There is always the other side.

I am just back in Bangkok after ten days in Sydney where I had gone for Provincial Chapter which is a meeting of my province held every four years to reflect, assess and plan our life and mission together.  I found it a positive and affirming experience.  Funny as after such an event, I usually go away feeling a bit unsure but not this time.  Rather I went away feeling that I had given and received some life.

That is one side of my time away.  The other is that I did go away feeling unsure about the wider Australian Church.  You see, at the Chapter, we had input on the state of the Church in Australia and what was shared hit me in the face.  What was it that had such an impact on me?  Here goes.  
5.4 million Australians name themselves as Catholic.
Only 662,000 attend mass on any given Sunday.
A third of this 662,000 are over 70.
Of all Catholics between 20 and 34, only 5-6% attend mass.
These statistics were an introduction to a presentation that told us that the Australian Church is facing a serious crisis.  This presentation along with the present story that I heard of the Australian Commission into child sexual abuse and the affect it is having told me that the Australian Church is in a state of collapse.   I was somewhat shell shocked as it had not really hit me before like this and in such a startling way.  

Then later in my stay I was going through the local Catholic paper and saw a picture that struck me as a period piece.  I thought it was a picture of characters in a play on the Church in the 1890s but it wasn't.  It showed three real, live, Catholic priests dressed in full cassock and collar with black sash, dressed for a public function.  It struck me that they were presenting such an out of place and out of touch picture to an Australia that needs to know a Church that speaks to today.  What I saw had a real connection to what I had learnt about the state of the Australian Church.  This one picture left such a negative imprint on me as it spoke to me of dangerous revisionism, something which today's mainstream Australia does not need from our Church.

I have come away questioning today's Church in Australia and where it is at.  What is it all saying to me?  It is not just about change but about something more basic.  It is about being Church and for Church to be Church in Australia it is challenged to grapple with the issues facing it and give witness in today's world in ways that speak to it.   This will not happen by being overcome by statistics and the present story nor by harking back to a past that was.  It will happen by seeing what I name as collapse as the present opportunity to take up the call to be Church in new, nourishing and refreshing ways.  Here in the midst of death and dying, there is a chance for growth.

There is always another side.

Sorry there is no picture this week but I can't capture an appropriate picture for what I share here.