The aftermath of the election gave play to the mythical Australian preference for the underdog. The stuffed shirts didn't like it, but people generally enjoyed the Greens' and Independents' day in the sun. It echoed the instinctive sympathy given to the little Aussie battlers, the hometown heroes, who are picked on by distant governments and big corporations.
This sympathy for the local and the simple over the larger, the sophisticated and the more powerful applies also to churches. When local bishops come into conflict with local congregations or clergy, the media commonly represent them as the heavy, remote and dogmatic hand that crushes the brave, shrewd struggler.
The obloquy grows when feisty local congregations fall foul of universal church law. This is seen as a battle between the light-armed David who knows the local terrain, and the heavy-footed Goliath who can cause great destruction but knows nothing much worth knowing.
This natural bias towards the local makes it difficult to argue to the average Catholic audience that the Roman bureaucracy and of a universal code of canon law can benefit local congregations.
Yet one of the surprising conclusions to be drawn from the life of Mary MacKillop is that the authority and legal framework of Roman government defended her sisters against the tyrannies and the chicanery of the local. Rome gave her and her sisters space for living. Her experience might lead us to review our instinct in favour of the local and straightforward.
When MacKillop became the central figure in the new congregation of Josephite Sisters, she was 24. By the time she was 30 she had been excommunicated by one Bishop of Adelaide, and had been investigated and deposed by another. She had also been forced to withdraw her sisters from two local churches because of the hostility of their bishops.
She had to travel to Rome to seek initial approval for the Rule of her Congregation, and had to apply to Rome again to have the Rule definitively approved in the face of the local churches.
At one level MacKillop can be seen as the brave, honest woman taking on the power and trickery of the Bishops. Bishop Sheil, an erratic man, excommunicated her with total lack of due process. Bishop Reynolds, a weak administrator, untruthfully claimed Roman authority for an investigation into MacKillop's leadership, and broke both Church and State law in binding the sisters to give evidence under oath.
The Quinn brothers, Bishops of Brisbane