President's address

"Not in danger, only near to death"
Religious Institutions and a Church in Transition

President's Address to the National Assembly of Catholic Religious Australia

In T S Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, when Thomas Becket is confronted with the murderous knights of King Henry II, he meets them with the words:  "I am not in danger: only near to death."  My theme in opening this 2008 National Assembly for Australian Religious may be similar to Becket's: Religious life: not in danger, only near to death.   

From a sociological and historical point of view, religious life appears quite near to death.  These are desert days for religious. Like the Church as a whole, religious communities are buffeted by the cultural and historical forces at work in society.  Moreover the stigma of abuse marks many sectors of the Church today. We may experience diminishment, disappointment and discouragement.  Religious life may be near to death, but I would assert like Becket, it is not in danger because of the validity of this vocation. From deserts springs new life.  Few things are more exhilarating than new life in the desert. Deserts, too, are natural place for prophets to prepare. Our vocation is precisely that: to be prophets.  Our present time and the desert wilderness of our contemporary society, offer us time and place for our true vocation.  

Even in this desert we have reasons for hope and grounds for gratitude. We religious are clearer about who we are, why we were founded, what our role in the church is, what will build community and what will take us all into the future.  Religious life is an affirmation that God is supremely good all the time and to everyone.  Religious life is based on faith in the triune God who is and who generates community, who is active and at work in all people and things and places.  Because we have met and experienced such a God, we religious choose a counter-cultural life that desires profound alternatives to the competitive, secular and individualistic ways of living that are accepted today by so many as inevitable.
 
Our ageing and diminishing numbers tell an undeniable story of decline.  In the 1970s, we recorded some 17,500 religious women, brothers and priests in the Australian Church, while today we count fewer than 8000, and the average age of women religious is in their 70s. We will soon be far fewer. Some communities have not received novices for years. For some their youngest members are in their fifties.   There are around 140 religious orders in Australia, comprising over 40 clerical religious orders, some five orders of brothers, and 80 or 90 separate orders of women.   

Yet something new and different is happening in our Church at the moment. Alongside the numerical diminishment and ageing of religious there is also a surge in lay involvement and lay leadership in mission.  Before Vatican II, lay people were seen more as the recipients than as the agents. But that Council (especially Lumen Gentium on the Church and Apostolicam Actuosam on the apostolate of the laity) proclaimed that we are all members of the people of God and that all, lay, religious and priests have a common vocation to holiness and service.  We all share the mission of the Church and do so collaboratively, because we are in communion with Christ and with one another, guided by the same Spirit.

For almost all in the Australian Church our first contact with the faith was once largely mediated through religious sisters and brothers in our Catholic schools. Now the call to holiness, to witness and to communion is being mediated to others also by lay persons.  This is not simply an organisational adjustment because of lack of sufficient ordained ministers, a fall back position to fill in the numbers.  Nor is it simply a sociological development consequent on the democratic movements in our broader culture.  It is the way the Spirit is alive in our Church and in our hearts. There is a happy confluence between lay people ready to serve the Church in these newer ways, and the mission religious have long claimed for themselves.

Behind the inspiration of each religious order is an imaginative response to the suffering and human dilemmas of their times. Each of the religious founders responded imaginatively to the suffering of their time.  Claire and Francis of Assisi showed that a total self giving in poverty, a total reliance on the goodness of God, created the greatest security possible.

In our times, the globalization of human suffering calls us to a new imagination that affects our mission.  We are all called to attention by the needs of the people of Myanmar after Cyclone Nargis, of the 2.5 million displaced by the Darfur conflict, of the suffering now in Eastern Congo, or the 130 million persons displaced within China from impoverished rural zones to the cities.  For over 20 years of service to refugees in such places as Cambodia, Rwanda, El Salvador, Bosnia, I had direct experience of these realities.  It is not the tired tools of Enlightenment activism that we turn to, but rather our deep Catholic principles of solidarity, service, communion, accompaniment, justice, and a belief in the Spirit of God active in all people and places.  

In Australia and across our globe, religious ask the same questions:  How do we live in an unequal and at times unjust world?  How do we best use our goods, manage our time, and capacities and our resources?  Where should we invest our surplus?  How can we cooperate and share resources with our brothers and sisters across our world?  This question is particularly acute among the Provinces of the international religious orders that may have quite different levels of life style in different parts of the globe.

The theme of this year's assembly: Our Australian Multicultural Church: Reality, Gift and Challenge, reflects precisely our desire to interpret and respond imaginatively to the needs of our society.

It would be a mistake for religious to allow a sense of our diminishment to drive our strategic planning.  Instead, we were asked over 40 years ago to use different principles for understanding our vocations and thus for planning our lives in community and our apostolic commitments.  Vatican Council II, calling religious to re-imagine ourselves, asked us to return to the Gospel, the source of all Christian life, and to the original inspiration behind our particular religious community. We were also called to adjust to the changed conditions of our time.

Vatican II called religious life the prophetic dimension of the Church. Religious, it claimed, make the life of the Church more vigorous and its work more fruitful.  It has taken time. It has taken shocks - both from falling numbers and from scandals - to stir us. But that is what is happening.  For us who live it, our life as a religious is not a statistical, historical or sociological phenomenon.  It is a vocation.

Not all religious orders will continue. Some may discern that they have simply fulfilled their mandate. Some are simply not blessed with new life.  But our charisms are a gift to the whole Church. All of us have responsibility to see that original inspiration institutionalised.  Some communities have been particularly vigorous in renaming and reshaping their lives and work.  You may have seen recently the plans and new directions of the Christian Brothers. Provincial Br Vince Duggan announced the establishment of new structures as a "dynamic process in which the Holy Spirit is active, unsettling yet also encouraging us to leap further into the Mystery of God."  

There are different arrangements whereby religious congregations make the needed accommodations, such as:

Those who dislike change may be disquieted by these apparent changes in direction.  But it is helpful to look at the original inspiration of the orders in order to understand what is happening to them now. A number of religious orders had their rise in the 19th Century. And all of our orders have been influenced by that time of blooming of religious life. Edmund Rice along with other prophetic figures like Catherine McAuley, Mary Aikenhead, responded to the new poverty consequent on the Industrial Revolution, and began to help the poor as laypersons. They then formed and the Christian Brothers, the Mercy Sisters, and the Sisters of Charity in order to continue this heroic service. Another contemporary, Frederick Ozanam, founded the lay movement, St Vincent de Paul Society. It was at the same time that Karl Marx released his Communist Manifesto; Charles Dickens was writing Bleak House and Hard Times, and Victor Hugo completing Les Miserables.

These congregations have given great service to the Australian Catholic community. The orders still own or influence many health care, social service and educational institutions. But these enterprises, even though they are in fact growing, are today supported in large part by the government and administered by lay persons. Clearly many needs remain, including the need to encourage and support this transition to lay participation in ministry and to ensure that the institutions they set up retain their Catholic identity and remain 'on mission'.  But the orders also may argue that the great work they began, for example in the 19th Century, has reached a point of completion. The brothers and sisters, meanwhile, are moving to the edge, offering a prophetic service in line with their calling.

May I share with you the testimony of a young brother who entered religious life during the last five years while I have been Provincial of the Jesuits.

The role taken up by the Brother is not one that defines him from others, not an exclusive role for which he is elevated and praised, but a role which unites him in solidarity.  A Brother is able to immerse himself easily whilst sharing an equal role with the laity. Difference here lies not in what he can do that others cannot, but in who he is, and to what he is committed.  

Within a few days I conclude my time as Provincial in Australia and move on to another assignment.  You can imagine that with such evidence of a genuine vocation taking root in our community, I move on with much hope.

Religious life is now in a desert time.  In deserts, people survive.  But after survival comes death. Survival is normally not enough for a full human life.  In deserts springs glorious new life. Deserts also breed prophets.  Prophets can be dangerous, but thanks to them our society and our Church can be renewed.  We have all tried to cross the deserts of competitiveness, isolation, individualism.  These drain our desire for the transcendent God who lives in all things and who inspires hope in our hearts.  

In his poem 'Australia', A D Hope condemns:

 

Benedict XVI, in his encouraging new Encyclical, Spe Salvi (n.2) says:

As religious communities, it does not matter how few we are, how diminished we appear to be.  It is our communion with one another across extraordinary cultural differences that gives us our power and our relevance.

In the Bible, we have the example of Sarah and Abraham.  They received the promise that because of their faith their love would be fertile, and would give to the world a new people, a new reason for hope.  Looking at their wizened bodies, they would have had no reason to hope. Yet they "hoped against hope".  They had to give up their familiar home and travel through the desert to a new land of promise inhabited by strangers.  How did they react to this? The Bible says: "And Sarah laughed."   

Our recently elected Jesuit Superior General, Adolfo Nicolas, remarked, "Humour is the daily face of hope."  The laughter of Abraham and Sarah has brought us to where we are today.  Diminishing, but ready to begin again on our journey of hope.