Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP once told The Catholic Weekly he might have “run away in terror” as a young Dominican friar at the thought of stepping into his current role.
But a decade on from his installation as Archbishop of Sydney he says the church’s people and the grace of God has made them great years.
They also included the hardest challenge of his life, a brush with death from Guillain-Barre syndrome at Christmas 2015. At first completely paralysed, he was in hospital for five months and took a year to recover.
The ordeal changed much of his outlook on life and regard for people who live with disability.
The community he serves is also different in many ways to when he was welcomed as archbishop on 12 November 2014, taking the episcopal motto “Speaking the truth with love” (Ephesians 4:15).
At 64, he’s looking forward to the next decade for the church in Sydney, buoyed by its success in securing the next International Eucharistic Congress and the growth in evangelisation, parish renewal and vocations.
The archbishop spoke to the paper about his hopes for the church’s future, what it can offer in a world of change, and what he does on a day off.
In your first archbishop’s homily you quoted Humbert of Romans: “I would rather you were dead than a bishop… Why ruin your reputation and that of the order by letting yourself be taken away from poverty and preaching?”
Do you ever feel your role has pulled you away from poverty and preaching?
There’s no doubt that I’ve had to express those things differently to when I was a religious.
I’ve been given new opportunities to preach, a new pulpit, literally, to do it from, and a new voice into the culture and the Catholic community which I didn’t have as an ordinary friar.
I am also called to do a lot of other things, but I probably give the preparation and the construction of my homilies and the giving of them more attention than the ordinary bishop would, because it’s still my passion. Possibly that’s true of writing as well, which is another way of preaching and teaching.
On the poverty side there’s no doubt it’s a big difference, living in an archbishop’s house beside a beautiful cathedral, visiting the Vatican and all the other things that come with my life.
I try as best I can not to become too attached to those things, to live simply to the extent I can. That is harder than it was in a religious order where everybody was engaged in trying to live poverty.
Could you point to a couple of highlights of your decade of ministry?
The recent announcement that Sydney would host the International Eucharistic Congress was very exciting and I think in all sorts of ways that’s going to shape the next decade of my episcopacy. It gives us some new things to focus on, new ways of evangelising and promoting the devotion and worship of the people of God.
Another big thing would be the establishment of the Sydney Centre for Evangelisation in 2020, and through it, sponsoring all sorts of activities by way of evangelisation, parish renewal, discernment of charisms and so on.
I think many people would say Sydney has become a centre for that for the whole country. Many different people have contributed but it certainly was a passion of mine and I was very happy to sponsor and promote it.
What has impressed you about the SCE’s work?
When I go to the conferences for parish renewal, the Purpose conference for young adults, or other things they run, I see usually hundreds of people, young Catholic adults and older ones, often from all around the country and elsewhere, coming to celebrate and to learn with us, and then going back home to do great things.
That’s very exciting for me. I have great confidence that when they go back to their parishes and their parts of the country, that they’re having a great effect on others. They’re transmitting the faith and serving the Catholic community in various ways.
What would you consider the most challenging time?
It was when, a year after I was made archbishop, I nearly died.
That’s probably affected me in all sorts of ways, some of which others might judge better than me, but certainly the way I think and feel about many things.
I was young by archbishop standards and very healthy, and suddenly to be completely crippled by the Guilliane-Barre was shocking, but it made me appreciate health and physical life so much more.
Knowing thousands of people were praying for me and expressing their care for me in different ways was hugely encouraging and I think it’s a big part of why I recovered completely.
And there’s a strange hand of God in it. I remember a discussion with my mother about getting my portrait done for the room of the archbishops’ portraits at Cathedral House. I told her, ‘Oh Mum, I’ve got more than 20 years as archbishop, there’s no hurry for that.’
And she said, ‘You never know.’
In 2014 you pledged to work with all for the good of our community. Given the divisions in society over faith, gender, and the beginning and end of human life as well as differences within the church itself, has working with “all” been more challenging than expected?
We are in a more polarised world and that has infected the church as well as every other part of the culture. Just look at the recent elections in America, or what’s happening in many parts of the world.
When there are major disagreements and culture wars, or some issues more personal to people that they feel very strongly about, you can still listen to each other and learn from each other. You don’t have to be enemies or treat the other person as mad or bad.
I think that it’s a very important thing for the church to teach our culture, or rather to teach it again, because it used to know about this but seems to have forgotten that you can disagree, debate and engage in a great dialectic of ideas.
While it is the case that leading for all is more difficult in circumstances where people are polarised, it just puts an extra responsibility on you to make sure you are listening to people different to those in your own bubble who are comfortable for you to hear.
Whether at the recent Synod at the Vatican or the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference where I’ve just been this past week, or wherever I am, I hope I’m listening and engaging with people of very different views, not just my own.
In 10 years, we’ve seen the legalisation of same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion up until birth, the rise of extreme transgender activism and pressure on the church’s role in education and healthcare. Are you ever discouraged that the church’s voice is diminishing in influence in the public square?
The amount of influence the church has is not the big concern for me, so much as that when the culture loses its way on moral matters, that usually means mess and hurt in people’s lives.
But it’s true that if the church has less of a voice into the culture, or it struggles to get a hearing, then the ways it could help people to find a happier and more purposeful life, to give them a moral compass and some ideals, gets harder.
That said, we still have tremendous opportunities. We’ve got an enormous school system, an enormous parish system and we still have a certain amount of attention from the media and from other places. We still have many opportunities to get the Gospel out there.
Other signs of hope in the church?
Yes, one is the continuous flow of young people coming into the seminary in Sydney and becoming priests. At the end it is quality that matters in vocations, not the quantity, but God in his goodness providing for the church in this way, and the generosity of the young people themselves in putting themselves forward for this kind of service is something that makes me very proud and very encouraged.
It means there will be generations after me to engage in the same great works of evangelisation and service.
I also look at the young Sydney women joining the Nashville Dominicans and other forms of religious consecrated life or ecclesial movements, and young families proudly serving their children and their spouses in a world that doesn’t value that work in the way it should.
It’s all very encouraging and can’t be taken for granted but many parts of the world don’t have those signs of hope that we have here in Sydney.
As a young auxiliary bishop of Sydney, you were responsible for World Youth Day 2008 and were the bishops’ delegate for youth for many years. What do you enjoy about working with young people?
When I was a seminarian and then a deacon, I was given the task of setting up a youth group in Wahroonga where I was based at the time, and I found it really hard.
I had no idea what to do and I just thought, ‘Youth group, that means pizza.’ It was a long time ago but shows you the Divine Sense of humour—God was going to make working with youth a big part of my life.
I’ve loved it, I was blessed to live in the time of Pope John Paul II, who was also a great enthusiast for working with young people and exciting them about the faith, teaching them more and giving them the confidence to go out and express it in the world.
I learned that it’s not hard. A lot of young people are just looking for something courageous to do, or for something that will give them some purpose and excitement and more than they’re getting from social media or other parts of the culture.
In that first homily as archbishop, you apologised to the survivors of abuse within church institutions. You said the church can do better and committed to giving a lead in that area. Do you feel you achieved what you set out to do? Do you think the church has become, as you hoped, humbler, more compassionate and spiritually regenerated?
I think we have come a long way in that area, certainly in Sydney with the establishment of our safeguarding office we’ve got some really good people working on this and done a lot of training of our clergy and our staff.
We passed our recent audit, but I don’t want to be complacent about it. I think this is a perennial human problem and the church is not immune. We could always learn more to do better in this area but we’re certainly well ahead of where we were 10 or 20 years ago.
We’ve all been on a steep learning curve about abuse and about how it can be prevented and how people can be healed or helped when it happens. The focus has been on children first, and that’s understandable and as it should be, but there’s still a lot of thinking to go on and new work to be done in the area of vulnerable adults too.
Is the church humbler? In a way, that’s for others to judge, rather than somebody at the heart of it. But I would say that we have been humiliated by all the revelations and by the reality of our failures, and humiliation can be a path to greater humility.
We have certainly had a getting of wisdom about these things which a lot of us were very naive about 20 or 30 years ago, and so I do think that we’re responding better, and that includes with more humility and more compassion.
And I hope that is true in other parts of the church’s life as well.
Do you think the church is gaining the credibility it lost over the abuse crisis?
Yes, I think it is and there are lots of signs of that, for instance, there was a period where we took a real dip in our Catholic school enrolments right across the country. They had been going up year after year for decades, declined for a time, and now they’re going up again.
I think that’s an example of a regaining of people’s trust. Not just Catholic families either, but other families think they can trust us to love their young people and give them a good education and a good start in life.
I think there are other signs too of regaining some credibility, but that said, we may not be for a time at least as prominent as we were when people, including our own people, perhaps too blindly trusted the church.
Recently you were in Quito, Sydney and Rome in the space of a week. What’s your favourite place in the world to visit?
Back home in Sydney is my favourite place. But I very much enjoy Tuscany and different parts of Italy. There is so much in Italy you could go every year, and you’d still hardly scratch the surface of things to discover there.
It’s no secret that you are a wonderful cook. What might dinner party guests at Cathedral House expect to find on the menu?
Most weeks I have a day off and I usually play tennis in the morning and then I’ll go shopping and cook for some friends in the evening.
Ever since COVID, when we couldn’t travel anymore, I started the practice of inviting the guests to pick what country I would cook from, to kind of travel in culinary terms, and so I’ve learned to cook the food of every place on Earth, basically.
They’re not all equally successful meals but I think I’ve learned a lot.
What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever eaten?
I was in Ecuador recently for the International Eucharistic Congress, and the national food of Ecuador, and also Peru, is the guinea pig. And I tried it, for probably the only time in my life.
That was interesting. I don’t think I’ll end up cooking it.
Any other reflections?
Just a sense of gratitude to God and the people who have made these last 10 years happen in the way they have. It’s been a great 10 years; lots has been achieved and I’ve had so many great collaborators.
People say to me, ‘Oh, it’s a huge job being Archbishop of Sydney.’ And that’s true. It is. But I’ve got so many good people around me, teams of them doing great things for the church and for building up God’s kingdom.
