Editorial: Inalienable rites

Sydney
11 May 2003

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Editorial: Inalienable rites

We can take religious freedom for granted in Australia, but it wasn’t always so. And this Sunday we celebrate the granting of such freedom to Australian Catholics 200 years ago with a special commemorative Mass at St Mary’s Cathedral.

Next week also sees the publication of a commemorative book, Dixon of Botany Bay: The Convict Priest from Wexford, about Fr James Dixon, the priest who celebrated the first official Mass on May 15, 1803.

There were probably other Masses before this, but Fr Dixon’s Mass is important because it marked the advent of real religious freedom in Australia. Before that, convicts were forced to attend Church of England Sunday services or risk having their meagre rations cut. As many convicts were Irish Catholics, a number of them rebels, this was not only a curtailment of their religious freedom - Mass was forbidden - but many would have felt they were being forced to attend the Church of the enemy. Not a happy situation.

It is interesting that one of the factors that persuaded the convicts’ English overlords to allow the Catholic religion to be practised in Australia was that the convicts behaved better if they had their own priests to minister to them.

One doubts their masters were much concerned about the convicts’ immortal souls, or the improvement in well-being that such improved behaviour marked. What they liked was the better behaviour.

But it is to the good that the practice of their religion should make unhappy convicts feel better and more at peace in a very tough situation. This is how it should be. Religion is often a cause for war and dissent, so much so that it can seem novel when it is a cause of increasing peace.

The religious instinct, the desire for contact with God and the transcendent, seems to be innate; no amount of repression can kill it. So the Irish Catholic convicts could not really have been expected to worship God in the church of those they viewed as their oppressors for long.

It is worth remembering, as we celebrate the birth of the Australian Catholic Church, that many people cannot take religious freedom for granted. For some, to enter a church is literally to take their life in their hands.

The 20th century had plenty of martyrs. And Catholics in some parts of Asia and Eastern Europe are still not really free to practise their faith. Many in the West see little point in going to church. They are lucky, though. They have a choice.

People often turn to the Church when they need hope.

St Mary’s Cathedral, in the heart of the city, sees many of them. So does your average parish priest.