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.

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.