Feasts, Fasts and Festivals This Weekend

In a gesture of Interfaith solidarity the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC) has sent good wishes to the Muslim community as the fast of Ramadan finishes with the Eid al-Fitr.

This year Bishop Michael McKenna has chosen to use the seldom seen spelling of Id al-Fitr. At first I thought it was a typo and was going to offer my services as a proof reader for the Bishop. However, Id al-Fitr is the spelling that appears this year in the message for the end of Ramadan from the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

The document is a significant gesture that challenges the ignorance and Islamphobia still found in too many Catholic communities. In this context I wonder this statement does not appear on the social media platforms of the Bishops Conference. nor of its members. In fact it hardly rates a mention across most of the Catholic community social media network that I follow

Mind you the Bishops are tied up in religious knots this weekend. They are caught between being more Catholic than the Pope, doing their Ecumenical best as well as showing Interfaith good will to the Muslim Community.

The Eid greeting doesn't make it onto the Facebook or Twitter feed of the ACBC.

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity gets one appearance on the Facebook and Twitter fed of the ACBC

And the winner is: Yes, Mary HOC gets more runs than Don Bradman This banner gets to feature six times on the ACBC Twitter account. Over on Facebook the banner gets to be the main header and one appearance in the timeline. As you might expect the banner gets headline treatment over at The Catholic Church in Australia although she does have to share space with the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and other banners.

The personality politics of individual Bishops is also interesting. The President of the ACBC, Archbishop Mark Coleridge and the Vice-President, Archbishop Anthony Fisher,OP have not featured any of these banners on their Facebook timelines.

Over in the land of the tweets, Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP,has been silent since 2018. On the other hand, Archbishop Mark Coleridge likes to be pretty cosmopolitan with his tweets and has bypassed all the weekend festivities.