Catholics learning to love themselves (humbly)
Church Alive: Pilgrimages in Faith 1956-2006, by Greg Dening. Published by UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006. ISBN 0868408433. RRP $44.95. website
This book is a history of the Catholic and Jesuit Parish of St Mary's North Sydney, published to mark its sesquicentenary year. Despite the title and subject matter, it's no ordinary parish history. The book is written by one of Australia's most creative and eminent historians, as an "ethnographic history of the prophetic imagination among ordinary believers in times of great religious change".
One-time Jesuit Greg Dening is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. Many of his previous works, which include Islands and Beaches and Mr Bligh's Bad Language, deal with culture conflict in the Pacific. When published, they broke new ground in the field of ethnographic history. As he did many years ago with his school history, Xavier: A Centenary Portrait, Dening has used ethnographic techniques in an area mainly charted by conventional and amateur historians.
One such amateur historian was Fr Henry A. Johnston SJ, who wrote the first history of North Sydney Parish, on the occasion of its centenary in 1956. Dening uses the fact that Johnston covered the first 100 years as a licence to focus on the last 50 years. This allows him to dwell on an era marked by unprecedented change, in both the Church itself and the Jesuits.
Dening writes that the change was inspired by two '60s prophets: John XXIII and Pedro Arrupe SJ—the pilgrim Pope who called Vatican II, and the prayerful and fearless Superior General who shook the Jesuits. He characterises the turnaround in Catholics of the period as a shift from a disposition in which it is "easier than one thinks to hate oneself", to one of "learning to love oneself humbly". He argues that the trauma of Humanae Vitae—Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical banning contraception—was not the beginning of an exodus from the Church, as is generally assumed.
The exodus was from a Catholicism defined by Sunday mass attendance, obedience to formalistic Church rules, and an acceptance of papal infallibility where it did not reach. Humanae Vitae freed Catholics to love themselves humbly by delivering their most personal decisions to their own conscience.
He contends that Humanae Vitae occasioned a boom in the number of Catholics going to communion, and a desertion of the confessional. To back up his argument, he borrows from the practice of conventional historians,