Most of those aware of what is happening in the Church know that Australian Catholicism is in trouble. When people focus on this most think of sexual abuse. In fact this is more a symptom than the actual core of the problem. The core issue is leadership, or lack of it, and the failure to provide adequate pastoral ministry.
This is the overwhelming conclusion of Peter Wilkinson's just published and detailed study 'Catholic Parish Ministry in Australia: Facing Disaster'.
Drawing statistics from 'The 2010-11 Official Directory of the Catholic Church' Wilkinson looks at everything connected with on-the-ground ministry in Australian Catholicism and shows that parishes are failing for a complex of reasons to meet even the basic liturgical needs of parishioners, let alone the broad range of other challenges facing the church.
'The crisis is real', he says, 'and the scale is huge.'
Wilkinson says 'it would be simplistic to measure the faith of Australian Catholics and the success or failure of parish ministry purely by rates of regular Mass attendance, which might perhaps be better read as ordinary Catholics attempting to convey a message to their leaders about how they see their church'.
In this context I actually think he overestimates the percentage of Catholics attending Mass. He puts it at 13.8 per cent in 2006. My guess for 2011 is somewhere between 7 per cent and 9 per cent.
What this study has done is to substantiate the claims that many have made, but none before have adequately demonstrated. Wilkinson shows that one in four Australian parishes is now without a full-time priest, that very few new parishes have been established despite a rapidly increasing Catholic population and that 184 existing parishes have been merged since 1994.
There has been a catastrophic decline in the number of priests, recruitment of seminarians is far below the number needed, the average number of Catholics per parish has increased 25 per cent in the last ten years (from an average of 3481 Catholics per parish in 2000 to 4368 in 2010), and fewer students from poorer Catholic families are enrolled in Catholic schools.
A most useful aspect of the study is the material Wilkinson has unearthed on the recruitment of overseas priests. This strategy (which he says 'appears to have originated out of despair and desperation') has been in place now for over 20 years, but it has hardly ever been discussed in public except in last year's ABC