I was chatting to a friend the other day who said that in the future, the church in Australia will have moved beyond labels and concepts like “left” and “right.” Most Catholics who remain in the church will be pro-life, and they will also naturally have a desire to help the poor.
I think this is already happening. Those old silos of “pro-life versus social justice,” conservatism versus liberalism, are breaking down. The Catholics in Australia survey of 2022 found some interesting things about the voting patterns of Catholics that also hints at this.
Catholics in Australia used to be a reliable ALP voting bloc. But now, only the older Catholics—the Boomers—still vote for the ALP in large numbers. ALP-voting Catholics in this study were also much less likely to be regular Mass-goers.
Younger, Mass-going Catholics were more likely to vote for the Coalition, or for populist parties.
This can lead to pearl-clutching among the Catholic chattering classes. They assume that only rubes and rednecks would vote this way. That’s where they’re wrong. And it also helps to explain why these young Australian Catholics are voting differently from their elders.
No one is going to vote for a political party whose supporters talk down to them and tell them they’re stupid for thinking the way they do. They’re going to vote for political parties and candidates who they believe speak for them, understand them, and share their concerns.
There’s still a Catholic working class in Australia, but we might not recognise them easily. Many of them are migrants in poorly paid jobs such as cleaning and aged care assistance.
Many live on the outskirts of our cities and work more than one job to make ends meet. They are scraping every cent together to send their kids to the best school they can find. They’re usually renting—and right now, it’s a landlord’s market. They live from pay packet to pay packet, or from cash job to cash job.
Most of these people fall into the remit of ethnic chaplaincies, so that they can have Mass and the sacraments in a language they understand.
But there are also working class Australian-born Catholics scattered around our parishes. Think about the Catholics who are enrolled at TAFE or doing apprenticeships. Most people don’t, which is why you might struggle to find a chaplain on a TAFE campus.
Anecdotally, apprentices and TAFE students—who earn as they learn—don’t always fit comfortably into our current Catholic youth ministries. Are these ministries too focused on middle-class private school and university students? Who are we excluding?
I have another friend who’s about the same age as me but is the mother of a large family. She describes her family background as “the respectable poor,” and her husband’s family as “dysfunctional/disreputable poor.”
She’s struggled to feel welcome in her parish, but she’s met some other people who have the same problem. They’re mostly men whom she describes as divorced, alone, recovering alcoholics, and an ex-Freemason. They’re drawn, like she is, to parishes where the priest is willing to speak frankly to his people and says Mass with real focus and devotion.
Do we welcome people into our parish who don’t have squeaky clean middle-class backgrounds? Do we only want “nice” people?
I am always tickled to read—usually from nice middle-class Catholics—that the church in Australia needs to seek out the marginalised. I am willing to bet you that the marginalised are already right under your noses in your parish. But you may not have ever noticed them, or spoken to them, or learned anything about them.
At every parish where I’ve gone to Mass regularly, anywhere in the world, there have been a good selection of God’s poor ones. Some are outright weirdoes, God bless them. There is much room at the foot of the Cross for the weirdoes of this world.
Some are barely keeping their heads above water and would rather die than let you find this out. Some are suffering with mental illnesses and injuries that you can’t see from the outside. Some are same sex attracted and have made it their life’s mission to love God above all things. Some are living down things from their past that keep them awake at night in a cold sweat of shame and pain.
This week, I challenge you to think about this…who have you not noticed in your parish?
And how can we all do better to serve the poor ones that are in our midst?