Sydney
2 March 2003

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Food for lots of thought

Pope calls for peace fast on Ash Wednesday

Café bid to curb violence

Supper guests share their stories with archbishop

Sex-change marriage challenge

Archbishop's plea for asylum seekers

Changing the guard at Vinnies

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Seminars on Theology of the Body

Project Compassion 2003 - Lenten campaign to break the 'chains of slavery'

Aid work in Kiribati wins Bill a 'thank you' from Govt

Christian ideals can 'guide us to share'

Australian Marist takes over as Cardinal Newman diaries editor

Editorial: Saint of the surgery?

Letters: Beat of a different drum?

Conversation: Fr John Flader, adult education director and Opus Dei priest - Teaching adults more about Catholic faith

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Three in one: A parish with something for everyone

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New home, chaplain and a youth ministry team

Mass, flags set celebrations in train

Conversation: Fr John Flader, adult education director and Opus Dei priest - Teaching adults more about Catholic faith

By Johanna Bennett

It can be hard when you are set up for controversy from the word 'go' - but good can come of such challenges.

This seems to be the case with Fr John Flader (pictured). As an Opus Dei priest he is the subject of great interest anyway, but he was also appointed to an important diocesan position last year when he was made director of adult education in the archdiocese of Sydney.

The job is a formidable one in some ways - to reach out to and teach grown-up Catholics about their faith. It seems some Catholics can enjoy a Catholic childhood and education and still remain quite ignorant of their faith.

"One young man told me during one of our Catechism classes that 'after 12 years of Catholic schooling I found I did not have a proper grounding in the Catholic faith'," says Fr John.

But Fr John is not in the business of criticising; instead he sees his task as teaching interested adults more about the Catholic faith. To this end, and unusually, one of his first moves in his new job was to offer a series of Catechism classes.

And he was pleasantly surprised by the number of takers - 180 people attended the three courses with few dropping out. The participants included catechists, those taking instruction to become Catholics, as well as lapsed Catholics and non-Catholics brought along by their friends, including a Buddhist.

So what were the big questions asked? Well, there was God and does he exist, and evolution and how does the idea of God fit with Darwin, and that is before we get to hot button subjects like married priests and contraception - subjects Fr John is keen to talk about.

A teacher with long experience dealing with bright, sceptical minds - he has been chaplain at both the University of Tasmania and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology - Fr John is fond of using stories to answer questions; an old Christian tradition.

For instance, to prove God exists he tells the story of a couple of high-profile atheists, the astronomer Sir Frederick Hoyle and mathematician Chandra Wickramasinghe, who, in the early 1980s, estimated that the probability of life on Earth arising spontaneously was one in 10 to the power of 40,000.

"The chance of life just occurring on Earth is about as likely as a typhoon blowing through a junkyard producing a 747," wrote Mr Wickramasinghe, who concluded that "a super-intelligent, extra-terrestrial being" must have brought life into being. He would not call this being God though, but, 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…' as Shakespeare says.

Evolution is not a problem for the Church in the way it is for fundamentalist Christians.

The Church admits the possibility of Darwin's theory, saying how our bodies evolved is not an issue, the soul is.

"The Church thinks that whether the human being has evolved from another living thing is up to the scientists to decide, but the human soul was most certainly infused by God in some living thing that could have been a man and woman or an ape," says Fr John.

"People are sometimes surprised at what the Church's teachings actually are."

For instance, there is a circumstance in which the Church allows what is technically an abortion.

This is in the case of an ectopic pregnancy when the embryo lodges in the fallopian tube. The Church's view is that the organ is diseased and so has to be excised.

This saves the mother's life but the baby dies, although, sadly, it would anyway.

Fr John sees his job - and the Church's in the third millennium - as evangelisation, spreading the Good News. So he has also begun a program of seminars discussing papal documents, which are also proving popular.

One last year, on the Pope's synod document, Ecclesia in Oceania, (which deals with the Church in our region and calls on us all to evangelise), attracted more than 100 people.

January's seminar was even more colourful. And it made headlines in the dailies because it featured controversial US Catholic psychologist Peter Rudegeair, who believes homosexuality is a treatable condition.

The next seminar (on March 25) should be less controversial, but no less important in this time of impending war.

It focuses on prayer and the Pope's recent Apostolic Letter on the rosary, Rosarium Virginis Mariae.

Fr John's work obviously consumes him, but there is a man beyond the Wisconsin-born priest.

John won a place at Harvard University where he gained a BA in chemistry ("Only at Harvard can you get an arts degree in chemistry," he laughs).

It was here he came into contact with Opus Dei - the Catholic organisation founded in Spain that calls on ordinary people to be holy through the sanctification of their work, i.e. doing their work well - Opus Dei means 'God's work'.

Fr John agrees that such a call is refreshing in a Church whose members cannot always be accused of being hard-working.

Opus Dei is controversial within the Church - partly because of its insistence that holiness is not just for priests and religious, but for ordinary people, too, but also because it is seen as secretive; a charge Fr John vigorously denies.

"We're on the web!" he exclaims.

In the early days, holiness was the big issue.

"Escriva's detractors cheapened the idea of holiness," says Fr John. "They vilified him for preaching the universal call to holiness, although saints down the centuries have always spoken of this."

[Escriva is Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, the Spanish founder of Opus Dei, who was made a saint last October.]

John the student was so impressed by Opus Dei that he embraced celibacy.

"The certainty came after much prayer that God was calling me to celibacy and to holiness as a lay person," he says.

But it wasn't long before he considered taking Holy Orders. He studied at Opus Dei's universities in Rome and Spain, completing a canon law doctoral thesis on what was then (in the 1960s) a hot subject - mixed marriages.

These are not marriages between people of different races, but between Catholics and non-Catholics, and used to be much frowned-on.

Thankfully this has changed and we are more welcoming now, says Fr John. "Today the shepherd has 18 per cent of the sheep in the sheepfold and 82 per cent outside.

"When one of them comes back, for a Christmas Mass or the First Communion of his child, or someone comes to marry a Catholic we should welcome them in.

"We should be open to all people, to every soul, or we are not Christian."

Fr John comes froma 'mixed' family himself. His father was "a nominal Lutheran".

After priestly ordination in Spain in 1967, Fr John came to Australia.

He became chaplain to the then brand-new Warrane College, the Opus Dei residential college for Catholic young men attached to the University of NSW, when it opened in 1970.

He went on to do essentially the same job at the University of Tasmania and, later, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, until Archbishop Pell asked him to come to Sydney last year to become director of the Catholic Adult Education Centre at Lidcombe.

Fr John was apprehensive about taking on what he saw as a big job. There was also some unrest among the Sydney clergy, who have mixed views on Opus Dei.

But he says he has been treated very well.

But Fr John's big claim to fame must be that he personally knew someone who became a saint - Josemaria Escriva. The then not-so-well-known priest used to meet regularly with the students at what was then the Roman College of the Holy Cross where John was a student. (It has since been elevated to university status).

He would do this three or four times a week, says Fr John. Nor was he was the arrogant man some of his critics claim.

"He was a man of God, deeply imbued with the love of God," he says. "He was the most affable, affectionate, good-humoured person I have ever met, always cheerful and concerned about us.

"You could not help but love him."

This is also how Fr John sees Opus Dei and the essence of Christianity - it is about friendship.

"You have to walk with people, be a friend and be there when they are in trouble," he says. "People are receptive in these moments."

And what does this rather serious priest do for relaxation - something he says one must do.

Well, he plays the clichéd priests' game golf on Mondays, the priests' days off, and also plays tennis - rather well by the sound of it; he plays in the clergy tennis tournaments.

The golf course also seems to be a good place for sorting out those conservative-liberal Church differences.

Fr John says he finds most of the disagreements he has with other priests are about style and approach rather than doctrine.

But there is one place where Church politics do not creep in - the music room.

Fr John has musical talents, too. He plays piano, guitar and trombone, and it is in playing the piano that he seems to truly relax, as he plays piano for himself, not in church.