Humane Catholic

It’s an interesting experience; being a temporary minor media personality. The sermon immediately below in this blog was picked up by The Sunday Age, a Melbourne-based broadsheet, and turned into an article with the rather disarming title “Priest urges end to ‘forced’ religious education”. I had been contacted by Jill Stark from The Sunday Age, who had read my sermon, and having realized that she had some pretty basic facts incorrect, I decided that it was better to speak to her than not. As always, what comes out in print is never exactly what you would have written yourself . . . Nonetheless, although I was initially annoyed by the newspaper report, as time has passed I find myself much less so. I think that there are two reasons for this. First, because of the quite astonishing level of support for what I said both on this blog and in the newspaper. Apart from one rather intemperate phone call from someone involved at the senior level in Access and one pretty mild rebuking email f...

Sermon for Easter 4 15 May 2011 Preached at St Mary’s Anglican Church, North Melbourne “A different sort of Access” When I became vicar of St Mary’s, I discovered that one of the duties I had inherited with that title was to teach and coordinate religious education at Errol Street Primary School. I’ll be up front and admit that I wasn’t a duty I relished, but over a month or so late last year I took up the task, and enjoyed the interaction with the grade five and six students, as well as the younger students who were involved in the final Christmas session of the year. Fr Philip, who has taught RE for several years, was intending to take over these duties this year, freeing me up to do some other things. Things have worked out somewhat differently. Doubtless many of you will have seen in the papers and elsewhere over the last few months – even this morning in fact – that there has been quite a kerfuffle about the teaching of Special Religious Education in primary schools. What ...

A sermon preached at Evensong at SMV, Sunday 6 September 2008 Paul, arriving in Ephesus, finds some disciples who have never heard of the Holy Spirit. He tells them about it, and they are re-baptised into the true faith. And so begins a great tradition – of one group of Christians telling another group of Christians that they are missing some crucial element of faith, and then converting them to their brand of the truth. Of course in this particular case the missing element of faith – the Holy Spirit – is pretty crucial, and I don’t blame Paul at all for wanting to share his news, and for bringing them into a new form of faith. But it does raise for me some fairly fundamental questions about how we, as Christians, behave towards other Christians whose beliefs are not the same as ours. Is it our job to convert them to our set of beliefs, or should we passively stand by, and leave them to remain with the set of beliefs they currently have, even if we think they are wrong? There are, to m...

A sermon preached at SMV, Trinity 7, 2008. The Sunday before GAFCON. Yesterday, if one can believe what one reads in the papers, the Anglican Communion split. The curtain-raiser for the Global Anglican Future conference, the conservative alternative to Lambeth, announced, in effect, that there was no future – at least no future in which conservatives and liberals could co-exist. As someone who doesn’t much like being called a liberal, but who is certainly not a conservative, I wonder what place there will be for me – for most of us perhaps – in this brave new world of two Anglican churches. It is actually far too soon to say whether the GAFCON leaders are right, or whether Archbishop Williams will be able to stitch back together the broken seam. And so in this sermon I don’t want to try to address directly the issue of a split, or even the presenting issues driving that split. I do, however, want to address what I believe to be one of the background causes. One of the accusations I mos...

A sermon at Evensong at SMV, Feast of St Barnabas (24 August) 2008 When I was a student in theological college over a decade ago, there was a regular question raised in the Friday “community time” as to the contemporary spiritual value of the daily offices of morning and evening prayer. Some – including myself – said we found it not merely helpful, but an essential part of keeping sane in the wake of the quite manic program of study and work we were required to undertake. Some others, however, said they found its rigid formality stifling of prayer, and argued for much less highly structured forms of daily worship and reflection. Perhaps the most helpful intervention in the debate came from someone, I can’t remember who, who suggested that the issue here was no so much the substance but the form. What some were finding helpful and others difficult was the form of the service, and its rigidity. No-one, however, was seriously questioning the substantive idea that as priests in training we...