Rob Colquhoun

Reflections on ‘Vanished Youth and the Church in Australia from a youth perspective.

James McCarthy, Archdiocese of Sydney

 A seminarian talks about youth and the Church in Sydney.

May 2, 2006 – Speech for the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences.


I have listened and reflected, over the past few days, on the wide variety of research and discussion papers on the topic of youth. The various themes considered at this conference, which are also found in the contemporary life in Australia, seem to have played a significant role in the selection of Sydney to host WYD 2008. I will attempt in a broad way to highlight some of the background to the Church in Australia, the current situation confronting young Catholics, and some achievable goals for evangelisation in the Church in Australian.


During the plenary session we have discussed the primary role of the family in educating and forming young people in the Faith. Much of family life in Australia seems to be negative. A majority of parents seem to give the moral and religious formation of their children a low priority. Many sadly believe that wealth and prosperity are the biggest contributors to happiness and communicate this message to their children. Many Catholic parents have embraced the widespread indifferentism towards religion in Australia; resulting in sporadic Mass attendance, and casual attention to implementing the teachings of the Church in their daily lives. It is in this context that parents do not assist in effectively passing-on or simply being witnesses-to the Faith to their children.


The frequent distancing of young people from their parents during their teenage years, not just concerning faith, but in all aspects of life, can lead to some adolescents maturing without significant input from their parents and other adults. Consequently, in these formative years many young people are strongly influenced by their adolescent peer-groups, resulting in a situation where they frequently are unable to escape their adolescent state until their late 20s. Many adolescents in Australia become part of friendship-groups or cliques. Some extreme behaviour by such groups is externally manifested, by unusual forms of fashion, body piercing and tattoos. Young people, as always, want to be part of something, to be accepted and to feel that they have friends with similar interests.


This concept of ‘belonging’ should be utilised by the Church to evangelise young people. Historically, the Church in Australia has attempted to build communities, societies and general Catholic culture outside of the liturgical setting. Youth participation in the faith, and to some extent participation of all the faithful, has been reduced to in the last 20 or 30 years to weekly Mass attendance. However, the offering of a complete vision, through an integrated Catholic way of life, through formation and through the establishment of what some have coined a “Catholic sub-culture”, was highly successful in forming and expanding several generations of young Catholics in the knowledge and practice of their Faith. Present experience is that without such supports, young people will become quickly disinterested and uninvolved in the life of the Church.


The news is not all bad! Many young Australians are open to faith, and when committed, they are truly the treasures of the Church. The youth are not the source of the problems, but can be the resource for solving the problems, as many have stated during the conference. Unlike the situation in Africa, as discussed by Prof Zulu, where a committed Catholic may separate the Church’s spiritual vision with its “practical” vision, many committed young Catholics in Australia show initiative and try to integrate the Church’s teaching into their lives. In fact, they want to see their Church and life in Christ expand and deepen.


One such example of the initiative of the committed youth of Australia is found in the original bid for World Youth Day for Australia, which is worth recalling and examining.


Three days after Archbishop Pell was installed as Archbishop of Sydney in May 2001, he was presented with a petition (of which I was a member of the organising committee) with over 10,000 signatures requesting Archbishop Pell to support an application to the Holy See by young Australian Catholics for Sydney to host WYD subsequent to the Toronto 2002 WYD. Archbishop Pell indicated that a submission by the youth organisers could be made and a youth representative should be prepared to go to Rome to support the proposal. Archbishop Pell also informed us that he was aware that other cities were being considered. A detailed submission was prepared and forwarded to Rome and there were subsequent meetings with Cardinal Stafford, then President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity and committee members about the Sydney WYD bid.


Certain features of this original bid should be highlighted. As Cardinal Stafford remarked to a committee member, the Sydney bid was unique in the history of WYD. The bid represented the initiative and aspirations of young Catholic Australians and was not, as an initiative, the proposal of the Australian hierarchy, although this bid had at least Archbishop Pell’s implicit approval. In other words, the Sydney WYD bid was ‘bottom up’ not ‘top down’.


Further, this submission was uniquely written by, and from the point of view of, young Catholic Australians. The ‘John Paul II generation’ in Australia felt sufficiently confident to address the Holy Father directly in the expectation that they would be listened to with openness and not ignored. As we know, the late Holy Father decided on Cologne as the venue for WYD after Toronto. However, Sydney was designated last year by Pope Benedict as the venue for WYD 2008 following submissions by Cardinal Pell and the Australian Bishops Conference.


It is noteworthy that the Church in Australia is a well-established part of society and we receive significant political and mainstream support for many of our programs and initiatives. Unlike the situation in the US, where it would be seen as seriously problematic, the State and Federal governments in Australia, with bipartisan support, find no problem, and actually believe it economically sound, to provide billions of dollars of funding annually to the Church for our far-reaching primary and secondary school system. In addition, it was announced last month that our Federal government will provide 20 million dollars of cash support for WYD 2008, while the State government has pledged to do whatever it takes to make the event successful.


What was even more important for the youth organising committee in 2001, was that WYD needed to be held in Australia. For the young people in Australia, WYD would be the great opportunity for the New Evangelisation in Oceania and would allow the Church to reach out to the younger generation in a completely different way.


To understand the background to the bid of 2001, it needs to be placed in the context of the wider Australian Church at that time. In 1998, there were the momentous Ad Limina visits of the Australian bishops with the Roman dicasteries. Led by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, there was an in-depth and critical analysis of the state of the Church in Australia and its future progress. This led to the famous Statement of Conclusions of December 1998 in which it was acknowledged by the Australian Bishops that there was a crisis of Faith in Australia. In various aspects this crisis was manifested by the rise in the number of people with no religion (16-17%) and a dramatic decline in regular Church attendance (for Australian Catholics, from 60% in the 1960’s to about 17% in the late 1990’s) While I was at University we estimated that the number of practising Catholics on campus was about 5%, and in absolute terms this was less than the number of active Evangelicals on campus.


Moreover the renowned tolerance of Australians has led to an indifference about truth and an openness to all opinions and positions, resulting in a loss of confidence in the ability to know the truth and to have Faith in God. At the same time, traditional Christian anthropology has faded and has been replaced by an extreme individualism and a concept of conscience, which elevates the individual to an absolute, and has developed a new level of moral relativism.


The Statement of Conclusions caused widespread dismay in sections of the Australian Church and there was extensive media debate about why Rome was being so critical of the Australian Church and whether the Australian bishops deserved to be regarded as ineffective.


The young Catholics on the WYD organising committee in 2001 had read the Statement of Conclusions and wondered “what the fuss was about”, as Australians say. It seemed clear to us that there was a crisis of Faith and that it must be addressed by the Church in Australia. With God’s grace and favour there was no fundamental reason to despair but both spiritual and social reality had to be confronted.


The organising committee perceived, through their own experiences, that while on paper the Catholic Church was the largest denomination in Australia (28%) and that a record number of young people had been educated in the extensive network of Catholic primary and secondary schools, there had been a virtual collapse of active interest-in and practice-of the Faith by a whole generation of Catholics since the 1960’s. The Church in Australia had gone from being a community where, in the 1960s, to be a practising Catholic was mainstream and normal, to the situation today where very few practice their Faith regularly, let alone live-out the Faith in their daily lives.


In the 1970’s and 1980’s, many Catholic associations which supported the broader Catholic way of life disappeared, and until recent initiatives, had not been replaced nor encouraged. Many parishes, since at least the early 1980s, have a reduced social and formational role, and many youth find little in the parishes to nourish them when the belief and habit of regular Mass attendance is no longer a part of personal and family identity.


With WYD in Sydney we believed a new era of youth involvement and organisation would be initiated. We envisioned the establishment of new and stronger Catholic associations, formed across the city and regions, absorbing many parish youth groups, which often have limited activities and are without a suitable “critical mass” of members. We also identified the necessity for a renewal of a Catholic culture and way of life. As the Evangelicals and Pentecostals exhibit in Sydney, strong active youth groups energise and attract more members and foster keener involvement.


All the features of the crisis of Faith are present in Australia’s younger generation of baptized-Catholics, from individualism, to materialism, to faithlessness. However, most young people who have a committed-Faith, have either emerged from sound and faithful Catholic families, or have received Catholic formation through groups and have been effected by the ever-developing Catholic culture. The WYD submission of 2001 from the youth of Australia firmly and distinctly showed that there are a significant number of young people who want to respond as faithful Christian witnesses and want to bring the wider Church, through the support of our bishops, the Holy Father and the Catholic youth of all the world, to assist us in this essential endeavour of proclaiming Christ to the youth of Australia.