David Penberthy: Institutions have only themselves to blame for this

Once powerful organisations like the Catholic Church want you to believe their demise is due to some bigger issue with society as a whole. But the truth is, every issue they now face has been of their own making, writes David Penberthy.

A few nights ago I was chatting over dinner with some good friends about whether we would be happy for our kids to join the Scouts if they showed an interest.

With apologies to the many good people who have devoted their lives to this generally good institution, we all concluded that we would be uncomfortable with it, or would only let them join and go on camps if we attended too.

None of us are hysterical, cotton-wool parents. We want our kids to lead active, outdoor lifestyles, we want then to grow up and take calculated risks, and we can see the benefits that organisations such as the Scouts provide. But the answer was still a regrettable no.

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And in 2019, I would suspect that our trepidation is in line with the same level of community suspicion towards an organisation that has in some cases served as a magnet for those with ill intent.

So many have lost faith in the Catholic Church in recent years. Picture: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

If you put this question another way, and inject a theological element into it — would you let your child go away with a group of priests on a religious camp?

Or, would you let your child join your church choir and leave them unattended in the care of theologians?

I don’t know if a survey has ever been done on questions like these but I’d be surprised if these days the “yes” respondents would crack double figures. In my case the answer would be, “yes, but only when hell freezes over”.

Our impromptu focus group shed a light on the collapse in trust for organisations that were once regarded as paragons of the community. The very places that good parents once regarded as the epitome of trust are now regarded as untrustworthy.

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You hear a lot from political conservatives and religious leaders about the rise of materialism and individualism, the idea that society is turning its back on God and becoming focused on itself.

It is a reassuringly misleading analysis for the decline in church attendance and the growth in irreligion, as it wilfully ignores the extent to which so many of these institutions have scandalised themselves, and made themselves repellent to many of us in the mainstream.

Institutions blaming the demise of humanity for their woes ignores the extent to which so many of these groups have scandalised themselves. Picture: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/AFP

If a spiritual hole now exists in countries such as ours, it’s not just because people are getting their existential kicks through faddish nonsense like wellness programs and sitting cross-legged under pyramids humming to themselves.

It is because many of us have simply decided we prefer existential emptiness to the preachy and hypercritical sanctimony of organisations that profess love and compassion, but have harboured the purest forms of evil misery and sought to obfuscate or silence people with hush money when it all came out.

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There was a terrific piece of journalism by my former colleague John Ferguson in The Australian this week where he documented the secret financial pressures that have hit Australia’s largest Catholic archdiocese.

Ferguson reported the Melbourne archdiocese, George Pell’s old stomping ground, is now mired in debt and deficit in the wake of millions of dollars in payouts over various child abuse scandals.

Ferguson wrote that the Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli has flagged a major overhaul of finances and church structures in a talk to ­clergy and staff, calling for restraint and a new way forward to deliver services.

While the financial situation is not wholly related to the child abuse scandal, with much of it stemming from the church’s 2014 purchase of a new administrative headquarters in Melbourne at a cost of $25 million, it has been exacerbated by the scandals with the church reportedly paying out an extra $11 million to top-up redress payments for 233 abuse victims. There are many other victims who are still seeking or awaiting compensation.

Beyond that, I wonder whether the financial problems also stem from the challenges of maintaining patronage — and also donations and bequests — at a time when so much trust has been destroyed by the church’s own actions.

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In you look at the financial development of the church, much of its original wealth came from the purest form of pillaging, as the many Aztec pyramids buried under Catholic cathedrals across Mexico demonstrates.

But for much of the previous century, churches derived revenue from their parishioners, and it was a relationship based on trust.

There are two illustrative measures that tell the story of patronage for these institutions in modern-day Australia, one is the Census, the other some interesting 2015 research by the demographers at the McCrindle group about church attendance.

The most recent census shows more and more Australians are turning their back on religion. Picture: Filippo Monteforte/AFP

The last few censuses have demonstrated the extent to which people are turning their backs on God, with the 2016 Census showing that 29 per cent of Australians (almost 7 million people) have no religion. That figure was up from 22 per cent in 2011 and 18 per cent in 2006. On current trends the number of us stating that we have no religion will probably have doubled in two decades.

At the same time, according to McCrindle, the proportion of Australians identifying Christianity as their religion fell from a high of 96 per cent in 1911 to 61 per cent in the 2011 Census. Correspondingly, over the past four decades the proportion of Australians attending church at least once a month has more than halved from 36 per cent to 15 per cent currently.

That’s a big whack square in the collection plate, as Melbourne’s archdiocese is finding out now.

There are more things we are attending, instead, such as football games, and more things we are doing, such as watching Netflix, going to Bali, or getting up at dawn to work out with a personal trainer to live our best possible life.

The theologians will of course state that this is a sign of a great spiritual emptiness in that we have turned away from God. It’s an assertion that ignores their role in turning so many of us away from Him.

@penbo