catholicweekly.com.au 19 5, April, 2020 E ditorial & letters Dorin’s World Send your letters to:
[email protected] By the post: The Editor, Level 13, 133 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000 AUSTRALIA Great idea putting the newspaper up in digital W hoever thought of putting The Catholic Weekly online in dig- itised format should be con- gratulated. While I appreciate the digital presence of The Catholic Weekly website in general (technologically illiterate as I am, unlike my nephews and nieces it seems), to have the digitised edition is the next best thing to being able to pick up the actual paper. I do hope the issues will be archived so I can easily share the articles with friends and family. Toby Garcia Lopez Baulkham Hills NSW A Polish cardinal and an Australian one ... O ne appointment by Pope Francis I applaud is that of Polish Car- dinal Krajewski to the office of papal almoner. I have a lot of time for a man who took his tool box and personally reconnect- ed the electricity for a family who faced eviction. Meanwhile, I note that the ABC TV program “Revelation” aired new allega- tions of sexual abuse against Cardinal Pell this week. I am aware that victims of sexual abuse find it very difficult to reveal what happened. They feel that they may not be be- lieved, they feel ashamed at what hap- pened to them, they are embarrassed to reveal such intimate details about their lives, they fear that their partners and families may not understand. Yet I have to say that I find it a tad bit suspicious that these allegations have only been made public at the time Car- dinal Pell’s appeal to the High Court is under consideration. It seems to me that there is a coordinated plan to “get Pell” whatever the cost. Cardinal Pell was a polarising fig- ure in the Catholic Church who some- times came across as aloof, arrogant and princely in his mannerisms. It is said that he called a spade a tractor! But His Eminence grabbed the Austra- lian Church by the scruff of its collar and dragged it back from the heterodox prac- tices and abuses that had become the norms. To do that you cannot be a shy, retiring wall flower. Stephen Early North Richmond NSW Need to keep virus deaths in their proper context A t the time of writing, the percent- age of deaths in relation to the number of individuals identified and tested with coronavirus is between .03 per cent to .04 per cent. To put some perspective on the num- ber of deaths caused by coronavirus we could observe that the number of deaths by euthanasia in Victoria for the first six months was 52. If we were to take a three month pe- riod based on current figures, the death rate for Euthanasia would be approxi- mately 26 compared to four deaths from coronavirus. Abortions for the same time period in Victoria would be somewhere in the vicinity of 6,000. I believe we have gone too far in fear- ing this disease and that we need to maintain some perspective. Taking away people’s livelihoods, social contacts, community sport and worship can only lead to increased rates of depression, de- spair, loneliness and poverty. The consequence of closing down so- ciety may well create more harm than good. It may even create more deaths in the long run. Why have we become so afraid and paranoid? I believe the fear of death is so much worse in our age than in the past. Previous generations were generally more concerned with both our physical and spiritual wellbeing, but as we have become more secular, death to the unbe- liever has become the ultimate calamity. Certainly we should all take precau- tions that will help slow down this dis- ease. The Government obviously needs to have a tight control of our borders, in- cluding testing everyone who arrives in Australia and implementing an appro- priate quarantine period. However I can’t escape feeling we should not have closed down our society as the cure may well be much worse than the complaint. Tony van Dorst Gunnedah NSW Pray for doctors, nurses and all fighting pandemic T his is a call to prayer to safeguard the doctors and nurses who are exhausted as they cope with this pandemic. Our only child is a nurse. She is a wife and mother of four who is also a highly qualified medic working on the front line in a public hospital. By our spiritual support we help our doctors and nurses as we keep them in the forefront of our prayers and thoughts. Irene Shanks, Mareeba, QLD Issues on which the Plenary could lead A rchbishop Julian Porteous of Hobart has this week written a reflection on the unique role of the priesthood and the role of the laity which can be found on The Catholic Weekly website. It is one of the most important pieces of its kind to appear in quite a while because the Church in Australia does have an issue that, as we commonly say, it needs to face up to: a confusion and even a certain seeming ignorance widespread among many Catholics about their role in the Church. And while Archbishop Porteous’s reflection was clearly written with a view to the Plenary Council planned for later this year, the problem he highlighted is really one of a number of issues which the Plenary could – and should – profitably consider. The Plenary comes at a time which can only be consid- ered a crossroads for the Church in this country. Many of the issues which the Church needs to face up to here are common to similar societies around the world, throughout much of Europe, the north and south Americas, for exam- ple, which were once heartlands of a Judeo Christianmoral code and for the Church itself. Among the critically import- ant issues here in Australia are the effects of the onslaught of a modernity whose culture is antithetical to the Gospel. The idea that God is not really important to the decisions we make about our lives nor, in fact to our lives at all, has spread widely among those who are identified as Catholics by census or school enrolment forms but who are really as ignorant as swans about Jesus and the Church. They identi- fy as ‘Catholic’ but they only go toMass at Christmas, Easter and first communions, baptisms and funerals because for them these are merely tribal rituals. They also decisively re- ject the faith of the Church in critical moral issues such as the sanctity of life and in practice in their own lives. It would not be inaccurate to describe them effectively as baptised pagans or the ‘faithless baptised’. The ignorance of numerous Catholics within the pews was painfully evident and can be read online at the Plena- ry website in Chapter 16 of the report on local consulta- tions with Catholics across Australia by Plenary facilitators. There one can read how numerous Catholics thought it not unreasonable to throw out every distinctive and unchange- able feature of the Church in accord with the latest opinion poll on subjects ranging from abortion to blessing same-sex marriages to the priesthood – to name just a few. What was revealed, in essence, was the profile of a crisis in crystal clear terms which the Church is facing within its own ranks and which it must address: the rejection of its faith. We can therefore nominate a number of topics of direct relevance to the Church in Australia which the Plenary could profitably consider and, presumably, act upon. This (not ex- haustive) agenda could include: l the lay vocation and the urgent necessity to better form lay Catholics in their understanding of the need for their wit- ness in the world rather than the Church sanctuary l the social teaching of the Church, the largely unknown corpus of modern teaching which begins with RerumNovar- um in 1891 and develops from there on, re-equipping and resourcing a lay vocation sufficiently well-formed to enter the public square and the vocation of politics, capable of re- placing show-Catholics whose life outlook has been formed largely by television, movies and popular opinion polls l comprehensive pre-and ongoing post-marriage for- mation as called for by Pope Francis with his suggestion for a marriage catechumenate, so that Catholics who marry un- derstand the significance of their decision and have a clear idea of their mission as a result l the re-establishment of the John Paul II Institute for Studies of Marriage and the Family, the closure of which by the Archdiocese of Melbourne was a disaster for the forma- tion of the lay vocation and the common good at exactly the moment marriage and the family are under the greatest as- sault from society and culture in the nation’s history l a plan for the renewal of Catholic education, drawing experience and involvement with it much closer to parish life, possibly making it conditional upon these l the universal call to holiness emphasised by Vatican II and recognition that sanctity is meant to be the normal state of life irrespective of one’s vocation, ways to communicate this to the faithful and programs to assist its implementation. Consideration of such fundamentals and finding new ways to address these would not only immediately make the Plenary a defining moment in the life of the Church in Aus- tralia but make it a major innovation, insulating it against any possible chit-chat that it may be nothing more than a large, very expensive, Catholic talk fest. LETTERS