The lively group of essayists who write in the book edited by Chris McGillion is indeed a long way from Rome. The stimulus for the book was the meeting in Rome between Australian bishops attending a Synod and Roman church officials. The bishops were presented with the Statement of Conclusions, a document that presented a negative view of the Australian church. McGillion himself summarises the events well, and his contributors offer an alternative view of the Australian church to the one the bishops heard. The book’s enterprise is inevitably tinged with polemic, for the perspectives of the Roman Congregation and of the writers differ greatly. The Statement of Conclusions finds fault with the independence and lack of respect shown by Australian Catholics; the contributors blame an excessively centralised and partisan Roman administration.
Two themes are developed in A Long Way from Rome. It describes the harmful consequences for the local church that flow from the centralisation of power in Rome. It also reflects on the specifically Australian context within which the local church lives. I found the discussion of this second theme the more interesting and significant. For even if the proposals made in this book for a less centralised church characterised by trusting relationships were implemented, the challenges of living faithfully as a Christian church in Australia would remain. Indeed their intractability would come into clearer light. The contributors to this collection demonstrate this by agreeing in their account of the symptoms of decline, and by disagreeing about its causes and about what in detail a healthy church might look like.
The Australian diagnosis of the health of the church offered in Chris McGillion’s book is consistent with that offered elsewhere. In the other books to which I refer, Winter, Cornwell and the writers in Hoose’s collection also consistently speak of a crisis of authority and of inappropriate uses of power in the
Catholic Church. They argue generally that the way in which authority is exercised is counter-productive, because it simultaneously distracts attention from the major challenges that the churches must confront in contemporary societies, and blocks attempts to meet those challenges reflectively.
The critics also converge in the evidence that they offer to show that the Catholic Church is dysfunctional. They argue that centralised organs of power limit the ability to adapt to local conditions, and furthermore disregard reflection by the local churches on their cultural environment. The more explicitly theological