But when central elements of the Mass – such as the chanting of the Gospel – were overlaid with asinine journalist interviewing journalist moments, we really did have a parable of the idiocy of the postmodern media, and maybe an answer to Saint Luke’s question too. Similarly, the Mass was obliterated by ceasing the coverage at its most meaningful moment – the Eucharistic Prayer – and ironically Pope Benedict’s communion was seen only on a screen behind a babbling journalist at the MacKillop Shrine in North Sydney later on during the news.

The commentary itself – particularly from ABC Religion and Ethics Editor Scott Stephens – was sometimes worthwhile, and later on ABC1, Compass did a much better job. But most of the coverage was indicative only of the sole frames the media appeared to find handy – celebritisation and nationalist hooha. Journos didn’t appear to be able to reach for the right cliches, though most of their comment was cliched. Claims that “naturally irreverent” Australians in Saint Peter’s Square would have cheered as if they were at a sporting event had they not been cautioned otherwise are incomprehensible when one considers that most of those present were presumably Catholic and would have been well aware of the difference, and the different dispositions appropriate, between the Commonwealth Games and a solemn liturgical celebration. Yet such claims were closely articulated to the prevalent mythos that the canonisation was an event for “all Australians”.

The ceremony itself, to the degree it was visible through the coverage, resisted this theme, inscribing Mary in a communion both synchronous and diachronic in time, and universal in global space.

That nationalistic motif may be, in part, a defensive political projection, seeking to ward off claims that the state is breaching its public secularity by giving aid and comfort to the rites of a particular faith. There is some legitimate debate to be had on Julia Gillard’s perceived about face, and the degree to which legislative fiat (protecting the “brand” of “our Mary”) and the attendance of Kevin Rudd and Julie Bishop at the Vatican is warranted. But, largely, the state’s role has been one of recognition, of integrating those of Catholic faith into the national story and Australian imaginary. The flipside of this process of inscription and narrativisation is the triumphalism of some elements in the Church. Some prelates still appear to be compelled to worship the idol of political power.

However, those concerns are no doubt going to be occluded by a false debate – an encounter that never really takes place – over such sideshows as miracles. The diktats of the atheist rationalists, or rather of those who are actively and prominently anti-faith, reinscribe a narrow range of tropes little changed from Reformation polemics. Anyone who doubts that many of the ‘atheist’ talking points have a direct lineage with English Protestantism need only read the more crazed sections of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the anti-Roman bits they don’t teach these days in political theory school. If a reading list were to be compiled for the disciples of Hitchens and Dawkins, the spectral mouthpieces of Calvinist rationalism, it ought also to include John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. Perhaps then they’d realise that secularism is something quite distinct from anti-religious abuse, something which Scott Bridges observes is the stock in trade of too many alleged rationalists.

Much of this vitriol is directed, unsurprisingly, at the Catholic Church. Some of it, in the works of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, also reflects a hatred of Islam. Neither, as Jeff Sparrow wrote in his piece for Meanjin earlier this year on the “New Atheism”, is a necessary implication of a rationalist rejection of faith, but neither is really contingent either. Both anti-Catholicism and anti-Islam, in this discursive register, have their origins in a particular conjunction of English Imperialism and the construction of its knowledges and its enemies, a tradition which profoundly influenced the social dissensus between Protestant and Catholic, British and Irish, in Australian history. It’s no surprise to see it resurface at this moment, and attempts to contain and meliorate it through social re-integration – the real purpose of the political and media insistence that Mary MacKillop, or rather, Saint Mary of the Cross, is a saint, or an exemplar, for all of us.

But, to what degree is this true?

The proclamation of Saint Mary as true blue has accreted to itself a range of contemporary pre-occupations – authority in the Church, pedophile clerics, the role of women in religion and in community. All of this is potentially divisive, so there’s something of an attempt by her auto-authorised hagiographers, both Churchly and Stately, to appropriate her for something that can be represented as a common denominator of Australian “values” – so Mary started her own Education Revolution, and stood for “fairness”. No doubt, had Tony Abbott been in power, she’d have been something of a different saint.

It’s hard to be a saint without attracting hagiography.

Almost impossible, by definition.

What we don’t really have a sense of, in all the “celebration”, is the challenge Mary makes to us on two levels. First, the empty rhetoric of “fairness” dissolves next to the much more confronting notion of a radical preferential option for the poor. Secondly, the idea that one’s life must be subservient to divine will and to an overarching thirst for justice sits uneasily with the idea of her as a precursor to the palliative care our neo-liberal society deems right and just for the deserving poor. In truth, it’s in her strangeness to us in the Australia of 2010, that St Mary of the Cross speaks to us most clearly.

Incidentally, I have had the view for some time that Kristina Keneally is a thoughtful and intelligent politician, whose talents are surely wasted in the abyss of NSW state Labor politics. You have to feel some empathy for her in face of the behaviour of the latest Minister to be forced to resign, the undistinguished scion of a mediocre Labor right dynasty.

Update: Just to clarify, in response to comments, the legislation is subject to a conscience vote, which explains why Keneally has discussed the relevance of her personal religious beliefs to her legislative judgement on this bill.

NB: Please confine your comments on this thread to the issues raised by Dawkins and Hitchens’ position, and post any general comments on the issue of child abuse and the Catholic Church on tigtog’s thread.

Go read.

Elsewhere: Andrew Hamilton in Eureka Street on Tony Abbott, Jesus and the poor, and in the same publication, Vinnies’ John Falzon on the ‘New Paternalism’ and precisely why Abbott’s comments are so offensive.

A number of points need making about this trope:

(a) Abbott is, of course, not the first federal leader of the Liberal party to be a Catholic. Sectarianism was definitely a factor in the largely Protestant and bourgeois parties of the centre right in the past, and there may be residual effects within the Liberal party itself. It’s worth remembering that Malcolm Turnbull is a Catholic, and this issue (as far as I can recall) was never highlighted during his leadership.

However, Tony Abbott is the first leader to be associated with a particular style of political Catholicism – one which, some decades ago, would have been much more closely associated with the DLP (and indeed still has influence within various ALP right factions and unions). Outside the circles around Cardinal George Pell this sort of neo-grouper politics has little influence in Australian Catholicism itself. Australian Catholics are less unified politically than in the days of sharper religious and political cleavages, and while social justice Catholicism is also a living tradition, my own view is that the post Vatican II Catholic Church is much less politicised with respect to the broader community. That holds less for those who are identified with Pope Benedict’s ‘reform of the reform’, but here, there is often a significant disjunction between Papal social teaching in some areas and an ensemble of conservative social and political positions held by the Pontiff’s Antipodean warriors.

In short, the interface of religion and politics has itself been affected by a secularisation within Australian culture, which is powerfully related to a dissolution of modernist political battle lines.

(b) This fracturing of a largely unitary theological and political constellation is reflected in, and in turn, influenced by a different way of seeing the imperatives of religion for acting within culture. Guy Rundle has summed it up thus:

There are three dominant ideas of God in Christianity at the moment. Leaving aside literal protestant fundamentalists, the division between the other two runs right through the middle of the Roman Catholic church. On the one side are those who believe that God may be a real entity, but cannot be expressed in human terms?—?and consequently the idea that God might have firm views on homosexuality, condoms, evolution, traditional aboriginal culture etc is a category error. On the other is the idea that God has a more knowable form with whom a dialogue of sorts is possible?—?if not exactly a Grandpa in the Sky, God can be thought of in terms sufficiently assimilable to humanity to make the pronoun “He” a meaningful one.

The division is not around the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, but around whether the creation of a specific moral and political order is a business of humans left to do it by themselves, or one in which God’s will and law can be interpreted and acted on.

Our society and politics is overwhelmingly of the first belief. It is a widespread belief that underlies the Australian polity as a humanist one. Tony Abbott is part of the second formation, and it is perfectly legitimate to pin him to the wall on it.

Writing as a Catholic committed to a left wing politics, I would want to complicate that a little – for instance, the question of the Divine and personhood is more complex – but it’s an accurate social diagnosis. I’d also observe in passing that the more universalist perspective on the Divine is also one that Joe Hockey made his own (in a recent speech which is better thought through than most of its detractors grant). However, I’d agree with Rundle’s conclusion – and add to it the point that targeting Abbott as if he were solely representative of Catholicism or God is both wrong and politically counter-productive. It’s, in fact, the mirror image of his own self-conception.

(c) Rundle also raises the spectre of right wing ressentiment and victimology in an interesting discussion of the populist politics of the right. Again, it’s worth remembering that Tony Abbott and the conservative commentariat are not the ‘representatives’ of Catholics in the pews (or the much greater number who kneel in pews only very occasionally, if at all); and that the much taunted Liberal ‘base’ is in one sense correct in assuming the rhetorical position of victimised minority – the minority bit.

The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations.

Elsewhere: Analysis at Salon and The National Catholic Reporter (and Rich Heffern on the consonance between the document and the Green vision), full text of the encyclical here.

I might have mentioned in passing here, and I know I’ve said on Facebook, that I’ve become interested lately in exploring some themes which don’t really seem to fit into the LP space, and also in a more personal form of blogging, and indeed, a more writerly form of blogging.

One of the issues I’ve been interested in discussing is the complex intersections of the religious, the spiritual and the social. That’s in part from a place based perspective – associated in particular with the continuing life of Saint Mary’s, South Brisbane – and in part from a radical Catholic position. In the process of so doing, I’ve been addressing some themes both personal and philosophical.

I’m not entirely certain the ‘one size fits all’ blog works for this sort of discussion. I’m also not interested in getting into an argument about the existence of God, or whether all religion is evil, or Richard Dawkins, or whatnot. That sort of thing might have its place, but it’s rarely conducted with much intellectual rigour, and it simply doesn’t do anything for me.

Anyway, I write this really just to highlight some of what I’m doing for the benefit of those who enjoy my writing and appreciate my perspective. There are actually crossovers between this mode of blogging and my political and sociological interests (it would be odd if it were otherwise – given that the personal is the political, and vice versa). It does seem to me that something has been lost in the massifying of the blogosphere – much of the personal element which was once its creative wellspring. In part, I think it’s been lost because of a certain masculinism (and sometimes even an anti-feminism). That personal tone is something of value and something I’m keen to revive. I’d be delighted if any LP folk wanted to check out what I’ve been up to at Angelus Novus.

I’ll also be blogging at BrisCulture more often from now on in. Now that we’ve held our first event, we’ll be utilising the blog more for substantive discussion and – among other things detailed in this post – for fostering a critical review culture, something that is largely absent in the Brisbane mediasphere. But more of that later.

In a lot of my past writing on blogging, I’ve identified the local as the space where blogs can have most impact, and I’m now practising what I’ve preached.

The image, which I’ve used as a header at Angelus Novus, is adapted under a Creative Commons licence from a lovely photo by eob on flickr. It shows Angeline Gragasin as the Angel of History in a Chicago play staged by National Headquarters, also called Angelus Novus.

I’ve now become quite heavily and personally involved in the work of the ongoing Catholic parish of St Mary’s, and for a whole range of reasons, I’ve been reluctant to have all that much to say about the saga in a forum such as this.

However, last night’s Australian Story crystallised my extreme disillusionment with the ridiculously simplistic and utterly one-sided media coverage of the whole thing. I should note one exception – Steve Austin’s ABC radio interview with Peter Kennedy, which did draw out some aspects of Kennedy’s position further than he might have liked to have revealed, in an actually positive and ethical journalistic practice.

But, given how appallingly the whole thing has generally been reported, I do want to go on record by linking to a piece I wrote at my ‘other’ blog Angelus Novus, but perhaps more pertitently with regard to the ABC programme itself, to another discussion of the affair by Michael Carden at his Jottings blog.

Photo credit: Leonard John Matthews on Flickr reproduced under the terms of a Creative Commons Licence.

So things have reached a very bad impasse, but it’s interesting that the media has failed to report that a number of long term parishioners of St Mary’s – including some who had quite prominent roles – have ceased to attend Mass there. Peter Kennedy’s rhetoric has become ever more self-centred, and the actual option for the parish’s outreach, mission and even form of service (albeit somewhat modified) to continue in his absence is one he is closing off, despite his claims about the centrality of the community.

In my earlier post I linked to some pieces written by Michael Carden on his blog, and I’m taking this opportunity to highlight another post he’s authored displaying a similarly acute understanding of what’s really at stake, and offering some reflections on the poverty of the media courage. Reading Michael’s post, it’s obvious that the dispute is more about authority than theology, and as he comments, Peter Kennedy’s “Father knows best” attitude mirrors that of the Archbishop.

Yet, I think that a lot of the real issues have been missed. I haven’t wanted to write about St Mary’s myself for personal reasons, so I’m pleased to be able to link to a comprehensive post from my friend Michael Carden, who writes both from experience at St Mary’s over the years and a deep knowledge of liturgy. He also critiques the reporting of this furore in the media – on sound grounds, in my view. Among other crucial aspects of the stoush that have been overlooked is the role of Father Terry Fitzpatrick, a priest of the Toowoomba diocese who’s been resident at St. Mary’s since the mid 1990s. I might also point out that I feel the coverage in the media has been deficient whether it’s supportive of St Mary’s or of Archbishop Bathersby. Christopher Pearson‘s comment that the liturgy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral is “gnostic” is just bizarre, and has no resonance for me, and I’ve been going to mass there off and on since about 1990.

While there have been some other blog posts on the issue – for instance from Andrew Bartlett who admitted to a bit of puzzlement at the whole brouhaha – I’d strongly recommend reading Michael’s take if you have any interest at all in this issue.

Update: Michael has posted the second instalment of his reflections on St. Mary’s and progressive Catholicism.

Update: As well as being furthered by another post from Michael, the St Mary’s discussion continues via the forum at Catholica.