Pundit in priest's clothing

Acting on Conscience: How Can We Responsibly Mix Law, Religion and Politics? University of Queensland Press, 280pp, $34.95

JESUS' famous formulation from 2000 years ago established the principle of the separation of religion and politics, church and state, that would become one of the foundation stones of Western civilisation.

Even the Catholic Church -- as brilliantly successful an institution in worldly as much as spiritual terms -- has for most of its history respected this separation.
While it has often played its politics with a Machiavellian shrewdness and ruthlessness, it has found a way of living with secular states, rather than trying to dominate or overthrow them. Jesus had set the terms with such authority that even the worldliest popes tended to hold his power ambitions in some check.

There is a further complication. Western culture's central religious texts, the Gospels, provide a story in which a main political figure is forced to act against his conscience.
In John's version of the Pilate story, the Roman governor, in obeying his political duty, which requires him to keep order in Jerusalem, has to condemn to death a man whom he knows to be innocent.

So, not only does Jesus provide the mandate for separating religion and politics, his story allows reflection on the severest ethical dilemma that confronts those who take on the grave vocation of politics.
From these origins the West would create an entirely secular political order. The modern form of this order, liberal democracy, has in turn developed its own cultural form.

Its principles and traditions have been largely framed by a commitment to natural law, the view that there are inalienable rights universal to all humans, irrespective of religion, race, age, sex and status.
The success of liberal democracy is dependent on another modern development. That is the belief that there is only one ultimate authority for each adult individual in judging what is the right course of action, in all matters great and small: the conscience.

Almost everybody who inhabits the modern West has come to hold this view.
Part of the liberal-democratic political order is the freedom of citizens to practise their choice of religion. The West has reached the point where it is the secular state that sanctions religion, exemplified by the British case, in which the prime minister appoints the highest figure in the Church of England, the archbishop of Canterbury.

Here is the opposite of the theocratic Muslim view, which renders politics subordinate to religion.
The separation of church and state has not meant that clergy would refrain from making public comment on moral and political issues of the day. In particular, bishops and archbishops, because of their high clerical office, seem to feel from time to time it is incumbent on them to use their religious authority to pronounce on secular matters.

This is a fine line to tread. It is fraught with the danger of compromising their religious authority by speaking out on issues in which they do not have special expertise, such as industrial relations, abortion, drugs or diplomacy. The moment they sound like any other citizen spouting an ordinary opinion, their office, which is predicated on them having some higher divine calling, inevitably loses some of its legitimacy.

This is especially the case in our times, in which the search for metaphysical answers to the central human questions about how to live and what to do has become critical for many. Here is precisely where the Christian churches have failed. They have lost their traditional and most important function of providing persuasive answers to questions about the meaning of life and of death.

Their spiritual role was, at its core, to provide succour to people in tragic times, principally by lifting them out of the torment and grief of the moment, and strengthening their belief that some higher purpose guided events on the human plane.
The contemporary mainstream Christian churches seem embarrassed to talk about God. When they do, their words usually sound wooden and archaic.

More particularly, they have failed to find a way of talking about the sacred in a way that may speak to the times. As a result, their concern with social issues often sounds like compensation: an attempt to find a new role, recasting the priest as a non-government social worker.
This is not to question the extraordinary role the churches continue to play in practical welfare for the poor, the old, the sick and the disadvantaged.

It is to question what is left for a religion that looks more and more like a welfare arm of the secular state. The priorities have gone awry: in a church, pastoral care must remain subordinate to the spiritual mission of communicating the faith.
Frank Brennan is a Jesuit priest, a lawyer and an academic.

In 2002, he was awarded the Humanitarian Overseas Medal for work in East Timor, and a year later received the Australian Centenary Medal for his service with refugees and for human rights work in the Asia-Pacific region. He makes regular contributions to public debate in Australia.
His new book, Acting on Conscience, is a collection of essays reflecting on the boundaries between church and state.

It is clear, sober and sensible; at times it is so sensible as to be almost commonplace. It is argued with measure, its tone mercifully free from hectoring or sanctimony. Brennan is notably independent-minded.

One of his themes is church intervention in social life. He uses former deputy prime minister and Nationals leader John Anderson to outline one of his examples of justified intervention. Anderson had noted in a parliamentary debate in 2002 that the Myall Creek massacre of Aborigines had occurred in his electorate in about 1840.

Most citizens in NSW at the time opposed the prosecution of white settlers for the murders. The trial was aborted. The Catholic Church then led a public debate demanding a retrial on the grounds that, in Anderson's words, this was an unsatisfactory drawing of the boundaries of humanity .

A retrial followed.
Brennan also provides three examples of church intervention in public moral controversies that he considers unjustified. In all three, the Catholic bishops became involved in cases of private litigation in which their intervention had not been sought by either party.

One of them concerned providing in-vitro fertilisation to a single Victorian woman in her late 30s. At the time, what she sought was illegal in Victoria but not in NSW. The woman's doctor considered that trips from Melbourne to Albury for IVF treatment harmful in her situation, so he started proceedings in the Federal Court to ascertain whether Victorian law was contrary to the Commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act.

The judge decided it was. The Catholic bishops had no right of appeal. So they took the case to the High Court.

The appeal took three days, at phenomenal cost, and then the High Court unanimously dismissed this extraordinary application by the bishops. Given that both parties to the dispute were happy with the Federal Court ruling and had no intention of appealing it, Brennan condemns the bishops: Trying to agitate the matter afresh in the High Court, they were strangers who had no business interfering in the final curial resolution of the matter between the parties.
The most engaging discussion in Acting on Conscience is signalled in the title.

Brennan takes up Cardinal Newman's discrimination that he would toast to conscience first, the pope afterwards. He quotes with approval BenedictXVI, in his former self as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger: The true sense of the teaching authority of the pope consists in his being the advocate of Christian memory. The pope does not impose from without.

Rather, he elucidates the Christian memory and defends it. For this reason the toast to conscience indeed must precede the toast to the pope because without conscience there would be no papacy.
This Ratzinger formulation is too clever by half.

Taken in the way that Brennan wishes, as a defence of the primacy of individual conscience, it is in direct conflict with the constitutive logic of the Catholic Church, a strictly hierarchical institution that grants special authority to its head, the pope, in modern times going so far as to deem it papal infallibility . It grants its priesthood the special powers to forgive sins and administer sacraments. It publishes lengthy catechisms of its doctrine and teaching, the most important of which requires its lay members to obey without question and under threat that disobedience will contravene divine law, sanctioned by divine punishment.

Allow primacy of individual conscience and the entire religious elite, from priest up to pope, loses its special authority and thereby its legitimacy. Once this happens, anyone with Christian inclinations should, in more honesty, join a Protestant church. For the Reformation hinged on this issue.

Martin Luther and John Calvin enshrined the primacy of individual conscience: conscience is, as the great Puritan poet John Milton put it, God's representative in man .
I have never had any link to the Catholic Church, yet I feel some sympathy for its impossible dilemma over individual conscience in the modern world. As an institution, it is what it is.

To ask it to accommodate primacy of conscience is like asking a lion to stop roaring and to love antelopes rather than eat them. It is asking it to become a species it is not.
Indeed, Ratzinger, as quoted by Brennan, elsewhere contradicted his own casuistry about conscience.

He stipulated, for example, that: When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.
So much for freedom of conscience.

BenedictXVI could cite Roman governor Pilate as his precedent, if he chose.
Brennan presents a carefully worked argument against recognising same-sex unions as marriage in Australia. He does so without any recourse to Catholic teaching.

The case he develops could just as readily have been put by a secular citizen. And here is the problem with Brennan's essays: the fact he is a Jesuit priest makes no distinctive contribution to any of his reflections. His thinking is squarely in the tradition of the liberal-democratic Western Enlightenment, guided by a Socratic commitment to the rational pursuit of just action guided by natural law.

Whether his readers are practising Catholics or not, lapsed Catholics or not, anti-Catholic or indifferent to Catholicism, will have no bearing on whether they agree or disagree with the cases he puts.
For him, there is no conflict between church and state, for the uncomplicated reason that he keeps church out of his interventions in public moral debate. Consequently, when he calls himself a meddling priest he is being unfair to himself.

This brings me back to a point I made at the start. Brennan is a Catholic priest. That his essays are so thoroughly independent from his church, not even being inflected with a Catholic tone, means that he contributes unwittingly to an embarrassment about God .

There is an inevitable subtextual undertow to his writings on morals and politics. He leaves the residual impression that the serving of the Eucharist to the faithful is something that consenting adults do in private. Of course, on the surface, such is the case.

But, if one of the most intellectually able members of the priesthood appears to fall over backwards to keep the religious framework of his belief out of his public views, then he helps diminish the authority of that framework. A priest is not a secular citizen.