Congratulations to a colleague from my days in the Collingwood Catholic Community, Michael Mason CSsR who has been awarded the Archbishop Adrian Doyle Award for Pastoral Research, for recognition of his outstanding contribution to pastoral research in Australia.
In attendance to present the award was retired Archbishop of Hobart Adrian Doyle, the first chair of the Board of Management for the Pastoral Research Projects (the predecessor of the Australian Catholic Council for Pastoral Research) and himself a strong supporter of pastoral research in the Church.
Address delivered at the
Conference on Beliefs and Practices of Australian Catholics
ACBC Pastoral Research Office
Melbourne
February 19-21, 2014
What have I learned? Well, not much, I suppose – two principles, at least:
• First: Understanding the situation is fundamental and must come before “doing”: understanding
what has changed, and what is the situation for ministry now. Otherwise people make poorly
planned attempts at “quick fixes” which don’t work. (I saw a cartoon of an elderly pastor
saying: “We gave them jazz masses, rock masses, hip hop masses, and still they don’t come!
What more do young people want?”).
• Second: The relationship between religion and society has changed over a long period; this change
accelerated sharply in the Western world from the 1970s on, and is still continuing; Christianity
will not become extinct, but in the future the church as an organisation in Western societies
seems likely to become smaller, more marginal, less influential than it is today, with fewer
resources and a smaller superstructure. The Church is primarily the people of God. The
institutional structure, which we also call church, is just the beautiful old family home the
Church has lived in for a long time, parts of which are getting beyond repair.
• The church existed for centuries in a relatively stable society and culture; so it has been shaped as a
traditional organisation; geared to faithfully continuing to hand on its treasures, and of course
developing and changing, but slowly; traditional organisations assume the future will be
basically much the same as the past, so they will always be relevant. So they tend not to notice
when rapid change in their environment makes them ineffective. Like an old TV station
continuing to send out an analogue TV signal when the receivers have all changed over to
digital.
• As institutions lose touch, they get a bit short-sighted; they can look straight at their defects and see them as strengths; there’s a lot of bad pastoral research out there that screens them from the
truth – Mary Gautier showed in her wonderful talk the other day how even counts of mass
attendance in the USA are exaggerated to make parishes or dioceses look good. Hence the old
saying: “there are lies, damned lies, and church statistics!”. A pastoral researcher must tell the
truth. If you announce that your research shows that in Catholic schools today, it is pastorally
harmful to impose religious education and prayer on students who do not believe (and this
includes many who are nominally Catholic), you will be called a Jeremiah. Well, take comfort
– he was a great prophet, to whom the Lord said: “Behold, I put my words in your mouth”.
• The people of God need some new houses built. And success always starts with failure. But the
church of the future will still be the community of believers gathered to live the Gospel of the
Lord. Our belief and hope in its future is not based on numbers but on the testimony of the
Holy Spirit.
Comments