For no particular reason this afternoon, I thought about the "rebel" liberal Catholic church regime at St Mary's in South Brisbane that led to a couple of priests being chucked out of the church, and the supporting parishioners and former priests heading off down the road to conduct very, very socially aware services in the Trades and Labor Council building. I wrote about them a few times around the time of the crisis, and hadn't looked up for some time whether they still existed, and indeed, if former priest Peter Kennedy was still alive.
To my surprise, it turns out that Philippa Martyr, who I used to like disturbing when she joined in threads in the old era Catallaxy blog, wrote about them a year ago in her weekly column in The Catholic Weekly (evidently, a very conservative Catholic publication, seeing it hosts Philippa.) She was inspired to write about them because the Guardian had a (rather sympathetic) piece about them.
Turns out Peter Kennedy is about 88 now, and retired. The other former priest, Terry Fitzpatrick, is 67 or so, and still active in the community, but the whole theme of the Guardian article was that their alternative spiritual community (or whatever you might call it) has clearly not attracted new membership, and the average age of those attending now is apparently above 60. Certainly, it is hard to see from photos in the article, or when viewing their online liturgies, any participant without grey hair and wrinkles.
Of course, all churches (except perhaps the pop music performance based mega churches) have ageing average attendees, but with St Mary's rebels, it's gone exactly as I expected - a rebellion that fizzled out, as making belief in God completely optional in a group devoted to vaguely following the liturgies of a Church that, at a minimum, did believe there was something real to worship beyond the material universe, kind of doesn't make a lot of sense.
Update: I've changed the way I worded the last paragraph. This is a topic (the significance of "realism" in religion or spiritual practice) that still comes to mind a lot after learning more about Buddhism and Asian folk religions in all of their varieties. More about one example of that in my next post!
3 comments:
Last week I watched a vid which argued people in the US are leaving the happy clappy churches and returning to the traditional orthodox churches. In particular it is younger ages, under 30\40 doing that. I think it is a good thing because the orthodox churches are much closer to Christianity than the happy clappy ones. I don't know if that is happening in Australia. Of late though, in the USA and Britain, younger age groups seem to discovering Christianity. Not sure of the numbers though, it might be a blip.
When you look deeper, it's usually a blip. I think maybe Religion for Breakfast did a video on that - that there really isn't a youth Christian revival in America - not so long ago? Might have been another channel.
Sorry, I've changed my security and forget to log in.
What people see as a renewed interest may reflect the uncounted leaving the happy clappers and returning to orthodoxy, so the raw numbers are deceiving. A few years ago I read that the youngin's were leaving the more forthright evangelical churches because of the demonisation of non cisgender individuals. Christians can be remarkably judgmental!
Copilot outright says no, Perplexity says signs mixed but mostly no, Grok more positive than P but still inconclusive.
BTW Steve it can be interesting to ask bots the same question. Just like humans, answers are not always consistent.
It might reflect an attitude you demonstrate: a curiousity, a looking beyond God or atheism. Naturally they first turn to the obvious choices but later look further into subjects like NDEs, Buddhism etc.
BTW not a Buddhist but intuitively I love the sense of Zen and Daoism. Can't explain that.
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