of goodwill toward the faith. If the texts are professionally well done, the vast majority of teachers will use them, because often they’re battling to find anything to use.
The key officials in the schools will continue to be the principal and the religious education coordinator. Both of these at least should be practicing Catholics, fully committed to doing what is possible to hand on the faith.
The schools can’t do the impossible. They’ve got massive forces arrayed against them: the family situation, the influence of the media, the pornography available through the internet, and the songs, often violent and demeaning of women. At the secondary level it’s an appallingly difficult job to teach religion. An older Marcellin Flynn survey showed that 10-15 percent of nearly every senior secondary class are hostile—as distinct from indifferent—toward the faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if that percentage has gone up.
What worries me more than anything is not that among the students 15 percent are hostile, or that the great majority are indifferent, but that we don’t seem to have enough committed students who, among their peers, will step forward confidently and espouse the Church’s position. We need to get together those who are ready to do so, reinforce them, increase their number, so that at the level of peer pressure, we’ve got a significant number of young people working for us rather than silently supporting us and being afraid to speak.
The Ex Corde Ecclesiae document has caused considerable controversy in America and discussions among the US bishops—I suppose because they have so many Catholic universities and colleges and it is therefore more of an issue for them. Has this had any impact in Australia with our small Catholic higher education sector?
Pell: Well, we’ve got only one multi-campus Catholic university on the east coast and a much smaller one in the west. The Senate and Members of Australian Catholic University (its owners and policy-makers) are very much aware of what is happening: the dialogue between the US and the Vatican on the Catholicity of the universities. At present ACU is seriously addressing these issues. It’s an ongoing issue which is being very seriously considered.
Can you give any background on how the Statement of Conclusions came to be produced at the time of the Synod of Oceania? The Australian Bishops Conference gave its general endorsement to the Statement in 1999, but 12 months later, apart from the curtailing of general absolutions, one is not aware of any sense of urgency nationwide about grappling with the Church’s central problems. Indeed, one even detects a certain antipathy among a few bishops to the very idea that anything might be amiss.
Pell: Every five years the bishops have got to report to Rome on the health of their dioceses. You’ve only got to read the last two or three reports from Melbourne and you will see what is happening to religion in Australia. To a greater or lesser extent it parallels what’s happening in much of the Western world. Unlike some places, Catholics in this country are not massively disaffiliated, but the decline of religious practice is going on. We’ve got 18 percent nationally who worship two or three times a month. In our archdiocese 43 percent attended Mass on Christmas Day.
The Vatican congregations are obviously interested in Australia—very explicitly, because they recognize that here we have the capacity to regroup and to grow, unlike in some European countries where the Church has become far more weakened. In fact, the Roman interest in Australia is a bit of a compliment.
The Statement of Conclusions was written by a joint meeting, and was not just a statement by leaders of the Roman Curial congregations. It was the result of a meeting between 15 Australian bishops and 12 Curial officials. A very significant percentage of the drafting was done by an Australian bishop. The document is very much a joint assessment, signed by a representative group of Australian bishops and accepted by all the participants as an accurate record of what went on. Whatever the subsequent doubts, that is actually what we decided.
I think the Statement is a fair and accurate description of what’s going on in Australia—but a bit understated. The submissions to the inquiry on women in the Church in Australia demonstrate that everything that was claimed about the Church in Australia in the Statement of Conclusions is accurate. Nobody, actually, has been able to say that any particular claim in it was false. Some said the emphases were wrong or that it was too negative; but the point I made was that if you’re running a branch of a bank that is losing money, the first thing is to realize that you’re actually losing money. Then you might be able to do something about it. If you keep saying everything is fine as you’re losing money, that’s a hopeless position!
In the case of the Church in Melbourne, we have 18 percent regular Mass attendance. The neighboring diocese of Sandhurst has the highest figure in Australia of 24 percent, while one or two dioceses have 6-7 percent and some around 10-13 percent. In Melbourne, of those in their 20s, 6 percent regularly worship; up to the age of 15, 11 percent; and those over 50, 24 percent regularly worship. A few dioceses would have better figures than these, and a number worse. The logic of those figures is inescapable. So when I say the challenge is with our young people, it is only too clear.
A major part of the problem in Australia is that a percentage of our religious leaders and functionaries are quite silent about the situation and radically disagree with the diagnosis of the Statement of Conclusions. The response of the public gathering in Sydney sponsored basically by the Leaders of Religious Institutes was that what the Statement was criticizing and lamenting were in fact signs of the activity of the Spirit. That exemplifies the miscomprehension and incomprehension of a significant percentage of very influential people.
You have traveled extensively around the world. How would you say the state of the Church in Australia generally compares with the United States and Western Europe?
Pell: The great point of comparison in the Western world is the United States. Some people in Australia are inclined to say that everywhere in the Western world the state of religion is equally weak and in decline. This is untrue. The great counter-argument to that is the United States.
The United States has been one of the most religious societies in history. It still is. Its Catholic practice rate is 50 percent—sometimes 100 percent—greater than ours. Unlike Australia, the United States has a very powerful set of Protestant churches or communities, especially in the South. The Protestant churches there are immensely more powerful than they are here and that helps keep the whole of society more religious. The public rhetoric in the United States is much more religious than it is here. Even crooks in the US have got to appeal to religion. It’s very rarely done here.
But the United States is also, I think, significantly more anti-religious. The academic establishment is much bigger and the culture wars are fought out much more explicitly there than here. What’s also different here is the high percentage of time our secular media give to Catholic issues. That’s certainly not paralleled in the States.
Here many people enjoy public confrontations. Now that’s got considerable benefits for religion in this country, especially with our young Catholics. That’s one reason why I talk to the media and encourage other people to do so—so that our views are out there in the market place of ideas as one of the options.
Even if you are attacked, there is something to be gained?
Pell: Usually. And while the erosion of Catholic practice continues, I suspect there will be an increasing number of well-intentioned people outside the Catholic Church who want to come in, provided we stick to our basic teachings, including the hard ones. In 1999 in Melbourne, 90 adults came into the Church through the RCIA program, and so far this year another 90 have already come in.
On the other hand, the state of the Church here is immensely stronger than it is in several European countries. We’re nothing like the Holland situation where only 50 percent are theists, or East Germany, where 26 percent are theists. In Switzerland and Austria, too, the erosion of religion is much further advanced. So we still have formidable Catholic strengths, which we often underrate.
One very crucial achievement is that the celebration of the Third Rite of Reconciliation has ceased in Australia. That’s no small thing. It shows that Catholic discipline is substantially intact, with the leadership of the Pope and bishops obeyed, if not always agreed with. Now we have the difficult task of explaining to an increasing percentage of people the usefulness and necessity of the First Rite of Reconciliation.
Are there any bishops you particularly admire, who have influenced how you handle situations in Australia?
Pell: The like-minded bishop I most admire is the Bishop of Rome, the Pope!
Other bishops include Cardinal Lustiger in Paris, who has the youngest clergy in France. We’ve partly followed him in our seminary reform here in Melbourne, certainly with the first year program. Cardinal John O’Connor is another great model, especially for his preparedness to enter into public dialogue, and using every opportunity to proclaim the teachings of Christ.
I’m a great admirer of Cardinal Frank Stafford, who was at Denver before he went to Rome as president of the Council for the Laity. He hosted the World Youth Day in Denver and laid the foundations for Archbishop Chaput’s very successful seminary, which has a lot of candidates. The rate of religious practice after the World Youth Day in Denver rose from around 25 percent to 40 percent today. What’s been done there can be done in other places.
Cardinal Ratzinger is another outstanding leader. He’s often attacked—nearly always by people who don’t know him and often by those who haven’t read much of what he’s written. He’s an outstanding bishop, ideally suited to the work he’s doing, because of his unfailing courtesy and the clarity and cogency of his reasoning. He’s able to explain clearly and adequately what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. That consistent courtesy and preparedness to give reasons for what you’re doing are two of the things I admire very much in him and that I try myself to emulate.
Besides these bishops, the people I most admire include the late Bob Santamaria in Australia, who did more than any other single individual to alert people there to the true nature of the challenge facing us. There are also important lay leaders like John Finnis, the Oxford philosopher and theologian. Msgr. George Kelly did so much early on in the States, as has the convert, Father Richard John Neuhaus, who edits First Things and is an outstanding intellectual. And there is George Weigel, who wrote that recent splendid biography of the Pope.
Do you have any concluding thoughts?
Pell: The Catholic Church in the Western world in the last fifty years has recovered from the Second World War, resisted Communism, and experienced a massive rise in the standard of living, the spread of education, and the introduction of television, the Pill, and now computers. The old sociological agencies for faith development—family, parish, and school—are all weakened. We need new sociological strategies and defenses, as well as strengthening the basic structures. I suspect many of the new movements will be increasingly important. We also experienced a religious and cultural revolution within the Catholic Church, which followed Vatican II and often ran out of control. We are living in interesting times!