My evening in Enniskerry was very interesting. It was part of a series of talks jointly sponsored by the Church of Ireland and Catholic parishes, and I was the second speaker. The first one was a Jesuit, who spoke about Pope Francis, so, since I have tended to talk a good bit about Francis in my presentations on Church reform, I decided to take a very different line this time. The overall theme they were working on was the faith journey.
Tom Roberts has an excellent article on the Australian Catholic Church in the current issue of the National Catholic Reporter. He goes back through the developments of the last century. In the first half of the century, when Archbishop Mannix was head of the Church there, the Catholic Church in Australia had a clear, common culture, which had to do with standing together in the fight against poverty and oppression. Mannix, who in his own way was very far-seeing, put great energy into setting up a Catholic school system.
As a result of a meeting of reform groups in Austria last October, which was attended by Sean McDonagh and myself, I became part of a network of reform groups. We have a skype conference every six weeks or so, and we plan to organise another gathering in about a year’s time, hopefully in Ireland. Currently the group is made up of Helmut Schuller from Austria, Markus Heil from Switzerland, Klaus Kemper from Germany, Deborah Milavec from the United States (representing the network of reform groups there) and Ian McGinnity from Australia.
