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Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century Bouma, Gary

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Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century 1st Edition, Kindle Edition
by Gary Bouma (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Australian Soul challenges the idea that religious and spiritual life in Australia is in decline. This fascinating book describes the character of religious and spiritual life in Australia today, and argues that, far from petering out, religion and spirituality are thriving. Gary Bouma, the leading expert on the state of religious life in Australia, provides the most up-to-date facts and figures and compares the 'tone' of Australian religious practices with those of other countries. Australians might be less vocal and more reticent about their religion than Americans are, but their religious and spiritual beliefs are no less potent. Australian Soul describes and analyses our religious and spiritual life in detail as well as providing a series of case studies that illustrate the range of practices and beliefs in Australia today. Australian Soul predicts a vital future for religion and spirituality.



ISBN-13

978-0521673891
Edition

1st
Sticky notes
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Cambridge University Press
Publication date

15 March 2007




Product description

Review
'Bouma's references to theoretical and research resources are authoritative and, in my view, worth the value of the book. The suggested reading, references and index at the back of the book are second-to-none. The book is strong on analysis, diagnosis, trends, surveys, and aetiology, rather than prescription.' Insights

'The Professor … is positive about the remaining and growing 'spirituality' outside, as well as inside, organised religion.' Church Times
Book Description
This fascinating book challenges the idea that religious and spiritual life in Australia is in decline.

Book Description
This fascinating book challenges the idea that religious and spiritual life in Australia is in decline. Australian Soul not only describes and analyses religious and spiritual life in detail, it also provides a series of case studies that give voice to the range of practices and beliefs in Australia today.
Review
'Bouma's references to theoretical and research resources are authoritative and, in my view, worth the value of the book. The suggested reading, references and index at the back of the book are second-to-none. The book is strong on analysis, diagnosis, trends, surveys, and aetiology, rather than prescription.' Insights

'The Professor … is positive about the remaining and growing 'spirituality' outside, as well as inside, organised religion.' Church Times --This text refers to the digital edition.
About the Author
Professor Gary Bouma is head of the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. He holds the UNESCO Chair in Interreligious and Intercultural Relations – Asia Pacific and is Chair of the Standing Committee on Ethics in Research Involving Humans. He is the author of numerous works on the interaction between religion and society in Western countries including Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
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Product details
ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000SIWMQ4
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (15 March 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2420 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 4 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 254 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0521673895Best Sellers Rank: 605,048 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)155 in Religious Studies - Sociology
378 in Religion & Sociology
393 in Sociology of ReligionCustomer Reviews:
4.3 out of 5 stars 4 ratings



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Top reviews from Australia


M. I. McGuinness

5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 20 February 2016
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An interesting picture of spirituality in Australia



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D Cronshaw

5.0 out of 5 stars Australian cultural and spiritual shifting tidesReviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on 18 August 2018

Australian Soul offers a comprehensive description of the nature of religious and spiritual life in Australia today. It analyses the post-modern, post-Christendom, post-empire, post-colonial, post-national, post-ecumenical, post-denominational, secular, post-secular, post-book, post-family, post-patriarchal and multicultural characteristics of the Australian context. Bouma builds his case with up-to-date facts and figures, the latest research and astute insights and case studies. Rather than bemoaning religious decline, he observes how religious and spiritual life is changing and showing itself as 'A whisper in the mind and a shy hope in the heart' (words used by Manning Clarke and Thornhill to refer to a key characteristic of the ANZAC psyche, appropriate also to broader Australian spirituality). A key theme was his analysis of the cultural shift from tradition to rationality (after the Renaissance, Reformation and especially the Enlightenment), and now to experience and emotion as the dominant form of authority. It is a move from orthopraxy (in terms of right worship scripting), to orthodoxy (right beliefs and creeds), to orthoprassy (right feelings and emotional responses). Bouma indicates how this shift in authority-base is reflected in what spirituality is appealing, what church forms are declining and how religious communities and worship services are organized. His analysis of globalization and changing family structures were also significant, particularly because these issues are not often dealt with in the emerging church literature. Churches need expressions that address global justice issues and that cater for people other than the 40% that live in nuclear families.
Gary Bouma is a La Trobe University Professor and an authority on religion and society in Western countries, and his work is worthwhile background to understand the heritage and trends of Australian religious life and grass-roots expressions of spirituality.

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Margaret C. Sadler
5.0 out of 5 stars Super BookReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 24 December 2010
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This book is very intriguing to read. It relates to US readers as well as those from Australia. Gary Bouma uses statistics from Australia to illustrates changes in how we practice religion in the 21st Century. Many changes are happening all around us but they happen without analysis for the most part. Dr. Bouma has spent most of his career in this field and has many insights which are helpful to the student of religion and society.

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Tony Castle
3.0 out of 5 stars an interesting readReviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on 15 February 2014
Verified Purchase

It's always interesting to see what others perceive about your nation. Yet when we consider a nation, how can the whole be encapsulated? Statistics are of no use, particularly in Australia - (We're notorious for not trusting those who govern and therefore are sometimes less than honest in what we give away!) Overall, I think that Bouma does justice to the spiritual question of Australia; a hard task for any author.
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===
This was published 16 years ago

Australian Soul
ByBarney Zwartz and Reviewer
February 24, 2007 

https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/australian-soul-20070224-ge4aj4.html

THE LEGENDARY, laconic, sun-bronzed Aussie is a fast-fading stereotype but there is one aspect of Australian culture where it lingers: our distinctive religious personality. Historian Manning Clark captured it in another context, the Anzac spirit, when he called it "a shy hope in the heart" (the thematic statement for Gary Bouma's excellent book, a valuable corrective).

Outsiders often misinterpret this, or simply miss it. Bouma says most sociologists have been influenced by secular, anti-religious social theories or by negative comparisons with religion in America. Historians and sociologists have consistently underestimated or denied the importance of the spiritual in our lives, and consider Australians an irreligious lot.

Not so, insists Bouma, who wrote Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century partly to counteract this myopia.

Institutional forms might be struggling but religion and spirituality are important in Australians' lives.

"There is a profound shyness - yet a deeply grounded hope - held tenderly in the heart, in the heart of Australia. It is not characteristically Australian to trumpet encounters with the spiritual like some American televangelist. That would be an obscene dealing with what is so precious. Australians hold the spiritual gently in their hearts, speaking tentatively about it. The spiritual is treated as sacred."

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This happens in a distinctively Australian way, involving "a tentatively curious exploration involving listening, attending, venturing with the whole person and being true to one's experience". For both indigenous and newer Australians, it is grounded in place and land. Sacred spaces are there and are used, but may become apparent only when threatened.

Bouma says Australian religion is characterised by a serious but light touch, a quiet and even inarticulate reverence, a readiness to laugh at itself, a commitment to life here and now, and a live-and-let-live tolerance.

Australians are wary of enthusiasm, of high-temperature and demanding religion, and of imported mass-culture. They dislike too much certainty or authoritarianism - the "God's police" who see themselves as guardians of purity. They dislike intolerance especially.

Bouma defines religion as socially organised and spirituality as a freer-form openness to dimensions beyond time and space. They provide meaning to life, making it worthwhile to go on, and above all they provide hope.

Anzac Day is a fine example: Australians have taken a commemoration of World War I losses and created wider meaning, myth and ritual, which they can celebrate formally or informally.

From the first, Australian religion was anti-institutional. The First Fleet came when religion in England was at a nadir, failing to reach the new urban poor. The convicts were largely outside organised religion in England, and also in Australia, where the church was too often an instrument of the state.

The long decades of having an absent ultimate authority in political, economic, social and cultural life can be seen in the distant, indistinct, low-expectation relationship with the transcendent that Bouma considers characteristic.

"While Americans seem to have an immediate sense of the presence of God, for Australians God is more distant - I suppose, at least as far away as London is from Sydney. . . . (For Australians) God is distant . . . and, while useful for desperate last-minute appeals, not quite relevant to daily life."

But religion in Australia has changed in important ways. The emphasis on experience and feelings over authority or reason reflects a trend far wider than religion.

Bouma says institutional Christianity was first characterised by authority, still exemplified by Catholic and Orthodox churches. Here hierarchies rule, and the sacraments are central - a mystery administered only by priests, which the worshippers receive kneeling with hands outstretched. Architecture in this tradition developed a sense of distance between the worshippers and the holy.

The next era, that of reason, came as a protest through the Protestant Reformation. Theology became sets of reasoned propositions based on an ultimately rational God, and mysticism was viewed with suspicion. The central feature of worship became the sermon, and architecture changed to promote hearing. The central posture was sitting and hearing, and the worshipper's chief duty was to believe correct theology.

The postmodern stage, which has been a long time developing, emphasises the worshipper's experience, senses and feelings. It is typified both by Pentecostal megachurches such as Sydney's Hillsong and by tiny New Age groups. Here what counts is not the theological precepts of the church but emotional fulfilment; the worshipper's duty is correct feelings. "Sadness, grief or guilt are but momentary transitional feelings on the way to ecstasy and praise."

The second key change in Australia is the rush to diversity, across a number of dimensions: more religious groups, more religions represented, and the range of differences within religious groups.

The trend to diversity started with postwar immigration and accelerated as Australians embraced multiculturalism in the past 30 years.

Muslims here come from 65 countries, while Australian Catholics were distinctly Irish until postwar immigration brought Italian, Maltese, Yugoslav, Polish, German, Dutch, Hungarian, Baltic, Lebanese, Indian and Sri Lankan Catholics.

Growth in these areas has been at the expense of formerly dominant British Protestant churches: Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Brethren and Congregationalists. There are now more Buddhists than Baptists, more Muslims than Lutherans, more Hindus than Jews. Mormons, Baha'is, Scientologists, Pagans and New Age groups are growing fast.

In fact, religion and spirituality in Australia are flourishing, contrary to the script dictated in recent decades by secular academics and the media. Religion was supposed to wither away as science overcame life's vicissitudes, Bouma says, but secular humanism has not proved as satisfying.

In fact, Bouma says, Australia was never as secular as some claim. It never formally separated church and state, and regarded overt religiosity merely as a form of bad manners. Secularism in the 21st century is not hostile to spirituality, as it was in the 20th - rather, as religion becomes more assertive in the public arena, secularism is learning to accommodate it as one voice among many.

This book is an important contribution: insightful, authoritative, accessible and extremely wide-ranging. Indeed, Bouma covers so much ground in 212 pages that inevitably he sometimes seems glib. Occasionally I'd like to pause and see more closely how he justifies a generalisation (I am sure he will expand on this material in the future).

Bouma is a liberal Anglican priest as well as professor of sociology at Monash University and occasionally his prejudices emerge. I think he is wrong, for example, to call evangelical Christians life-denying and uninterested in engaging the world. But these are minor reservations.

Bouma is certainly right that Australia's future will feature religion and spirituality. That is, he says, because the needs they address are core to humanity: hope and meaning and connections.

It will also be driven by diversity (which requires a more careful construction of personal identity), and by the rise of faith-based education. After two generations that seemingly deserted spirituality, it is on the rise among young people.

He concludes that modern forms will "neither be weak, insipid nor irrelevant; nor will they dominate the landscape . . . Hope will continue to be nurtured and quietly celebrated - a shy hope in the heart."

Barney Zwartz is the Age religion editor.

===
Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality inthe Twenty-first Century,
by GARYBOUMA. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007, 248 pp.;$34.99 USD (paper).For a nation that covers an entire con-tinent, Australia has proven surprisinglyeasy for sociologists of religion to overlook.Gary Bouma’s new book,
 Australian Soul,
presents a useful corrective to this over-sight. Bouma has taken on the enormoustask of depicting Australian religion andspirituality in all of its diverse forms, and inthis he has done an admirable job. Hismain thesis is that religion in Australia is,in fact, quite vital, and that those sociolo-gists who ignore or discount the impor-tance of religion in Australian life are look-ing in the wrong place.As Australian society has changedsince World War II, he argues, Australia’sreligious composition has also changed.Fewer Australians attend traditional main-line Christian churches. The number of religious groups in Australia has increased,and many non-Christian religions havegrown considerably. Movements to revital-ize the old churches have providedAustralia with a humming Pentecostal andconservative Christian scene. And religionhas escaped the bonds of the church into adiffuse “spirituality” that offers myriadopportunities for bricolage and unexpectedsoulful synthesis.The empirical basis for these claims issolid. The book presents up-to-date statis-tics on Australian religion that clearlyillustrate the decline of Australia’sChristian churches, whose membership hasdropped 20% since 1947. The result of thisshift away from the mainline churches of yesterday is a situation where, dramatically,there “are now more Buddhists thanBaptists, more Muslims than Lutherans,more Hindus than Jews, and more thantwice as many Sikhs as Quakers” (55-56).Bouma pairs this statistical abstract withvignettes that offer windows into less tradi-tional religious expressions—which are,Bouma argues, where the action is. Thusthe reader is introduced to surfing pagans,the Tibetan Buddhists of Melbourne, theevangelical megachurch of Hillsong, andirregular contemplative gatherings support-ed by the spiritual consulting groupWellspring.Bouma situates contemporaryAustralian religion in relation to the broadsocial trends that have transformed it.Many of these forces will be familiar tosociologists of religion: the growth of reli-gious diversity; the fragmenting of the tra-ditional family; the growing power of expe-rience as a source of authority. Others areunexpected. Bouma argues, for example,that Australia’s slow divorce from theBritish Empire and its groping attempts tofind a post-empire identity for itself sinceWorld War II have played a major role bothin the decline of the old religion (especial-ly the Anglican and PresbyterianChurches) and in the way that Australiansimagine God.Bouma’s most ambitious claim is thatthere is a distinctly Australian character toAustralian religion. Australian religion, heargues, is characterized by “a distaste fordisplay—whether aesthetic or affective”(32), which stands in stark contrast toAmerica, where religion is trumpeted ingaudy displays of faith, and to Europewhere religion is effectively absent. Thisdifference amounts to a durable “religiousinstitution” (34) that has shaped and con-tinues to shape Australian religion in anormative fashion. A legacy of Australia’sfounding as a penal colony during a periodof low religious enthusiasm in Britain,Bouma argues that this religious institutionhas conditioned Australians to a low-

 
BOOK REVIEWS
497
intensity religiosity that is wary of enthusi-asm, intolerance, and authoritarianism, aswell as to expectations that its churches toplay more than a marginal role in society.Bouma argues that this implies that “meas-ures used to detect religious and spirituallife in the American context may not besufficiently sensitive” (33) to captureAustralian religiosity. Australia shouldtherefore not be seen as
less
religious thanthe United States, just
differently
religious.This is a strong claim. Unfortunately,Bouma does not provide the kind of longi-tudinal evidence needed to establish thatthe difference is as longstanding as “reli-gious institution” implies. If Australia’s reli-gious institution is tolerant, laid-back, andmarginal, then how should we understandAustralia’s long history of Catholic-Protestant conflict, puritanical “wows-erism,” and politically prominent churchleaders? Has participation in religious serv-ices really been as consistently infrequentas it is today? Were religious services in thenineteenth century as quiet and subdued ascontemporary ones? Given the broad scopeof the book, Bouma must rush past thesequestions, but this necessarily leaves thereader wondering whether Australia’s con-temporary tolerant, undemanding religiousculture might just as fairly be read as arecent development, or as evidence of adecline in religious fervor.This criticism, however, does notnegate the overall accomplishment of thisbook, which remains a grand analysis of Australian religious life in the tradition of Hans Mol. The detailed depiction Boumaprovides, with its many parallels with anddivergences from America and Europe,make it worthwhile reading for anyoneinterested in examining the fate of religionin the modern West.Damon Mayrl
University of California, Berkeley

===

 
Alternative Spiritualities in Australia
Carole M. CusackUniversity of Sydney
Abstract
The five-yearly census data since 1996 has revealed that the fastest-growing religions inAustralia are Buddhism, Islam and Paganism. The 2006 census data broadly identifiedAustralia as 30.6% not religious (combining categories such as Atheism, Humanism and No Religion and Religion Not Stated/Not Adequately Defined), 63.8% Christian, and5.6% religions other than Christianity. Australia is a generally secular nation with noestablished church, in which approximately 14% of the population attends religiousservices regularly (defined as at least once per fortnight). When ‘religions other thanChristianity’ are removed from this equation, the percentage of Christians regularlyattending is 9% of the population (21.8 million in 2009). This paper examines Australia’ssecular and multicultural nature and seeks to place Paganism in the religious mix.This draws attention back to Australia’s convict foundation, as one cause of thecomparative secularity of Australia (as opposed to America) is the fact that the UnitedStates were settled by religious refugees where Australia was settled by convicts hostileto religion and authority. That one third of those convicts were Irish is a possible factor inthe attraction of Celtic types of Paganism and alternative spirituality in Australia in thetwenty-first century. This paper has three sections: first, the place of Catholicism and theIrish in eighteenth and nineteenth century Australia is examined; second, the growth ofalternative spiritualities in the West and Australia in particular is considered; and third,the data from the 1001 and 2006 Australian Censuses on alternative spiritualities, andPaganism in particular, is discussed.
The Irish in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Australia
European settlement of Australia dates from 1788, when Governor Arthur Phillip madelandfall in Port Jackson on 26 January, now celebrated by non-Indigenous Australians asAustralia Day and mourned by Indigenous Australians as Invasion Day.
1
 The First Fleet,captained by Phillip, comprised eleven ships carrying 1030 persons (including 548 maleand 188 female convicts). The prisons of England were overflowing, because after theAmerican War of Independence no further convicts could be sent to America. Between1717 and 1775 about forty thousand convicts had been transported from Britain andIreland to America. From 1787 to 1810 about twelve thousand people were transported toAustralia, which was about 7% of the total convicts that would arrive (slightly over170,000). The decade 1820-1830 brought about 31% of that total. Population growth wasstimulated by free settlement. Transportation of convicts had ceased entirely by 1868.
1
 Carole M. Cusack and Justine Digance, ‘The Melbourne Cup: Australian identity and secular pilgrimage',
Sport in Society
, Vol. 12, No. 7, 2009, p. 878.

 
Arthur Phillip was charged to ‘enforce a due observance of religion and good orderamong the inhabitants of the new settlement, and that you do take such steps for the duecelebration of publick [
 sic
] worship as circumstances will permit’.
2
 Like all Anglicans,Arthur Phillip accepted the Thirty-Nine Articles, a set of doctrinal statements first issuedin 1571, and prayed using the Book of Common Prayer. As a servant of the King, ‘[he]had to take the Oath of Abjuration rejecting all Roman Catholic pretenders to the Englishthrone, and … reject[ing] the doctrine of transubstantiation, the catholic understanding ofwhat happened to the bread and wine during the Mass.’
3
 The Irish Catholic convicts werea constant source of disruption and rebellion in the colony, as they were forced to attendChurch of England services and were denied priests and Catholic liturgy and devotions.There was a deep-seated suspicion of Catholics within the early colony: one of the mostsignificant ideas was that Catholics were essentially untrustworthy, were
bad citizens
.This was partly due to the identification of Catholicism and Irishness; the 1798 Rebellionwas proof positive of the traitorous character of the Irish.The first Catholic priest to celebrate Mass in the colony was Father James Dixon, whohad been transported for his part in the 1798 Irish Rebellion. His permission to serve,resulting in the first Australian Mass in 1803, was retracted when he was implicated inthe Castle Hill rising of 1804. This was a rebellion by 300 Irish Catholic convicts, whichwas easily crushed by the military corps. This led the colonial authorities to believe that aformally appointed Catholic chaplain would improve morale and conduct in the colony.This enraged the Anglican chaplain, Samuel Marsden (known as the ‘Flogging Parson’),the most important cleric in the colony. He frequently expressed his hatred of Catholics:The number of Catholic Convicts is very great... and these in general composed ofthe lowest Class of the Irish nation; who are the most wild, ignorant and savageRace that were ever favoured with the light of Civilization; men that have beenfamiliar with… every horrid Crime from their Infancy. Their minds beingdestitute of every Principle of Religion & Morality renders them capable of perpetrating the most nefarious Acts in cool Blood. As they never appear toreflect upon Consequences; but to be… always alive to Rebellion and Mischief,they are very dangerous members of Society. No Confidence whatever can be placed in them… They are extremely superstitious, artful and treacherous, whichrenders it impossible for the most watchful & active Government to discover theirreal Intentions… [If Catholicism were] tolerated they would assemble togetherfrom every Quarter, not so much from a desire of celebrating Mass, as to recitethe Miseries and Injustice of their Banishment, the Hardships they suffer, and toenflame one another’s Minds with some wild Scheme of Revenge.
4
 Another example of this bigotry is Marsden’s belief that only marriages celebrated in theChurch of England were valid. In 1806 he drew up the ‘Female Register,’ a documentclassifying the marital status of all women in the colony as widowed, married, or
2
 Quoted in Jean Woolmington (ed.),
 Religion in Early Australia: The Problem of Church and State
,Cassell, Sydney, 1976, p. 1.
3
 Hilary Carey,
 Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions
, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p.3.
4
 Quoted in Robert Hughes,
The Fatal Shore
, Collins Harvill, London, 1987, pp. 187-8.

 
concubine. Robert Hughes calls this ‘an inspired piece of creative bigotry’
5
: all womenwho were married by any rite other than that of the Church of England (including Jews,Catholics, Baptists and other small non-conformist denominations), no matter howexemplary their relationships, were classified as ‘concubines.’ Marsden sent thisdocument to William Wilberforce in London, where it was accepted by the Englishestablishment as a factual record of the colony’s lax morals.The first authorised priests, Fathers John Joseph Therry and Philip Conolly had arrived in1820 and the foundation stone of Sydney’s St Mary’s Cathedral was laid within a year oftheir arrival.
6
 Father Therry’s commission was revoked in 1825 due to his frequentclashes with Governor Brisbane. The next Governor, Richard Bourke, passed the ChurchAct in 1836, which gave ‘financial assistance for ministerial salaries and buildingsubsidies to the four main denominations in Australia though, as the largest church, theAnglicans received the greatest share.’
7
 From this point, Catholic schools were fundedand the Catholic Church became more secure. John Bede Polding, a former novicemaster at Downside Abbey in England, had been offered the bishopric of Madras but hadrefused it in 1834. In 1842 he was consecrated Archbishop of the Australian Catholicclergy. Nineteenth century Australian Catholicism was a religion in a high state of tension, for anumber of reasons. The colonial government instituted an assisted immigration scheme in1836; ‘the scheme lasted until 1886 and brought out over 200,000 immigrants, nearly halfof them Irish. As late as 1856, a survey showed that less than half the Catholics couldread or write. Their church was truly a church of the poor.’
8
 Politically, Catholicism wasdivided, in that the Irish parishioners were politically radicalised through ‘nationalistopposition to British rule in their Irish homeland … Protestant persecution of Catholics inthe early days of Australian settlement, and because of the working class status of a bigmajority of Australian Catholics’.
9
 The clergy were often English, intellectually-oriented,Roman-educated, and thus at odds with the sentimental, colourful popular/folk religionfavoured by their flock.In response to this tension, Catholics in Australia created their own subculture. Bodiessuch as Catholic Scouting Troops, Catholic Business Colleges, and so on testified to thissub-cultural separateness. There were religious organizations such as the Children ofMary, in which children expressed their devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Great ceremonyexisted in Catholic communities pertaining to sacraments such as First Holy Communionand Confirmation. For Catholics, these things were reminders of the reality of the otherworld, life after death. Deprived of politics, public life, and social advancement, the Irishturned to Catholicism as the sole focus of their national spirit. The famine years of the1840s in Ireland accelerated this identification between being Irish and being Catholic.
5
 Hughes,
The Fatal Shore
, p. 247.
P
 Patrick O’Farrell (ed.),
St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney 1821-1971
, Devonshire Press, Sydney, 1971, p. 1.
7
 Roger Thompson,
 Religion in Australia: A History
, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 9.
8
 Edmund Campion,
 Rockchoppers: Growing Up Catholic in Australia
, Penguin, 1982, p. 45.
9
 Thompson,
 Religion in Australia
, p. 13.



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