Australian Catholic University ‘committed to Catholic identity, but challenged by it’, says priest

An new advisor of Catholic Identity and Mission at the university disagreed that the university was ‘ambivalent about its Catholic identity’ following a series of public controversies.

Gerald Gleeson has been appointed as ACU's Senior Advisor of Catholic Identity and Mission. Picture: ACU

The priest tasked with preserving Australian Catholic University’s religious “identity and mission” says he would have advised the university to help “rebalance” a unionist’s controversial speech on abortion to make it “more invitational” to young people.

Reverend Gerry Gleeson accepted ACU could have “better handled” the fallout from former union leader Joe de Bruyn graduation speech. Yet, he disagreed that the university was “ambivalent about its Catholic identity”, a community sentiment raised in a letter by the Sydney Archbishop to university leadership.

The newly announced Senior Advisor of Catholic Identity and Mission also said there was often ‘little empathy’ for the “difficulty of the challenge” faced by Catholic universities worldwide in 2024 in “ensuring that their mostly non-Catholic staff and students have the opportunity to experience the riches of the Church’s tradition”.

Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher. Picture: Nikki Short

His appointment comes after students and staff staged a mass walkout of a speech given by Dr de Bruyn on October 21, where he said abortion was a “tragedy that must be ended”. The university subsequently expressed regret for any offence caused.

It also prompted a letter by Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher – who nominated Dr de Bruyn for his honorary doctorate – to university leadership, urging some “serious soul-searching within the university about its identity and mission”, and expressing concerns from others that ACU had become “ambivalent about its Catholic identity”.

Vicar General in Sydney Catholic Archdiocese Fr Gleeson, who joins the university part-time from mid-January for the role, said while there were “important messages in Dr de Bruyn’s speech … it would have been good if he and the university had worked together to restructure his speech”. It could have focused on themes of “standing up for your own principles in life”, while using same sex marriage and abortion as personal examples.

“With some changes of tone and approach, his address would have been more invitational to young people on their graduation day” as a result, he said, adding it could have been “rebalanced” to make it “a bit less provocative”.

In response, Dr de Bruyn told The Australian this was “absurd” and he could not see “how a Catholic priest can say to a Catholic layman that you should not give witness to your Catholic faith in your professional life”.

He continued: “That is what I tried to do in those three historical examples, and that is what I was describing to the students in what I have faced, and they can draw their own conclusions from them.”

ACU vice-chancellor Professor Zlatko Skrbis and Archbishop Christopher Prowse in 2021.

Fr Gleeson, whose father was one of the founders of ACU, said during the recent controversies, the university had “mostly chosen not to defend itself to avoid inflaming the situation” and that Archbishop Fisher, in his letter, was simply “asking a whole lot of questions” in the absence of “more detailed communication”.

“In hindsight, I think some robust and accurate communication at times might have cleared the air, and defused some unwarranted criticism,” he said.

He added, however, that “the university is committed to its (Catholic identity and mission).”

“But (the university is) challenged about how you do that,” he said.

“Most of the students are not Catholic. What do we do for them? How do we give them an experience of university life that we would think of as an opportunity to explore questions they wouldn’t think about otherwise … That’s the challenge, that’s what this role is about.”

“And that’s a challenge for every Catholic university in the world. It’s not unique to us.”

He said while some small Christian colleges in the US were able to live a “very intense religious life” because of the size of the country, “we don’t have that luxury”.

“We have a public university, like any university, with tens of thousands of students, in a culture where more people aren’t Catholic or Christian, than are. It’s impossible to run that kind of small, intense religious university,” he said.

Fr Gleeson called a letter written by nine members of the Catholic lawyers’ group, the St Thomas More Society, including former state Coalition finance minister Damien Tudehope, in the aftermath of the de Bruyn speech, “a bit of a stunt”.

The group wrote to the ACU Senate to make recommendations based on their review of canon law, which included an independent investigation into university leadership, and the possibility of stripping the university’s religious designation.

“That was a very partisan letter. I don’t think an inquiry is going to achieve anything. I don’t think there’s anything to inquire into. What’s happened has not happened in secret, the university wants to go forward, and make sure we do things in the future as well as we can, and do what we can to keep enhancing the Catholic mission.”