In the past months the concern of the Muslim communities in Australia over the effect on them of legislation directed against terrorism has grown. So has anxiety among many other Australians about the evidence of increasing violence and discrimination against Muslims.
Some well-intentioned Australians have proposed steps that Muslim communities themselves might take to placate the fears held by many Australians that Muslim places of worship breed radicalisation.
These steps focus on leadership and religious teaching in Mosques. It is suggested, for example, that local Imams, not those from overseas, should be appointed to Mosques and that the services might be conducted in English. It is argued that this may diminish the segregation of Muslims into national groups, and also allay the fears of non-Muslims about what is done in the mosques.
Muslims, of course, will make their own judgments about such suggestions. They are unlikely to be favourable. And from long experience of chaplaincy to a small Catholic immigrant community, I would also counsel against them. They run counter to all that we have seen and learned of the faith of migrant groups in Australia and their relationship to the wider Catholic Church.
When Australia sought migrants after the second world war, Catholic Bishops sought chaplains for the different national and linguistic groups from the sending nations. These were cheerfully provided and were received as a gift. Generally the immigrant groups were encouraged to accept the hospitality of local congregations for their services. Only a few groups built churches of their own.
The special services led to grumblings among some priests and parishioners that the immigrant Catholics did not contribute to the life of the local parishes. Nor did they conform to the Australian sense of what being Catholic meant. It would be better if they simply integrated into the Australian congregations with their expectations and practices.
But these populist attitudes never became prevalent. Particularly after the liturgy was celebrated in vernacular languages instead of English, it was recognised that for migrants to live their faith in a new country was not simply a matter of of leaving one culture and joining another. It was more like grafting a branch from one tree on to another. The life of the branch had to be nurtured until the graft took, when it would be part of the new tree but bear flowers from the old tree from which it was taken.
In churches people needed to