The Ark

Resistance to the 'winds of change' of Vatican II has long been seen as characteristic of Australian seminaries, but former Catholic priest Val Noone argues that there were priests and lay people who agitated for change.

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: In the 1960s the Roman Catholic church was on the brink of change, but how open to it was the Australian Catholic church?

Hello, this is The Ark on ABC Radio National, with me, Rachael Kohn.

I can't claim that today's story about Corpus Christi College in Glen Waverley, Victoria, will tell you the whole story. But Val Noone, who was a seminarian and then a priest for ten years during that crucial period, challenges the view that Australia was entirely resistant to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. And no doubt about it, the reforms were big news.

Val Noone: I think, probably for the first time in my lifetime, news about the church was news in the wider world in a very big way, and I think the religious media even had trouble keeping up, because stories would break; stories about changing attitudes, about arguments in Rome, about the Pill, about whether English would come into the mass and so on.

The Advocate in fact is exceptional in its coverage of Vatican II because it sent an extremely good journalist by the name of Michael Costigan to Rome, and he sent back weekly reports, and they had supplements. Edmund Campion the historian, says that Melbourne was better served than any other diocese in Australia, as it turns out.

Rachael Kohn: Well, books by the ex-priest Chris Geraghty, especially Priest Factory, about his training at St Patrick's College at Manly in Sydney, paint a pretty dismal picture of the church at that time, one certainly not very welcoming of Vatican II.

Val Noone: I think it's generally agreed that the seminary in Melbourne would have been a more liberal institution, under the leadership of a famous Jesuit called Charles Mayne. And he was quite open-minded, but nonetheless I would have to agree that most of the seminaries, including the Corpus Christi College where I was in Melbourne, did try to shut down debate.

On one particular occasion I took in with me to the seminary, a book by a Jesuit theologian, and palaeontologist called Teilhard de Chardin, and the Dean of Discipline, they had these people to look after what you were reading, he said, 'No, you have to give me that, you're not allowed to read that, that's not a good book for a young theology student to be reading'.

So there was also this attempt at sort of thought control I suppose, even in Melbourne.

Rachael Kohn: Well modernism was the big heresy that the church identified. How embedded was the rejection of this so-called modernism in the training of priests?

Val Noone: Formally it was very clear. At the start of every academic year, those teaching theology had to repeat an oath against modernism.

Now just what modernism is, is a tricky thing, but the lecturers had to say that, but also the young men being ordained priests had to take an oath that they would not be modernist. Now in general I think being modern meant taking in too much scientific, critical thought, being sympathetic to some of these mystical approaches to religion rather than just hard dogmatic stuff, and I suppose the attitude to scripture was important - were you inclined to ask questions about Noah and Moses and all that sort of thing. They were worried about those things.

But of course with Vatican II, a lot of questions came on to the table and were taken up by bishops, and then Popes, and sort of okayed.

Rachael Kohn: Well when you mentioned science and mysticism, that's where Pierre Teilhard de Chardin really comes into the picture, doesn't it?

Val Noone: It's remarkable that they wouldn't even publish his books while he was alive. He died in 1955, had published a couple of hundred scientific articles about paleaontology and geology. He'd been on the dig, or whatever they call it, to get Peking Man, the famous discovery and so on. But his writings were about how he combined faith with his acceptance of evolution.

Rachael Kohn: Because he was a Jesuit priest, wasn't he?

Val Noone: Oh yes. We have to explain that he was a Jesuit priest, born in France, died in New York, and wrote these rather really interesting poetic accounts of how one could believe in the world going forward. He had this concept, a religious, poetic view, that we were moving to an Omega Point that would take on board all the religions and all the great achievements and we'd go forward. And that was good, exciting stuff to hear, but it certainly was a challenge for the church that wanted to shut down modern ideas and modern thinking.

So when his stuff was published, in English about 1960, it would have been published in French four or five years before, by an international committee I think headed by Aldous Huxley or someone, and the Jesuits wouldn't let it be published, so his secular friends got together and it swept through the religious world and indeed it was a phenomenon in the daily press, so he really is a symbolic or emblematic figure of the change in thinking.

Rachael Kohn: Well you were reading him. Were there other students at Corpus Christi College who were as daring as you were?

Val Noone: Well I'm aware of being part of a group. It's very interesting that whole question, to what extent is one an exception, was one part of a general movement. And it would be true that the group that was not the majority, but you're interacting. I mean lines are not drawn clearly, and I can remember a few years later meeting a priest who I thought was quite conservative, and in conversation over a cup of tea or something, 'What are you reading?' He said 'I'm reading Teilhard de Chardin'. I thought, Oh this is really now percolating its way through.

So I suppose you're looking at change over time, what might be a minority view in 1960, by 1965 could be commonplace.

Rachael Kohn: There were other issues at the time that Vatican II was trying to promote, and that was unity, or ecumenism. How ready were you and your fellow travellers at Corpus Christi College to embrace this notion of a unified church?

Val Noone: I think Australians of the post-1945 post World War II generation were well and truly ready. And many of the men of that generation had gone off to World War II and fought side by side with Catholic, Protestant, Church of England together and were in some ways I think impatient with the divisions.

I mean I remember my father and his friends might go to the funeral of a workmate and they'd have to stay outside the church if it was a Protestant church, they couldn't go in to the service. So when that change came, they thought that was the most commonsense, I mean that change was just welcome, people thought that was absolutely commonsense. That doesn't apply to all the changes.

I suppose the question of taking Communion together, then as now, has become a sticking point, but I would think that a lot of the younger ones like us, thought that that was going to follow as the night the day. Once you start talking church unity, you start recognising that Anglican priests and your own church priest or the Uniting church didn't exist till the '70s, that they had valid ministries and so on, we thought it would go to inter-Communion. Now in fact the Vatican and the Pope put the shutters down on inter-Communion. That's still a live issue now in 2006, unfortunately.

Rachael Kohn: Well as a young seminarian at Corpus Christi College in Glen Waverley, were you also engaged in discussions about the liturgy in English?

Val Noone: Oh yes, this was probably the most spoken about issue. We had been prepared. I mentioned to you this rector, Charlie Mayne. He brought out a visiting speaker, an English Jesuit called Clifford Howe who was at the cutting edge. They had an organisation called Association for Vernacular in the Liturgy, or something. 'Vernacular' means in your own local language. And so we had been prepared by hearing one of the theoretical and practical leaders of this movement, but indeed there were arguments - 'We don't want everything in English because Latin's a universal language'.

I would have probably said that early in the debate myself. Oh no, the great advantage of the Catholic church is you can go anywhere in the world and you hear them say the mass in Latin. We knew that Luther and Cranmer in England and so on, the big debate had been in the Reformation to take the Bible into the vernacular languages for heaven's sake. What a very sensible thing to do. And we finally get it some 300 years later. So there was a sense of welcome in that as well. But it was a big issue.

Rachael Kohn: I think arguments at the time tried to say that the laity, the Catholic people at large, were opposed to the changes of Vatican II. Do you think that was an accurate statement?

Val Noone: That statement of yours there is probably one of the triggers for this paper that I've just researched and written for this conference.

I think there is a very widespread view around now that Vatican II, that big meeting of the bishops to revise teaching and practice upset the laity and caused confusion and made priests leave and nuns leave and the collections started to drop and attendances started to drop and so on. My research suggests that that's not the case. My research suggests that people welcomed the Vatican II at the time, and I want to talk in a minute about where I think the trouble started in 1968 with the birth control encyclical.

But going back to those early 1960s, if we remember the Council is 1962 to 1965, these are in fact heady, exciting years, I think for just about most Catholics. There are periods in time when history speeds up a bit, and those four or five years in terms of Catholic history are such times. What looked impossible in 1961, by 1965 people were starting to think of more and more things that could be developed.

No, the confusion and the sadness about the church doesn't in my view date from Vatican II, it dates from the blocking of the hope of Vatican II by the Vatican Curial officials, in this case with Pope Paul VI, stopping the democratic movement. The Pope had set up a committee to inquire into the birth control issue. That committee went through an exhaustive process over three or four years, and came in with a recommendation for change. The Pope, in 1968, ignored, in fact went contrary to his own advice, and he put out a letter called Humanae Vitae. It's on Human Life. It covers many points, but the crunch point comes when he comes to the question of the limitation of births. He rules against contraception.

Rachael Kohn: So what sort of a reaction was there from the priests on the one hand, and the people on the other?

Val Noone: Well I would think that the good priests were those who were in touch with the thinking of their people, so there's a kind of intermeshing there, but nonetheless you're heading for a very important point there.

I think that the teaching of theology and moral theology in the Catholic church was in the hands and the minds of male celibate priests and bishops, and that's an inherent problem, an inherent contradiction. We're dealing with the morality of marriage. The voice that needs to be heard is the voice of those Catholics and Christians who are living through, that have lived through this experience. So it really showed up a kind of a very deep flaw in the decision making process in the church.

But in terms of reaction, I'd have to say that at the grassroots, most people were up in arms. And that's borne out by the press reports of the day.

Now indeed very few priests and bishops spoke out publicly against that. In fact I dedicated this paper here in Adelaide this weekend to a Michael Crotty, who was in fact one of the theologians who spoke out against the Pope's ruling and said, 'This is against Catholic tradition and it's in fact against good Christian morality'. Now he was sacked, and we had a meeting of some 30 or so other priests who agreed would we do the same, or would we, as they said in those days, 'stay in and fight' or keep your head down and work it through.

So I suppose what's really happened in the intervening 30 years that just about every working priest at the coalface today would have a go-ahead, open view on the birth control issue.

Rachael Kohn: Indeed, a lot of priests and nuns did leave around 1968 didn't they?

Val Noone: Yes. I haven't got the graph at the front of my mind, but from 1968 through to say 1980 or so, there's a big number leaving there. That's tied up with a whole lot of issues, but one of the issues I would think is the disappointment at the failure to deliver on the terrific hope generated by Vatican II to the attempt to reverse. And as we've seen with the papacy of Pope John Paul II and the role of Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, and the role of Cardinal George Pell, we've seen that particular interpretation of Catholicism getting stronger and stronger at the central level of the church.

What's happening at the grassroots is another matter. As an historian, what I'm really drawing attention to now is let's not forget that. It seems to me that this negative view that there was always a conservative Catholic church and so on, has the upper hand, and part of that view of the church's history is to say that Vatican II caused the troubles, and I think I've got the research to back it up to say No, Vatican II didn't cause the trouble. Vatican II evoked enormous hope and it was a very exciting time of learning and development.

Rachael Kohn: Well you were one of those priests who left shortly thereafter to get married and so forth. Couldn't it be said that the liberals departed from the church and left the church with a conservative rump?

Val Noone: Well this is something that I'd love to tease out in more detail scientifically. I'll obviously give you my impressions, in the answer to that.

That's roughly right, isn't it, in terms of the liberals leave, and then those that stay. But I think in the number of liberals who stayed, take a figure like Father Bob McGuire and Father Eric Hodgins, they're known around the town as progressive liberal priests, and very good pastors and so on. Well they would all have similar views to the ones that I'm saying about the history of this matter.

So there are some who have stayed, and I think the last couple of appointments of bishops in Australia are a bit interesting. I mean Bishop Damien Coleridge [Correction: Val Noone means Bishop Mark Coleridge] to Canberra, and then Bishop Greg O'Kelly here, that's a little bit against the kind of ultra-conservative trend.

So yes, overall what you're saying. But what I think's happened at the grassroots is worth thinking about. I think I mentioned that most Catholics would make up their own mind on birth control, but on that thing of church unity, I mean I've been to a number of places where inter-Communion is actually practiced. Nobody gets permission to say 'Can I take Communion at the Anglican church or can the Anglican people take Communion at our church?' or something. But I think people are going ahead, I think one of the main results of the Pope's ruling on birth control is to change dramatically the people's attitudes to the papacy.

Rachael Kohn: Taking matters into their own hands.

Val Noone: Yes. It's reinforced the role of the laity forming their own conscience and working things through in their own faith tradition, and not waiting for the Pope in Rome to tell them what to do.

Rachael Kohn: Professor Val Noone is a Fellow at the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, and is also the editor of TAIN, the only Australian Irish magazine.

What does the search for holy relics and for the historical Jesus have in common? Find out on next week's Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Dr Val Noone
a former priest, is a Fellow of the History Department at the University of Melbourne.