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	A Church Collapsing without Foundations The Australian February 28, 2009 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25115856-7583,00.html TOWARDS the end of pope John Paul II's long reign, the term "cafeteria Catholic" was coined. It was a critical response to the free-ranging way middle-aged people in the First World had taken to picking those parts of the church's teaching and distinctive culture that they found congenial and unapologetically ignoring the rest, much as you might approach a smorgasbord. One extreme of the tendency was to focus on all the traditional aspects of church life except caring for the poor. Its polar opposite was to concentrate on social work initiatives and forget about the theological principles and habits of piety that used to underpin them. In Australia, Catholicism long ago entered an unholy, tribal alliance with the ALP. Much of the national church has been captured by the clerical Left for upwards of 50 years and in the process come to trivialise what had always previously been regarded as non-negotiable elements of the faith. By some, for example, the sins of the flesh have been relativised away as anachronistic preoccupations, barely worth the bother of confessing by comparison with offences against the ideal of social justice. Universal salvation is pretty much expected and can best be ensured by good works. Insofar as it still registers, acknowledgement of the fatherhood of God generally plays second fiddle to an agenda based on the brotherhood of man. Benedict XVI addressed the problem in a speech on the state of the church in Aosta in July 2005. He spoke of the West as "a world weary of its own culture. It is a world that has reached the time when there is no longer any evidence of the need for God, let alone Christ, and when it seems that humans could build themselves on their own ... We see that the so-called 'great' churches seem to be dying. This is particularly true in Australia." He might have added that the most precipitous collapses in Sunday mass attendance and priestly vocations have been in Queensland. The controversial parish of StMary's, South Brisbane, and its turbulent priest, Peter Kennedy, are interesting because they epitomise an extreme version of the cafeteria approach still often encountered north of the Tweed. The well-heeled congregation at St Mary's — many of whom are from the upper echelons of the church's lay bureaucracy — have been dispensed by their pastors from the need to subscribe to the particulars of any credal statements or articles of faith that might prove problematic. The trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ and his bodily resurrection, not to mention their own; in short, all the perennial stumbling blocks to faith have been in effect discarded. All that remains is a commitment to social justice, feminism and deep green ideology. No wonder the Raelian movement, a UFO cult with a similar radical Left agenda, and the Socialist Alliance should have sent members to demonstrate their support for St Mary's. Beyond the refinements of theological argument, it's important to understand what's going on here from a sociological point of view. This is a version of the church refashioned ad lib in the likeness of its members. They are being taught to think of themselves as Catholics in good standing, in fact more virtuous than most because of their courageous openness to new ways of thinking. Sexual morality is seen as a matter for individuals to decide and unauthorised blessing ceremonies are available for gay and transgender couples. Kennedy insists on using baptismal formulas that the Vatican has officially rejected as invalid. He also relies on dubious consecrational forms, together with lay eucharistic celebrants, both of which are radically inconsistent with a Catholic understanding of the priest's function in the mass. Justifying his disregard of any attempts to bring practices at St Mary's into conformity with liturgical norms, Kennedy said: "Jesus broke a lot of rules for the people. If Jesus came back today, there's no way he would be a Catholic. He never was a Catholic. He didn't start it." This is to ignore Christ's messianic claims about replacing the Old Testament's covenant with the Chosen People with a new and everlasting covenant extending to all the Gentiles and sealed in his own blood. In particular it disregards Catholicism's consistent teaching about the foundation of the church and the institution of the Last Supper from the earliest times. Stranger still, when asked if he and Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby were talking to the same deity, Kennedy said: "No, not at all. In fact I wouldn't talk to God, really." It is easy enough to make Kennedy sound like an oddball. However, I find it hard not to feel some sympathy with him because it's clear he's only been saying out loud and a bit more insistently what a number of his brother clergy also think. His sense of injustice is understandable because he's held and taught his unorthodox views and made a habit of designing homemade liturgies without censure for most of the 28 years he's been at StMary's. Some dissident observers in Queensland go so far as to say that the South Brisbane parish and Brisbane's cathedral are both run on Gnostic principles, covertly at odds with official church teaching, the only difference being that the cathedral version is more discreet and up-market. To see why St Mary's represents a pervasive threat to the survival of Australian Catholicism, it's necessary to say something about the sacramental system. The sacraments are rites that relate to different stages in people's lives, held to confer particular graces through the mediation of the church, and believed to have cumulative effect. If someone's baptism is deemed invalid it is a grave matter, foundational rather than a mere technicality, and has to be rectified by going through the rite a second time. This is because baptism is axiomatically "the gateway to the other sacraments" and no subsequent sacrament — such as confirmation, marriage or ordination — can be validly conferred on the unbaptised. Until recently all the mainstream churches took a very conservative attitude towards their formulas for administering the sacraments. Safety lay in strictly following Christ's example in the New Testament as interpreted by apostolic custom. To authorise anything else was held to be ultra vires, simply beyond the scope of their authority. What's more, in the universal church it is a given that the laity are entitled to certainty about the validity of the sacraments offered them. A decade's worth of controversy over invalid baptisms at St Mary's is profoundly subversive and leaves uncertainty or worse over hundreds of subsequent church marriages. To anyone with a delicate conscience, or on the other hand anyone who may be looking for convenient grounds for an annulment, uncertainty over baptismal efficacy is a big deal. We may never understand quite why Kennedy was so insistent on using defective baptismal formulas, except that he couldn't bring himself to invoke the patriarchal trinity. Instead he preferred the creator, sustainer and liberator, much as ecclesiastical feminists such as the mother goddess, Christa and Sophia. A more important question is why Bathersby did not intervene decisively when the issue first surfaced about 10 years ago. It's hard to see his failure to do so as anything other than scandalously remiss. Correcting such abuses has always been understood as one of a bishop's primary responsibilities. In the end, as Bathersby confided to Radio National's Religion Report last year, it was no less than three powerful congregations in Rome that told him to act. The curial offices in charge of worship, the clergy and bishops have finally forced his hand. They are unlikely to settle for the kind of procedural delay or protracted stalemate Kennedy is aiming for. Rather, the signal they want to send Australian Catholics is that the cafeteria is finally closed.
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