ONE OF the chief, if not the principal, works of the Catholic Church in Australia has been the education of the Catholic people. And one of the chief, if not the principal, objectives of Catholic education has been to equip the children of a "marginalized" Catholic community to take their place as equals in a secular society. 

Australian Catholics, consequently, have never been prepared to accept that they should stay confined to the ghetto, but have fought vigorously and successfully for a place under our secular sun. All this is well and good; but the people who had forced their way into the bright world of the Australian day had all been enrolled under the sign of the Southern Cross to conquer in its name. That, at least was the theory, not too loudly or even very often proclaimed, behind all the vast labor of Catholic education.

We can now see that the long term consequence of this herculian effort - funded chiefly by pennies from poor Catholic pockets - has been the thorough "inculturation", or more accurately "domestication", of the Australian Catholic Church: the now tame pussy of the Australian national household.

How did it happen? Inculturation (of a certain kind) has been a strategy employed by the Church as long as Catholics can recall. Among the first historical evidences for it are the letters of Pope St. Gregory the Great to St Augustine of Canterbury which direct him to convert the Kentish temples into churches and pagan religious festivals to holy days. But the effect of this approach was not to turn the Catholic thing into a Kentish. The effect was to transform the people and their customs into a Christian society and culture without the newly converted nation ceasing to be men and women of Kent. 

It was not so in Australia. The strategy of penetrating the milieu, as Jacques Maritain would have described it, has its own risks. The host culture can swallow up the uninvited guest, particularly where the host is ancient or proud (or both) and invincibly convinced of its superiority and where the guest is on the defensive and lacking confidence. We should never forget that together with the vigour and aggression of our Irish Catholic forebears there was a certain amount of bluster: the unerring pointer to loss of confidence and self-respect. 

As a result, once the rising Catholic professional class had muscled in on Australian society, there was, so to speak, an embarrassed pause. Suddenly conscious of how gauche they must have seemed, but determined to get what they had come for, our rising Catholics hastily checked in their values at the cloak room and approached the banqueting tables of success very models of the agreeable guest.

This phenomenon has been especially noticeable among Catholic entrants to Australian political life. 

Loss of confidence in being a Catholic is not now, obviously, a merely an Irish-Australian phenomenon. It is endemic throughout the Western world and it is everywhere connected, however local conditions might vary, with three common phenomena: the defeat of Catholic culture by the civilisation of the Enlightenment; the acceptance by Catholics a la Maritain of the cultural parameters set by secular society; and the desire of Catholics to be approved by the world. 

A few weeks ago, on January 19, the Church beatified a woman who took a different view of things. Mother Mary of the Cross was considered a thorn in the side of the Australian bishops by refusing to accept State Aid for schools run by the order she had founded. In her 1870 "Brisbane Statement" Mother Mary stated her position: 

"Many reasons are alleged for having our schools placed under the [State Education] Board. Great toleration is in some cases promised. Every argument is brought forward to show that aid from the Government is necessary...We have but one answer to all:- St. Joseph's schools are humble, but strictly and purely Catholic.

"The world, its cold, false maxims, pride and self-sufficiency, its trust in human judgements and human means, is such a heartless opponent of the meek and humble Heart of Jesus, that we, as victims consecrated to its sacred interests, must only love that which it loves, and despise that which (in its acts and consequences at least) despises it. We never, never can be connected with any secular Board of Education. Even granted that a free use of our religious principles might be allowed, we must be left free to appoint our own teachers and adhere strictly to our own system; otherwise endless evils would ensue and the work of the Sacred Heart would not go on. Were we to depart in the least from this, the whole would fail - it would cease to be God's work." 

Saints are canonised because of their holiness not because of their prudential wisdom. However we can now see that this obstinate woman was right. We accepted the Government's shilling and became its servants. As we survey the contemporary Australian scene we see that our once independent Catholics schools (and hospitals) have been nationalised in all but name. And as for the schools doing nonetheless "God's work", that ceased more than two generations of students ago. 

But what has this got to do with the traditional liturgy of the Church about which the Ecclesia Dei Society is concerned? A great deal. A Catholic culture is a culture founded on, and founded for, the worship of God. A Christian culture is not built upon schools; it is built upon altars. The idea of culture being built up by education is an Enlightenment conception which Mother Mary of the Cross clearly understood and rejected. On the other hand, our Irish Catholic founding fathers, by their excessive pre-occupation with schools and education, and their hostility to the English Benedictines and their priority on worship, shows how far they too had been influenced by Enlightenment propaganda. 

True, Sir Henry Parkes, for one, had threatened to wipe out the Church's influence by making education free, compulsory and secular; and, true, the bishops did well to create an alternative system of Catholic schools. But to accept the enemy's assessment that the Church's power springs from its schools when in fact it flows from its altars; then to rely so heavily on institutions which play a merely supportive - which is not to deny them a vital - role in building a Catholic culture; and finally to believe that they could safely be made dependent on the financing of the state: all these factors, combined with a powerful drive to get on in the world, were ultimately to imperil our Catholic community. So it was that the harvest of destruction which we are reaping today was sown long ago, not "after the Council", as some people say.

To build a Christian culture, then, one needs to put worship at the centre and to do this requires a tradition: a set of customs, sanctified by the usage of generations, appearing therefore ossified to the worldly eye, but in reality detached from temporal things by an anticipation of eternity, and wholly orientated to God...to God on his heavenly throne.

Evangelisation and Christian education are, on the other hand, directed toward man and because of this need to use elements of contemporary cultures to achieve their purpose. But this purpose must be clearly understood. It is to turn men and women from the world (and from worldly cultures) to God. Moreover, being thus converted man needs, while yet in the world, to live in a new culture - one which helps to hold him to the new course he has taken. In this Christian culture secular activities are subordinated to, and made to serve, man's Godward expedition. They are intended to help man focus more attentively on the end for which he was created: to worship his Maker, and so to become his friend, in this world and the next.

(Originally published in the Autumn 1995 edition of the "Ecclesia Dei Newsletter" - prior to its change of name to "Oriens")

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