Church Parade

The Pope left Sydney a few days ago, and I sit here still astonished by the extraordinary nature of his visit. I hadn’t much considered it beforehand, beyond perhaps the trivial thought: “What a nuisance for Sydney—another total traffic disruption like John Howard’s APEC conference last year”. But it proved to be nothing of the sort. Beyond all the canonical carry-on and the liturgical showbiz, beyond the amazing size and good behaviour of the crowds, I sensed something more than just another successful Catholic coup de théâtre. The event had changed something, confirmed something. But what? I’m still trying to work it out.

I grew up in a lower-middle-class Protestant family in suburban Melbourne. My mother, very early in the 1920s, gave her parents a slight shock by marrying a lapsed Catholic, but we all used to trot off happily to the Methodist church about half a dozen times a year. My father died when I was thirteen, and never told me the story of his apostasy. But from odd remarks overheard when I should not have been listening, I gathered that he had years ago knocked his parish priest unconscious on the vestry floor. I recall him only as a man of infinite good nature, but he was tall and strong, a league footballer, and I daresay well able to handle the average parish priest.

It is true that two maiden aunts—my mother’s sisters—could wax alarmingly anti-papist as they recounted the hard life of my great-grandfather. He was a Methodist country clergyman at Bungaree, near Ballarat, in potato-growing country; it was said that he could sock a very solid sermon indeed against “idolaters”—get it? As he drove around his parish with horse and buggy, a bunch of Irish youths would sometimes leap from cover by the roadside, grab the bridle and unharness the horse; a smart slap on the rump would send it cantering straight home, leaving Great-grandpa stranded with his buggy. Yet there were Catholics among the circle of close friends with whom my aunts played cards and tennis.

In my home, in the 1920s and 1930s, there was no sense of anti-Catholic bigotry, though Melbourne’s famous and fiery Archbishop Mannix was personally unpopular. (My father would occasionally drop wicked little asides, such as calling our toilet seat “Archbishop Mannix’s photo-frame”.) I suppose a natural tendency towards ecumenism was encouraged further by my attending an Anglican boys’ school of a rather humble sort, the fees of which were paid by a generous scholarship awarded by the Presbyterian Church.

Nevertheless, there was a slight “apartness”—more social than doctrinal—between “our sort” and the RCs. The “no meat on Fridays rule” could be a constraint, and before a visit to any Catholic household Mum would warn me not to gawp “rudely” at crucifixes or holy pictures. I think this minor unease was very common indeed among Australians of the time.

Then, at sixteen, I went to work in the Victorian Public Service, and saw ugly sectarianism in action, as the Catholics and Masons slogged it out quite viciously for appointments and promotions.

Late in 1941 I turned eighteen, joined the army, and went into training camp under canvas at Maribyrnong. On Sunday mornings, C of Es and OPDs (“Other Protestant Denominations”) were, at separate times, marched onto the camp parade ground, where a padre of appropriate persuasion would conduct Church Parade. The RCs, on the other hand, packed into the back of an army three-ton truck and were driven to Mass at stately St Monica’s church in Essendon.

A tent-mate, Sapper F——, suggested that I accompany him with the Catholics. “It’s a bit of fun. You get out of camp for a breath of fresh air. And with a name like Ryan, who’s going to spot a ring-in?”

I objected that, not knowing the ritual, I would make a fool of myself by liturgical blunder. “Nothing to it, pal. Just watch me. I’ll give you the drum.” And, after a tense start, I was soon kneeling and crossing myself with all the panache of one to Rome born.

I remarked to Sapper F—— that the driver did not accompany us into church, but remained seated in his truck cabin. “Oh—he’s a Jew. But he comes in handy for this caper; can keep his mouth shut, too.” Then we all crammed back into the three-tonner for return to camp, but by a significantly different route: within a very short while, our Jewish driver who could keep his mouth shut had, with a discreet toot, pulled up outside the tall back gates of the Rising Sun Hotel. The gates opened mysteriously, and as quickly closed behind us.

“All right, you blokes,” said the amiable sergeant in command of the Church Party, “you all know the rules. Two beers each—no more. Anyone who plays up will find himself demoted to C of E next Sunday.” I noted that our driver enjoyed his two beers as much as the most devout Christian present.

So this was how the Catholic Church gained recruits to the faith! But not in my case.

A couple of years active war service persuaded me that although the ultimate mysteries of first causes and of final things would remain beyond my understanding in this world, I would respect any man’s sincere religious belief, so long as he would indulge me in my doubt. The many passing years since then have convinced me that, irrespective of the “truth” of the Christian revelation, Christianity is still the most wholesome doctrine of ethical regulation the world has so far evolved: to abandon or to weaken the basic Judeo-Christian basis of our polity would be a long step towards madness and the dark.

Well, back to the Pope.

The success of his visit as a spectacle should not have surprised me, for no impresario has ever exceeded the talents of Rome. The Melbourne of my youth had been a showcase of the Catholic “demo” meant to exert political pressure. In wartime 1917, when the authorities forbade Mannix to appear at the Melbourne Exhibition Building, the entrepreneur John Wren obliged him with the loan of his privately owned Richmond Racecourse, where a crowd of 100,000 attended.

For the St Patrick’s Day procession of 1920, Wren organised a squad of fourteen First World War Victoria Cross winners, each mounted on a pure white charger. At the Eucharistic Congress of 1934, 80,000 received Benediction, and half a million turned out to watch.

Every St Patrick’s Day tens of thousands of serious marchers, from school children to octogenarians, would process up Bourke Street, aimed pointedly at Parliament House, on the steps of which their archbishop sat in his limousine awaiting their fervent salutes. Hunger for state aid for Catholic schools was an important part of the background.

For me, all the “vibes” of Sydney’s recent World Youth Day rang from a wholly different set of strings. From the first day, one saw that Benedict’s face bore none of those hard lines of prelatical worldliness which crease the countenances of so many cardinals. It seemed to me to be a noble and a friendly face, a signature over the whole week’s proceedings.

The papal deportment was exactly right—dignity with warmth and sincerity. I noticed especially that whenever he blessed a baby, he was blessing a baby—not ogling for a prime-ministerial-style photo-op.

I heard a few sneers about the rich liturgical apparatus and the gorgeous vestments. Come off it! Do they seriously expect the Pope to say Mass in a business suit?

To me, the good behaviour and the glow of the huge crowds of young people surpassed both praise and wonder. Of all skin colours and from almost every country in the world, they proved by their presence the truth of a universal humanity that transcends the poisons of politics and racism.

For Australia, I believe the visit began a shift in the political ground, a movement small but seismic: George Pell and Tony Abbott (just to take two examples) will less be seen as sectarian extremists—a sinister and reactionary ecclesiastic and a “mad monk”. They will increasingly be taken for granted as Australian public men who just happen to be sincere Catholic believers.

But what would I know about such matters? My contact with the church lacks all solemnity of bread and wine. The most I can claim is a few illicit Sunday beers with Catholic soldiers on Sunday church parades. True, it was the sort of contact which St Francis Xavier keenly enjoyed, but even that was now sixty-six years ago.