Attack on Christianity will undermine society

THE forthcoming canonisation of Mary MacKillop, who will become Australia's first saint, has been embraced in Australian popular culture.

As we do with all our heroes, we have made her something of a sporting legend. She is our first spiritual gold medallist. She ranks with Don Bradman.

There's nothing wrong with that. We treat our military heroes that way as well. It's the Australian idiom: our way of popularising people who are important to us.

Cardinal George Pell was right to describe Mary as a recognisably Australian saint. She was, after all, born in Melbourne but died in Sydney.

In case you've somehow missed it, Mary founded the religious order of Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart. She ministered mainly to the poor, she bonded with indigenous people and she was for a time excommunicated by a cantankerous bishop for insubordination.

Those who think the Catholic Church is over-centralised might reflect that while she was excommunicated by a South Australian bishop, the rule for her religious order was approved by the pope in Rome.

Like World Youth Day, the canonisation of Mary is one of those fairly rare occasions when popular Catholicism breaks through the gatekeepers of official culture in Australia and commands some mainstream attention.

Christianity generally is massively under-regarded in Australia. More people go to church every Sunday than go to football, but the media coverage is hardly commensurate.

I cannot recall seeing Pell on ABC1's Q&A, yet there is a Muslim representative on about every fourth episode of that show. There's certainly nothing wrong with having Muslims on the show, but it's almost as if there is a policy that any mainstream Catholic Church leader is ipso facto boring, not to be listened to or simply not a suitable person to participate in the mainstream media.

This is a sign both of a kind of immature provincialism in our culture and a serious ongoing prejudice against orthodox Christianity of any kind.

There is, of course, specific anti-Catholic prejudice, of the kind seen in the ridiculous treatment of Tony Abbott on ABC1's Four Corners when he became leader of the Liberal Party.

This kind of prejudice used to be called the anti-Semitism of the intellectual and its tired persistence in Australian culture is sad, not only because of the unfairness of the prejudice but because of the consequence it has of the media missing so big a part of modern life.

It is very good that our Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has gone to Rome to attend the canonisation of Mary.

The Catholic Church, with more than a billion adherents, remains the most powerful Christian institution in the world.

It was one of Rudd's best decisions as prime minister to appoint an ambassador to the Holy See. The Vatican remains one of the world's greatest intelligence agencies, with personnel and insights in societies all across the world, far different from, and in many cases far beyond, the powers of any state agency.

The church is a continuing if sometimes elusive force in global politics. When Rudd as prime minister met Pope Benedict XVI, he committed to helping the pontiff in the agonising process of trying to gain greater religious freedom in China.

Beijing certainly takes Rome seriously, whatever the views of professional church denouncers Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and their countless Australian imitators.

Of course, all the great secular dictators have taken the church seriously and understood it is one of their most formidable opponents. This is partly because the universality of the Catholic Church transcends all national borders.

Adolf Hitler planned to abolish the papacy and set up a separate pope in every country he ruled. Joseph Stalin, the leader of the most consistently murderous atheist ideology of the 20th century, scoffed that the pope commanded no battalions. But it was the Polish pope, John Paul II, who was pivotal in the downfall of communism in Europe.

Benedict, though plainly a good man, is not as charismatic or as effective as John Paul was.

The church could certainly do with all the self-confidence it can get. Two things have harmed it greatly in the past half century. One is the drowsy liberalism it half embraced in a mistaken reaction to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. This has been pretty much washed out out of the official church now.

A liberalism that softens all differences, that abolishes almost all rules, that says one thing is as good as another, may be exhilarating at first in the sense of licence it brings, but ultimately it is enervating. After all, Jesus Christ might have been just a man, in which case Dawkins, Hitchens et al are right. He might be just a prophet leading up to Mohammed, the last prophet, in which case Islam is right. Or he might be the son of God made man to redeem humanity's sins, in which case the Catholic Church is right.

One thing is certain: he couldn't be all three, and in the end you must make a choice. A religious liberalism that tries to avoid these choices leads nowhere.

The other factor that has hurt the church has been the sexual abuse scandals. It may be that these were not more widespread in church institutions than in secular institutions but, whichever way you look at it, until recently they were badly handled.

In Western societies such as Australia, it seems the Catholic Church is shrinking, though it is refreshed by new immigrants, is amazingly resilient and still commands the support to some degree of millions of Australians.

In many parts of the world, the church is growing strongly. Religion generally is a growing force almost everywhere except western Europe and Australia.

We are the outliers in global trends here.

On the other hand it is also true that in the most religious of Western societies, the US, it is not Catholicism but evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism that are showing most vigour.

But the church is a central component of Western civilisation. All of the good things in our civilisation, from its greatest institutions to the unconscious grammar of its ethics, flow ultimately from the Judeo-Christian inheritance on which it is based, and which is welcome to and enriched by the inflow of people from sympathetic religious traditions.

The professional denouncers of Christian orthodoxy are trying a new experiment in their desperate search for a universal secularism, to create a society that lives permanently off the moral capital of its founding institutions, which it hopes finally to destroy. I'm not sure it can be done.