When Faith Comes a la Mode

I suppose you’ll think I’m blowing my own trumpet, but I once won a debate on air with the formidable and rather scary radio talk-show host and ex-senator Derryn Hinch. But the fact is that I was just very lucky.

It was 20 years ago and I was then rector of St John’s College in the University of Sydney. The University administration wanted to buy a few acres of our property, land that lay between our college and their own territory, to build a new medical centre. We were willing, even keen to sell, but felt bound to stipulate that we would only do so if the building were not used to terminate or experiment with human lives.

Amazingly the University senate agreed. But you can imagine that we became the focus of a howling storm of protest from many left-leaning staff and students, and of course the good old media. You can always rely on the media — they’re always there when you don’t need them, aren’t they? Christians are always the same, they said, interfering in matters that didn’t concern us. We’re meant to keep out of politics.

So I had a call from a radio station in Melbourne asking if I’d take an interview. I agreed. While I was holding the line I was luckily able to hear the preceding minutes of the broadcast and, to my horror, realised I was going to be up against Hinch himself, the manslayer. I listened to him saying to his audience something to the effect that ‘the idiot coming on next is one of those religious nuts who want to impose their bigoted opinions on ordinary decent people’.

So that was a real blessing: I was given a couple of minutes to get ready not just to defend ourselves but to go on the offensive. It was easy to do, because anyone — all of you who read this — if given just a moment to think, can recall names like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Janani Lumum (Archbishop of Uganda. murdered by Idi Amin), Oscar Romero (Archbishop of San Salvador, murdered by a military junta). All were martyrs who ‘interfered’ by trying to impose their bigoted views on ordinary decent people. So I asked Mr Hinch if he thought they should have shut up.

I’m pleased and not a little chuffed to report that Hinch rather handsomely conceded defeat. If I had had more time I could have added many more names, as all of you could too: both Peter and Paul, for a start, then martyrs such as St Laurence, who told his persecutors under torture that the real treasure of his Church was the poor.

Not all of those who stood up for matters of conscience became martyrs: a few actually got away with it, like St Ambrose of Milan, who excommunicated his emperor for permitting a massacre of civilians. Now there were no Occupational Health and Safety laws in those days, but if there had been, accusing your emperor of murder would have been on top of the list of unsafe work practices. Surprisingly in Ambrose’s case the emperor folded — and did penance. Bishop von Galen (the ‘Lion of Münster’) preached against Nazism throughout the war; they often considered killing him, but his popularity set the price too high.

Thomas a Becket wasn’t so lucky, nor were many of the protestant reformers, such as Cranmer, Lattimer and Ridley; nor (I’m bound to say) many of the counter reformers, people like Edmund Campion and John Fisher who stood up for the ‘old religion’.

Even among Christians – within the very household of Faith – there have always been ‘decent, ordinary people’ (as Derryn and others would say) who don’t like religious fanatics meddling with their comfortable values: remember the cry against Tony Abbott, often from fellow Catholics: ‘Keep your rosaries off our ovaries’? The sad thing is that many Christians, in every age, have themselves been nominal believers, Laodiceans, today’s ‘cafeteria Christians’, who pick and choose what they’re comfortable with, don’t like upsetting people, and (this is the worst bit) would sooner leave fellow Christians to the wolves than be embarrassed by them. Cardinal Pell learned that the hard way.

Somebody observed that the chief of the cardinal virtues in the modern Church is no longer charity, not even faith and hope, but prudence.