pathways, DECEMBER 2008
An issue whose time has come - multiculturalism in the Australian Catholic Church - was broken open for more than 100 leaders of religious congregations when they gathered in Melbourne earlier this year for Catholic Religious Australia's national assembly. So they might have a better, more factual understanding of what for many was only a vague hunch, Australia's leading Catholic voice on multiculturalism,
PROFESSOR DESMOND CAHILL, from Melbourne, presented the leaders with a detailed look at Australia's multicultural Church in a globalizing multi-faith world.
In absorbing presentations, he left no-one in any doubt that the face of Australia is changing as globalisation takes hold, leaving the Church in unchartered waters that must be journeyed across. He contends that the Australian Catholic Church is the most multicultural Catholic Church in the world and suggests that its future will be as an immigrant Church with an Anglo-Irish remnant.
Due to the length, detail and importance of Professor Cahill's address, pathways will present the material in the segments over several editions.
In this segment, Prof. Cahill considers the ...
Repositioning of the Religion-State relationship
The period from the early 1870s to the early 1970s was one where there was a quite rigid separation of religion and state.
It can be rightly called the secularist era of Australian history with the Catholics agitating strongly for the funding of their schools. The philosophical basis of the Catholic position rested on the mantra that parents have the right to send their children to whatever school they like.
In the end it was perhaps the more pragmatic financial reason that it was less costly for the government to support private schools than to allow the large Catholic schooling system to collapse. Another equally pragmatic reason was that more and more Catholics, by now becoming the largest religious community in Australia, were upwardly mobile and their votes were needed by the liberal conservative party in their three periods of government (1949 - 1972; 1975 - 1983; 1996 - 2007) though it was the Whitlam government that made the decisive change.
The secularist legacy would last beyond the Second World War. Government policy towards religious communities was largely that of a negative neutrality though relations between political and religious leaders was generally positive. But this neutrality supported a privatised faith and senior religious leaders were regularly told to keep their noses out of politics or to keep out of the nation's bedrooms, especially when their dictums conflicted with a particular party's policy.
There was some cooperation, including by clerics acting as both religious and state celebrants during the marriage ceremony. As well, the state funded health initiatives such as religiously-sponsored hospitals and aged care facilities and religious welfare organisations which fed and housed the homeless, looked after disabled people.
The legacy of the strict separation was not sustainable in the context of globalisation, the decline of the welfare state and religious extremism.
Accordingly, in Australia we have seen a repositioning of the relationship between religion and state over the past 40 years.
Central to this was the decision to fund private religious schools beginning in the 1960s. Education has always been the touchstone of interreligious relationships and the religion-state relationship. As a result the poorer private, mainly Catholic, schools were able to move from survival mode to an era of professionalisation once they began receiving almost total funding from 1973 onwards according to a formula weighted in favour of schools in economically poorer and higher migrant density areas.
Other expressions of this repositioning have been
-
the funding of part-time ethnoreligious schools to teach the language and perhaps religion of immigrant and refugee communities,
-
the funding of confessional universities such as the Australian Catholic University by the Commonwealth government,
-
the appointment of religious personnel as a governor-general and as State governors,
-
the funding of welfare officers for some of the more recently arrived groups such as the Muslim
-
the inclusion of religious discrimination within the ambit of racial discrimination and human rights acts
-
the listing of historic places of worship on the national register, and the allocation of funds for the restoration of historic churches
-
the utilization of religious leaders for civic occasions such as at times of national celebration or national and international times of tragedy,
-
the successful tendering by religious groups for the delivery of unemployment, health and welfare services as part of the privatisation of government services and the winding back of the welfare state,
-
the appointment of many more chaplains to government and private schools
-
the financial support by State and Federal governments for interfaith events such as the Parliament of the World's Religions in December 2009
-
the funding of interfaith projects, including the establishment of the Islamic Institute at Melbourne University, through the Commonwealth Government's Living-in-Harmony program
In Australia, religion and state are now very interwoven in terms of policies and programs and in sheer money terms. In contrast to the USA and France, Australia, like Canada, has a moderate and balanced religion-state relationship.
Educated in Melbourne and Rome, Des Cahill is Professor of Intercultural Studies at RMIT University and has been one of Australia's leading researchers in the areas of immigrant, cross-cultural, interfaith and international studies for almost three decades. His many publications and research projects have focussed on immigrant and multicultural education, ethnic minority youth, immigrant settlement, ethnic community development, intermarriage and, more recently, religion and globalization.Since the events of September 11, 2001, he has played a major role in researching and bringing together the various faith communities in Australia and across the world through his research and community activities. With Gary Bouma, he was commissioned by the Australian Government after S11 to examine its implications in Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia (2004) and to prepare the resource book, Constructing a Local Multifaith Network (2004).
Since 2001, he has chaired the Australian chapter of the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP), and represents Australia on the executive committee of the Asian Conference of Religion and Peace. He was the leader of the City of Melbourne's successful bid to stage the Parliament of the World's Religions in December 2009.
Cahill, D. (1990) Intermarriage in International Contexts: A Study of Filipino Women Married to Australian, Japanese and Swiss Men (SMC Center, Manila)
Cahill, D. (2004) Missionaries on the Move: A Pastoral Study of the Scalabrinians in Australia and Asia 1952 - 2002 (CMS, New York)
Cahill, D. (2005) The conundrum of globalization. Australian Mosaic 12, 4, 6 - 11.
Cahill, D. (2007) From dagoes to doers: accommodating Australia's Italian migrants by church and state. In A. Paganoni (ed.) Pastoral Care of Italians in Australia: Memory and Prophecy (Connor Court Publishing, Victoria)
Cahill, D., Bouma, G., Dellal, H. & Leahy, M. (2004) Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia (DIMIA with the Australian Multicultural Foundation, Canberra), also available on the AMF website in the research folder.
Background reading:
GRACED BY MIGRATION: Implementing a national strategy in pastoral care for a multi-cultural Australian Church (2007)
COMMENT AND EXPERIENCES ARE WELCOME.
or if you have an experience of our multi-cultural Australian Church you would like to share, please contact Penny.
Top of page
