Sydney
29 June 2003
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values ‘a major role’ for the Church
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Classic
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Gothic paradise -
the legacy of Pugin
Moral values ‘a major role’ for the Church
a conversation with Bill Neville,
lay activist and former international president of Pax Romana
By Chris
Lindsay
“Values are caught, not taught,” says Bill Neville, (pictured)
Australian lay activist and former international president of Pax Romana, the
Catholic professional and intellectual arm involving university graduates.
“I
am very pleased to say my son has developed the same sort of views on the world
as I have.
“He has ‘caught it’ without me preaching at him. It is good to see
that moral values are still seen to have consequence in the world and that organisations
such as Pax Romana are playing a part in this.
“The Catholic Church has a major role to play in seeing that the moral imperatives in the world are not lost in the current drive for economic achievement alone.”
Bill Neville has retired from the NSW education system after a long history of teaching, research and administration. He was recently made an honorary life member of Pax Romana after 40 years of service from the grass roots to the highest level.
His list of contributions to the Catholic Church in Australia is impressive.
As well as his work for Pax Romana, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference appointed him in 1971 to the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Joint Secretariat (with the Australian Council of Churches) of Action for World Development.
Bill chaired the first National Conference of Australian Catholic Laity and was a co-founder and the last editor of the National Outlook, an ecumenical magazine concerned with religious affairs, theological developments and the ethical dimensions of economic and political issues.
He attended St Patrick’s College, Strathfield,
and from there went to Sydney University where he did an Arts degree - majoring
in English and History - before completing a Diploma of Education.
Bill taught
within the NSW State school system and then at the Marist Brothers high school
in Suva, Fiji, for four years (1958-61).
“I learnt to speak with a slightly
Indian accent,” he says. “The students were mainly Indian. They were determined
to improve their lot and studied hard. The school had the best reputation in Fiji.
“Fiji
was then still a British colony and the British favoured the Fijians for administrative
positions, so the Indians went into business and the professions. Some later came
to Australia.”
After Fiji, Bill came back to Australia. Gerry Gleeson, later to become the top bureaucrat of the NSW Public Service under Premier Neville Wran and a senior lay Catholic who is now a member of the senate of the Australian Catholic University, suggested he join the NSW TAFE system.
He taught English at Sydney and Meadowbank technical colleges, and then in February 1968 joined the Universities Board as a senior research officer. He then had a variety of positions in the Ministry of Education before he retired.
Bill says that when he first went to university, his priest gave him the standard warning of the time to “beware of the terrible Protestants and atheists” there, so he joined the Newman Association to “protect my faith”.
“It seems silly to say it now, but that was the prevailing attitude of the time,” he says.
“I got involved in the association quite a bit and when I came back from Fiji I joined the council and became secretary and had other positions.”
From there he moved into involvement with Pax Romana.
“Pax Romana has been an international Catholic organisation since 1947,” he says.
“It has two parts: an international movement of Catholic students and international Catholic intellectual movement which now has a local body called the Australian Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs.
“They are autonomous bodies.
“The Vatican recognises Pax Romana as one of the major Catholic international lay organisations, and it has consultative status with the UN and UNESCO.
“Pax Romana, meaning Peace of Rome, was founded in 1922 in Fribourg, Switzerland (on the border of the French and German speaking areas of the country). It brought together chaplains, students and a few graduates.
“Its purpose was to give cross border and national contacts, to give Catholic students and graduates within Europe a chance to discuss important contemporary issues with each other following World War I.
“Very early it was concerned with peace-making in the wake of the disasters of 1914-18,” Bill says.
“After World War II the graduates became separate from the students and more concerned with questions of Catholic understanding and social teaching.
“It began to concentrate on the great issues around the world such as peace, disarmament, world development and poverty and development in Third World countries.
“Vittorio Veronese, the first Secretary-General of UNESCO, came out of Pax Romana.
“Its philosophy was to ask what Christianity has to say about developments on the world, how Catholics should approach them.
“In 1965 the association sent me to an international assembly of Pax Romana movement in Bombay, where I saw Pope Paul VI on the tarmac as I arrived. He had been attending a Eucharistic congress there.”
Later, in 1972 at an Asian regional meeting in Singapore he joined the international council, ultimately rising to the position of international president (1987-1992), and attending Pax Romana meetings on every continent.
As president he did “everything from the sublime to the gorblimey”, including meeting the Pope and putting out newsletters. He helped ensure that Pax Romana fulfilled its role as a consultant body to UNESCO, speaking to the commission and presenting its views on specific issues.
He remembers Bishop Gerardi of Guatemala addressing the commission and telling it what was happening in his country; the human rights abuses, the thousands murdered and ‘disappeared’. Bishop Gerardi himself was murdered only three or four years ago.
What did Pax Romana achieve during his time as a member of the organisation and under his leadership?
“It has become a truly international voice of Catholic graduates in world forums,” he says.
“It helps ensure the Catholic voice is heard, not just in the Vatican but in international organisations.
“Pax Romana used to be very Euro-centric when I first joined. But in 1965 it first met in Asia, and by 1975 a significant number of Asians were members, people from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India and other countries. It began to have a true international presence.
“When I became president I was the first non-European to hold the position, but I was followed by an African and the president is now a Uruguayan. The organisation has a much broader perspective.
“The issues we are now dealing with particularly focus on poor nations and their relative exclusion from the world economy.
“We are expressing the Catholic philosophy on such issues as economic rationalism, which as currently practised has nothing to do with justice.
“There is no such thing as a ‘fair go’, in the Australian term.
“The emphasis of everything is now ‘the bottom line’.
“There are very important issues underpinning the work of Pax Romana at the moment.
“Catholic social teaching appears to be getting nowhere, but it will when people see the results of such things as the Iraq war and that the concept of free trade only seems to be free in one direction.
“If we can bring some perspective in from Catholic philosophy, people will see that there are moral issues too.”
Bill Neville puts his commitment to the purpose of organisations such as Pax Romana down to a combination of his personal faith and his background and education.
“I
not only studied Catholic history but saw it at work in these issues, and where
it was leading to.
“Some of the European thinkers involved saw themselves very
much in the Catholic tradition without being traditionalist.
“They saw themselves as part of the tradition but also doing practical things, such as Bl Frederick Ozanam and St Vincent de Paul.
“This traditional thinking became part of my being as I was growing up.”