From Evangelii nuntiandi to Ecclesia in Oceania and beyond:

After twenty-five years of 'Evangelising the Culture' where to from here?

Conference of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars (Australia) and the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family (Melbourne), 24 November 2001

Anthony Fisher OP*

A Prayer
O Mary, Help of Christians, in our need we turn to you with eyes of love, with empty hands and longing hearts. We look to you that we may see your Son, our Lord. We lift our hands that we may have the Bread of Life. We open wide our hearts to receive the Prince of Peace.

O Mother of the Church, your sons and daughters thank you for your trusting word that echoes through the ages, rising from an empty soul made full of grace, prepared by God to welcome the Word to the world that the world itself might be reborn. In you, the reign of God has dawned, a reign of grace and peace, love and justice, born from the depths of the Word made flesh. The Church throughout the world joins you in praising him whose mercy is from age to age.

O Stella Maris, light of every ocean and mistress of the deep, guide the peoples of Oceania across all dark and stormy seas, that they may reach the haven of peace and light prepared in him who calmed the sea. Keep all your children safe from harm for the waves are high and we are far from home. As we set forth upon the oceans of the world, and cross the deserts of our time, show us, O Mary, the fruit of your womb, for without your Son we are lost. Pray that we will never fail on life's journey, that in heart and mind, in word and deed, in days of turmoil and in days of calm, we will always look to Christ and say, "Who is this that even wind and sea obey him?"

O Lady of Peace, in whom all storms grow still, pray at the dawn of the new millennium that the Church in Oceania will not cease to show forth the glorious face of your Son, full of grace and truth, so that God will reign in the hearts of the Pacific peoples and they will find peace in the world's true Saviour. Plead for the Church in Oceania that she may have strength to follow faithfully the way of Jesus Christ, to tell courageously the truth of Jesus Christ, to live joyfully the life of Jesus Christ.

O Help of Christians, protect us! Bright Star of the Sea, guide us! Our Lady of Peace, pray for us!

-Ecclesia in Oceania

1. Introduction: Stone -v- Peter
At the turn of the millennium John Stone wrote a report card on the world in the Adelaide Review. 'The world," he assures us, "and we Australians, have just ended a more successful (in every sense of that word) era than the world, and we, have ever previously seen." Any contrary view is, he insists, the 'Socialist flotsam' and 'ever-predictable laments' of 'the chattering classes'.

In that very week Pope John Paul II offered a rather different view in his letter Novo Millennio Inuente. The contrast between Stone and Peter could hardly have been starker-though it was not, as some might expect, a contrast between the optimism of an affluent economic rationalist and the pessimism of a millenarian anti-rationalist. John Paul II is, to frustration of many of his 'conservative' allies as much as of his critics, an eternal optimist about human person, culture and society. But his assessments are also far more nuanced and penetrating than the simple hoorays and boos of the preachers of the prosperity gospel, secular or religious.

Despite sweeping claims about the past ten centuries, Stone offers little analysis of the years before his own birth. We are simply told that at the turn of the previous Christian millennium most people's lives "were in Hobbes' words 'nasty, brutish and short', under rulers exercising, in most cases tyrannically, absolute power over them." Hobbes, however, knew his history rather better. His hell was a world before Christianity, before government, indeed before institutions of any sort-a laissez faire, totally free-market world which, he thought, ultimately cried out for justice, moral thinking and government.

It is far from clear that all was as bleak around 1000 AD as Stone (and so many of our contemporaries) paint it. Certainly there was poverty, ignorance and disease. The Albigensians promoted a bleak, dualist view of creation, body, sex and the rest. But Europe stood at the dawn of a new era of peace, prosperity and creativity, supported by a renewed Church and relatively stable states, with the advent of universities, new arts and sciences, new philosophies, new religious orders, cities, legal systems, industries, and new classes of people neither tyrannical nor servile. It was the dawn of a new evangelisation of culture that would sweep across Europe and, by the end of the 'thirteenth and greatest of centuries', would have thoroughly impregnated culture and society, marriage and family, the academy and all the other institutions of Christendom.

Yet the image of the middle ages as dark and brutish remains a commonplace in our society, even amongst scholars, even amongst Christians. The crusades, inquisitions, witch-burnings and persecutions of Galileo are brought out with monotonous regularity with which to charge the past to bolster our fragile confidence in the superiority of the present. So we must leave aside the fact that the trials of witches, like those of Galileo, occurred not in the middle ages but in the much more 'liberal' post-mediæval world. We disregard the recent findings that while 'civilised' Elizabethan England burnt its witches there were no such burnings in Spain because the 'benighted' Spanish Inquisition said there was no such thing as witches. We ignore the evidence that between 1400 and 1700 there were only 150 to 300 executions of witches per year in Europe and North America-150 to 300 too many to be sure, but a drop in the ocean compared to the annual head count for political, religious and other 'crimes' in the following three 'enlightened' centuries.

Much more could be said about the middle ages and centuries since, and you will be properly suspicious of whether a Dominican like myself can give a balanced assessment of the Gothic period! But my main point is that the 'bad old days' were not necessary as bad as moderns portray them and the Church was remarkably successful-due in no small measure to friars like Dominic and Aquinas, as well as Francis and Bonaventure, and of course Bernard and his Cistercians before them-in changing whole cultures for better.

Stone skips forward to 2001. "A thousand years later, and throughout almost the whole world," he again assures us, "people's lives stand enormously improved." There is, asserts, 'no reasonable argument' about this or the fact that, "for first time in history. the lives of great majority of people contain an ingredient almost unknown previously-hope." Should we really be so smug about ourselves at turn of the Third Millennium? The progress in some areas has been tremendous, certainly, and we should be grateful for our affluence and comfort; for our healthcare, education and welfare systems; for living in a free society, where human rights are respected; for living relatively free, too, of terrorism and violence, even if we are starkly reminded from time to time that none of this should be taken for granted. Stone is right to be annoyed by the constant carping, indeed plain ingratitude, of those professional whingers who wag their fingers at a system that gives them the luxury of such criticism and who fail to acknowledge the enormous good (and goods) we moderns enjoy. But dare we claim superiority over all past ages and in all respects, as did the eighteenth-century seers of a new enlightenment, the nineteenth-century heralds of imperial expansion, the twentieth-century sages of technological progress, and now the twenty-first century auditors of economic growth?

Just as the past was not all dark ages, so the present is not all sweetness and light; not everyone in the past lived lives 'nasty, brutish and short' and not everyone today lives comfortable and secure. I need not argue on percentages here. My hunch is that the situation is now, and ever was, more complicated than Mr Stone's two-tiered universe; there are too many imponderables, too many incommensurables, to make sweeping claims about 'almost everyone'.

John Paul's judgment is more humble and more complex than Stone's. He sings the praises of the 'economic, cultural and technological progress' which our era enjoys. But he is also sensitive to 'the contradictions' of a world which offers such immense possibilities to some while leaving others, millions of others, "not only on the margins of progress but in living conditions far below the minimum demanded by human dignity. How can it be," he asks, "that even today there are still people dying of hunger? Condemned to illiteracy? Lacking the most basic medical care? Without a roof over their heads?" Mediæval man could not do much about these things. We can. And too often we don't.

Was our most recent century really as 'successful in every sense of that word' as Stone paints it? We have had-and still have today-wars of unparalleled cruelty and devastation, régimes more tyrannical than any in Stone's imagined dark ages, ideologies and technologies at the service of 'ethnic cleansing', death before birth on an unimaginable scale, death for millions more soon after birth from eradicable starvation and disease, and millions of their parents living in slums with no hope of a better world for their children, the victims of globalisation or the genetic disease of being born into the wrong family. In the 'twentieth and bloodiest of centuries' the trains often ran on time, and there were umpteen other signs of technological and economic progress, but these only added salt to wounds of the victims. So would Stone's telling them 'you've never had it so good'.

Even in free and affluent countries such as Australia there are those who miss out. And so many of the haves, for all their wealth, are impoverished in other ways: by drugs, alcohol, gambling, abortion, broken relationships, depression, violence, loneliness, abandonment. We are far from the most successful era when it comes to making commitments and keeping them, far from the most successful at marital and family life, or at extended family and neighbourhood. No one would pretend our academies or arts or political debates are at their zenith. Does anyone imagine we are the most spiritually fulfilled, emotionally balanced or virtuous people in history? That we have more saints, or that sanctity is more universal, than it was in the past? That we are the most hospitable and generous to outsiders? That we are the happiest and more hopeful of generations? If we are, why do we have the highest youth suicide rates and lowest birth rates? The highest drug addiction rates and lowest marriage rates?

As a new millennium begins, "how can we remain indifferent," the Pope asks, "to the prospect of an ecological crisis which is making vast areas of our planet uninhabitable and hostile to humanity? Or to the problems of peace, so often threatened by the spectre of catastrophic wars? Or to the contempt for the fundamental human rights of so many people, especially children?" If we are to do anything about these things, we cannot afford to wallow in self-congratulation. "A theory that makes profit the exclusive norm and ultimate end of economic activity," as the Bishops of Oceania reminded us, "is morally unacceptable. So-called 'economic rationalism' is a tenet which tends increasingly to divide rich and poor nations, communities and individuals" (Ecclesia in Oceania §27).

We have many causes for pride, to be sure, and we need confidence if we are to move forward. But genuine hope is not hubris, genuine happiness not anaesthesia. God's kingdom has dawned and yet it has not yet come in its fullness. If our technological and economic success is to be harnessed for the good of all, we will need sensitivity and humility more than ever in the years ahead. And more than this, our whole culture will need to be evangelized so that it points human potential towards heavenly ends and earthly enactments.





2. Evangelizing the culture(s)
In his 1976 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nundiandi (§20) Pope Paul VI described the "split between Gospel and culture" as the great drama of our times, one which could only be addressed by evangelizing the culture. That call has been re-echoed many times by John Paul II in many of his encyclicals and apostolic exhortations, and so much of his great intelligence and pastoral effort has gone into this task. In Christifideles Laici (§165) he writes:

The Church evangelizes when she seeks to convert, solely through the divine power of the message she proclaims, the personal and collective consciences of people, the activities in which they engage, and the lives and concrete milieux which are theirs the strata of humanity is transformed. For the Church it is a question not only of preaching the Gospel in ever-wider geographic areas or to ever-greater numbers of people, but also of affecting and as it were challenging, through the power of the Gospel, mankind's criteria of judgment, determining values, points of interest, lines of thought, sources of inspiration and models of life, which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation. Every effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures.

Only this week John Paul sent us all an email calling us to redouble this effort. In Ecclesia in Oceania (§16) he suggests:

The Word made flesh is foreign to no culture and must be preached to all cultures. Inculturation, the incarnation of the Gospel in the various cultures, affects the very way in which the Gospel is preached, understood and lived. The Gospel is not opposed to any culture. An authentic inculturation of the Gospel has a double aspect. On the one hand, a culture offers positive values and forms which can enrich the way the Gospel is preached, understood and lived. On the other hand, the Gospel challenges cultures and requires that some values and forms change.

I will now list some propositions regarding the new evangelisation of culture which we find in those several encyclicals and apostolic exhortations:

1. The Gospel is independent of, and certainly not identical with, any culture; yet it inevitably interacts with it in complex ways (Ecclesia in Asia §21; Vita consecrata §98 etc.). Why?

2. The Son of God, by taking upon himself our human nature, became incarnate within a particular people, even though his redemptive death brought salvation to all (Ecclesia in America §70). Jesus lived and breathed within a specific cultural context.

3. Nor is this peculiar to Jesus. Culture is the space within which every human person comes face to face with any truth, including the Gospel. Just as a culture is the result of the life and activity of a human group, so the persons belonging to that group are shaped to a large extent by their culture: change the culture, change the people, and vice versa (Ecclesia in Asia §21).

4. Thus in the process of encountering the world's different cultures, the Church (a) transmits her truths and values in the languages of those cultures, (b) changes or renews those cultures, and (c) also takes from those various cultures positive elements already found in them. Because the Gospel comes to people who are part of a culture it cannot avoid borrowing elements from human cultures in order to communicate itself (Ecclesia in Asia §21; Ecclesia in America §70).

5. Yet this is a project fraught with difficulties. The dialogue between Gospel and culture must unfold in truth, honesty, humility and respect (Ecclesia in Asia §21). The goal of inculturation of the Gospel or evangelisation of the culture is never merely the transposition of ancient near Eastern or mediæval European churchspeak into the concepts and words of other times and places. It is to convert the consciences of human beings, both individually and collectively, and to fill with the light of the Gospel all their works and undertakings, their entire lives, and, indeed, the whole of the social environment in which they are engaged (Sapientia Christiana §3).

6. The Holy Spirit is therefore the prime agent of inculturation, not the local church or the individual missionary, and the only valid point of reference for validity of any act of evangelization or inculturation is the Paschal Mystery of Christ and the Church's magisterium (Ecclesia in Asia §21; Ecclesia in America §70).

7. The evangelisation of cultures occurs at all levels of human existence, but especially at the following flashpoints:

· the liturgy

· kerygmatic, apologetic and catechetical activities

· centres of information and education, especially universities and the media

· pastoral care

· action for social justice and charitable works

· the life of Christian family

8. In these several fora the Church must be active both as evangeliser and evangelised. Hence centres of education and the media must be converted so that they in turn can help in converting the surrounding culture. Catholic universities and schools must recover and maintain their Catholic identity and in their teaching should make constant reference to Jesus Christ and his message as the Church presents it in her dogmatic and moral teaching (Ecclesia in America §71; Redemptoris Mater §37). So, too, the Church needs good philosophers and theologians who will explore more comprehensively the dimensions of the true, the good and the beautiful to which the word of God gives access (Fides et ratio §103; Vita consecrata §98; Ecclesia in Oceania §20). Likewise the Christian family must be reconceived as a sort of lived preaching, "a specific revelation and realization of ecclesial communion", an image of the ineffable communio of the Most Holy Trinity, a sharer (through procreation and education of children) in God's work of creation (Ecclesia in Oceania §45).

It is with these thoughts in mind that we can examine the successes and failures so far in the period since Evangelii nuntiandi and ways forward for the Ecclesia in Oceania and beyond.



3. Ecclesia in Australia
So with what sort of culture must the Gospel interact in contemporary Australia? People have given contemporary Australian culture various descriptions: post-Christian, pagan, secular, pluralist, liberal, individualistic, consumerist. Commentators such as Michael Mason and those involved with the Natioanl Church Life Survey, Hugh Mackay and David Tacey, all point to a demonstrable decline of institutional religion despite a continuing hunger for 'spirituality' amongst ordinary people. In a parallel context Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor told clerics at a recent gathering in Leeds in England that "Christianity, as a background to people's lives and moral decisions and to government and to the social life in Britain, has almost been vanquished." He echoed Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, who last year talked of the 'tacit atheism' that prevails in Britain. We are not so different.

Not that the scene is entirely bleak. Modernity has enacted important human values, often rooted in Christianity, even if not explicitly, such as respect for inalienable rights and democratic procedures, and a refusal to accept structural poverty as inevitable. We reject terrorism, torture and violence as a means of political change. We recognise entitlements to education, health care, welfare and housing for all. Yet as the bishops at the Synod of Oceania recognised that in Aus we suffer from (EO 7 and 18):

· a gradual lessening of the natural religious sense and the sense of Providence

· a disorientation in people's moral life due to the denial of faith's rôle in forming conscience

· a decline in influence of religion in civic life

· a consequent diminishment of the rôle of the churches as teachers and of the Catholic Church as a magisterium even for the faithful

· an alternative magisterium of science, technology, media, government, academic and other institutions leading the public imagination and institutions

· the power of non-Christian ideologies such as secularism, individualism, consumerism and economic rationalism in our region, even amongst Christians

· a decline in Catholic faith and practice in lives of some, to the point where they accept a completely secular outlook as the norm of judgment and behaviour

· summing up the situation, John Paul II recalls Pope Paul VI's caution at a Mass at Randwick racecourse in 1970 that here in Australia "there is a danger of reducing everything to an earthly humanism, to forget life's moral and spiritual dimension and to stop caring about our necessary relationship with the Creator", which in turn leads to a practical indifference to religious truths and values which clouds the face of divine love. (Ecclesia in Oceania §§7 & 18)

Indeed for all the benefits of our Christian history and the continuing unidentified influence of Christian assumptions in so much of our national life, a good case can be made for the proposition that our 'post-Christian' culture is in much worse shape than pre-Christian, Roman or Aboriginal culture where at least there was an openness to the transcendent, invisible, unmeasurable, uncontrollable, divine. The culture of modernity, as Tracey Rowland argues, may not only be practically indifferent to faith but may actually inoculate people to faith in a way tha the ancient religions never did.

I am a Member of the Infertility Treatment Authority, a body charged with regulating artifical reproductive technologies here in Victoria. This past fortnight has been an especially complex one for ITA, given the very high profile debate about access of so-called 'psychological infertile' women to artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. It is part of a bigger debate about whether single and lesbian women should have access to ART. In turn this is part of a larger issues of the nature of male and female, and the proper rôles of technology and healthcare, Church and state, freedom and authority. And these, in turn, are disputes over meaning, over whether anything is true, good or beautiful...

In Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century Jonathan Glover considers a century of moral catastrophes, the factors which contributed to them and the 'defences' that held some people back from co-operating in atrocities. He observes that

One feature of our time is the fading of the moral law. The idea of a moral law external to us may never have had secure foundations, but, partly because of the decline of religion in the Western world, awareness of this is now widespread. Those of us who do not believe in a religious moral law should still be troubled by its fading. The evils of religious intolerance, religious persecution and religious wars are well known, but it is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have also come from principled religious commitment. (p. 405)

Glover notes several, including Elizabeth Anscombe's heroic protest against the use of nuclear weapons and the granting of honours to Truman by her University-a protest he attributes to her doctrine of just and unjust war which he in turn attributes in part to her religious views (pp. 106-9). He concludes that "The decline of this moral commitment would be a huge loss. If the decline of religion means this, then Jung Chang's worrying thought, that if you have no God your moral code is that of society, might be true." (p. 405)

Australia does not feature much in Glover's impressive history, but it is no oasis of morality in the twentieth century desert. The White Australia Policy, the continuing dispossession of the Indigenous People of their lands, culture and children, the more recent Tampaing with refugees, the lead which Australia has given the world in some areas of breakdown of relationships and destruction of human embryos and oler unborn children-there are many causes for shame. As the Pope recently observed, today in Australia as elsewhere,

marriage and family life is facing many pressures. This can corrode marriage as the basic unit of human society, with the gravest of consequences for society itself. As I noted when I was in Australia: 'The Christian concept of marriage and the family is being opposed by a new secular, pragmatic and individualistic outlook which has gained standing in the area of legislation and which has a certain "approval" in the realm of public opinion'. Recognizing this, the Synod Fathers urged that 'pastoral programmes ought to provide support for families that face any of the serious problems of modern society and a renewed catechesis on the ideals of Christian marriage.'

The Pope thinks the Church in this part of the world

has a unique opportunity to present Christian marriage anew as a life-long covenant in Christianity, based on generous self-giving and unconditional love. This splendid vision of Male and Female offers a saving truth not only to individuals but to society as a whole. Therefore, the theological principles underpinning the Church's teaching on marriage and the family must be carefully and convincingly explained to all. (Ecclesia in Oceania §45)

It is for this very reason he recently established the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family here in Australia.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of regulators of artificial reproductive technologies from around the world-a curtain raiser to next week's 'IVF Olympics' where 1700 scientists and businesspeople will boast openly about latest achievements or future plans in human cloning, lesbian AI, surrogacy, you name it. At yesterday's meeting references to the Catholic Church met with sniggering, laughter and barely veiled contempt, for all the supposed liberality of the participants. At one paper I attended two Melbourne University academics argued that regulators should refuse to receive submissions from groups like the Catholic Church on ARTs because the Church is not directly affected and in no special position to represent children or morality. After all, they insisted, democracy has nothing to do with morality, it is about respecting individual choice.

As I heard this I had echoing in my ears the words of the Pope in Familiaris Consortio, Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium vitæ, and only this week in Ecclesia in Oceania, about the sanctuary of marriage and family for the sacred gift of human life and about the necessity for an objective morality as a limit to the human will. In his pontificate John Paul has shown how reverence for these things are not merely Catholic obsession or an optional extra for some people's private lives: rather, they go to the very heart of the kind of civilisation we are and the kind of beings we become.

Thus in Ecclesia in Oceania he observed that the very societies like Australia which talk so insistently about human rights still "deny the most basic right of all. Did not Christ himself say 'I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly' (Jn10:10)? Indeed, the Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus' message. In the present conflict between a culture of life and a culture of death, the Church has to defend the right to life from the moment of conception until natural death, at every stage of its development." The Pope is all too aware of what an abortifacient society Australia is. Within a kilometre of this very lecture room over 25,000 babies are killed every year; thousands of embryonic human beings are stored in freezers with an uncertain future; and parliamentarians are being lobbied to allow the 'mercy-killing' of the handicapped, frail elderly and dying. As the Pope insists:

It is not a question of the Church seeking to impose her morality on others, but rather of being faithful to her mission to share the full truth about life as taught by Jesus Christ. The promotion of the sacredness of life is a consequence of the Christian understanding of human existence. This message must be taught by the Church not only within the Catholic community but, in a prophetic way, to society as a whole in order to declare the power and beauty of Gospel of Life. (Ecclesia in Oceania §30)

Post-modern Australia is a society with ears far from wide open to hearing such a Gospel. Here we like to choose, more or less at whim, our own values and ethics, our own sexuality(s), our key relationships whether spousal or quasi-spousal, parental or quasi-parental, committed and permanent or more transient. We like to choose whether and when we are fertile or infertile, what kind of children we have and when and in what numbers and even whether they will live or die. After all nothing is fixed, given, natural or unnatural in these matters: democracy is about choice not morality. And anthropology, physiology, psychology, ethics, none is thought to be definitive for such choices. What matters is freedom and preferences and free fulfilment of those preferences. We each have a right to what we want, as long as no-one is hurt too much in the process. Churches, governments and professional bodies are expected to keep out of such private matters.

If scientists want to clone and dismember human embryos, if 'dinks' want to sterilize their bodies or abort their mistakes, if people want to terminate unborn children for having the wrong sex or for being twinsw hen we only want one or for having some other undesired characteristic-who dare say no? If men want to be mothers, or single women want ARTs, or others want to design their children genetically-why not, as long as there is consent and no one is hurt? If people want doctors to kill them, or want to help grandpa make a dignified exit sooner rather than later, or want do-it-yourself home abortion or suicide pills-what is to stop them? The consumer mentality and the language of the free market have now thoroughly colonized even the bedroom, the nursery and womb.

Having for decades now disconnected our conceptions of the human person, sexuality, marriage and family, from human nature and practical reason, and elements of each of these from each other, we are now hard put to resist anything, no matter how perverse. Peter Singer now suggests bestiality is the go. How are the Church or ordinary people to resist that particular move? After all, sex in post-modernity is largely a recreational activity, and fertility a matter of consumer choice. Who on earth goes to the Church for advice on entertainments or shopping? As Michael Casey's recent book, Meaninglessness, so well details, the great project of modernity has been to discredit any ideas of transcendence or absolutes, indeed any limits on the human will, and if it has succeeded anywhere it is in Australia.



4. Where to from here?
So where to from here? In decades since Evangelii Nuniandi, and especially during the pontificate of John Paul II, the Church has engaged in a searching critique of the culture of modernity: its individualism, relativism and values disorientation; the various intellectual streams which flow into and out of it; the fragments of dubious 'isms' which are now commonplace assumptions; the effects of the new ideologies on institutions, laws, social policies, and structures of sin; the harm all this does to individual consciences and lives.

One great ecclesial achievement of that period has been in the area of what might be called 'meta-evangelization': the realization that there is more to be converted than individual souls. Cultures, communities, traditions, institutions, to large extent shape and reshape individual values, identities and destinies. Therefore the Church must engage in a so-called 'culture war', a battle for individual hearts and souls fought on the level of the cultures which nourish or corrupt them.

Increasingly John Paul II has supporters not just in ecclesial circles but amongst secular social commentators. They have begun to detail a range of social ills partly or wholly attributable to what Anne Manne called 'the shadowland of moral chaos' in the 'duty-free' society. They join him in seeing the problems, even if they are yet whole-heartedly to join him in his solution: the radical re-evangelizing of culture and society, of all our institutions including the academy, including indeed Catholic academies and academics. Only this week he called upon us Catholic academics to rededicate ourselves to research, teaching and other services in keeping with our 'cultural mission'. It is our "honour and responsibility," he said, "to dedicate [our]selves without reserve to the cause of truth. [and] to observe the highest standards of academic research and teaching as a service to the local, national and international communities. In this way, [we] play a vital part in society and the Church, preparing future professionals and leaders, who will take their Christian responsibility seriously". (Ecclesia in Oceania §33)

When Cardinal Gilroy arrived back from the Second Vatican Council there was a flurry of reporters on the tarmac to greet him and question him about the Council. Asked what was thought to be the biggest problem in the modern world, they presumed he would, after this most progressive of Councils, answer 'the bomb' or 'racism' or 'the population explosion' or the environmental question'. Instead, he said clear as a bell, 'mortal sin'! He was right, of course, even if he was also being deliberately provocative. In the end much more important than the issues we faddishly build up as 'crises' of our days is the question of whether any of us will get to heaven and whether, in the meantime, we are willing to work with Christ in building up his kingdom here on earth.

But what Gilroy did not suggest, and which a modern Cardinal might, was that fed by and feeding individual mortal sin is the sin of the world, social or structural or cultural sin, that encourages vice or moral confusion or self-will or unlovingness. In his constant call to the evangelisation of culture, John Paul II has underlined that the Church can no longer afford to see itself as a parish- and parish-school- maintenance operation. The 'new evangelisation' is a matter of life and death for the Church and the world. Just as John Paul II has recast the papacy for the twenty-first Century as an evangelical office, a prophet to Church and world, so he invites all the faithful to join him in the task of carrying Christ to every corner of the earth.

But we must go into that field with eyes open. There are plenty of challenges out there. Our culture will not be turned around by one Pope, even a very great one, or by one project or bureaucracy. It will require a concerted missionary endeavour parallel to that by which Christianity was first brought to Oceania. John Paul II's vision is not one of despair and paralysis at the enormity of the task, nor is it a naïve ten-year pastoral plan. Rather he has offered a new grid through which to configure the culture to the Gospel and by which to marshal all the resources of the Church to confront nihilism, individualism, relativism and secularism head-on.

There is plenty of evidence already of successes: the collapse of communism; the continuing Christianisation of continents such as Asia; the enduring influence of Christianity on social attitudes, law and culture, as was recently demonstrated by the capitulation of government to public opinion on lesbian access to IVF; the increase in vocations in some places resulting from the reform of seminaries, the revaluation of the priesthood and an increased devotional fervour; the huge rise of the ecclesial movements; the new ecclesial involvements in national and international scenes through bodies such as the Pontifical Council for the Family; new pastoral projects in so many areas; the constant work with young people and the enthusiastic response of some of them; the consolidation and recovery of valuable elements of the Catholic tradition; the gradual redirection of scholarship and new academic initiatives as alternatives to the stubbornly secular; and the development of doctrine in areas such as marriage and family.

Just as the Church of two millennia ago converted the decadent pagan Graeco-Roman culture with all its abortion, infanticide, divorce, slavery into a Christian one; just as the Church of a millennium ago converted the dualist, anti-intellectual Albigensian culture into a Christian one; so we are ready again at the dawn of the third millennium for a new evangelisation. We might leave the last word to John Paul II:

Therefore, among the priorities of a renewed endeavour of evangelization there has to be a return to the sense of the sacred, to an awareness of the centrality of God in the whole of human existence. A new evangelization is the first priority for the Church in Oceania. In one sense, her mission is simple and clear: to propose once again to human society the entire Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ. She is sent to the contemporary world, to the men and women of our time, 'to preach the Gospel...lest the Cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the Cross... is the power of God'.

The Southern Cross stands as a luminous sign of God's overarching grace and blessing. The present generation of Christians is called and sent now to accomplish a new evangelization among the peoples of Oceania, a fresh proclamation of the enduring truth evoked by the symbol of the Southern Cross. This call to mission poses great challenges, but it also opens new horizons, full of hope and even a sense of adventure. (Ecclesia in Oceania §§18 & 13)

* Very Rev Professor Anthony Fisher OP is Director of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family, Melbourne