Madonna - Prayer and Spirituality for Today's Christian

Forty years on, one of the participants of the Second Vatican Council, Michael Parer, still burns with enthusiasm for positive change in the Church. Rosie Hoban spoke with him.

It’s 40 years since Michael Parer worked at the Vatican as Theological Adviser to Archbishop Leonard Raymond of Nagpur, India. It was in the 1960s during the final session of the Second Vatican Council and the halls were filled with intellectual debate, inspiration and promise of change. Michael, a young parish priest from Victoria, was caught up in the hope.

It was an exciting time for the religious and lay people from around the world who were invited to attend. Many people in Australia read Michael’s views and accounts of the addresses in the Catholic press. At evening talks and during coffee breaks during the sessions, Michael listened to some of the world’s most renowned theologians. They spoke of issues that some would have condemned as heresy in Australia and their views added weight to the many questions and conflicts that had plagued Michael since leaving the seminary. It was in Rome that Michael met many of the people who helped shape the direction of his life in the years that followed.

‘Here I had discovered that the people at the peak of the theological world were discussing the anguish I was daily living out in my priestly life. I was not isolated. I was part of the world church scene. The crisis, the tension, the uncertainty of the priesthood that was in my life was their concern’, Michael wrote of the Council in his book, Dreamer By Day.

Michael’s book, subtitled ‘a priest returns to life’, was an account of his life as a priest and particularly the time he spent in Rome during the Second Vatican Council. The book was published in 1971, just two years after he was granted a dispensation from the priesthood. Michael had eight years in the seminary in Melbourne and his ten years as a priest were tormented, filled with doubts and battles to maintain a celibate life in a Church structure that could not respond to his pleas for help.

Ironically, those years were among his happiest. He served for many years as a parish priest at Yarraville and Gordon in Victoria where he grew to love the people he served in the inner city and the life of a small country town.

‘I loved parish life, but in many ways it was false. I spent a great deal of time trying to manipulate people to get them through the pearly gates, but if a poor person turned up for help the Church’s first inclination was to send them to St Vincent De Paul to be helped’, he says.

It was also in the seminary that he developed his close and faithful relationship with Jesus, which continues to thrive. However, his relationship with the institutional Church has changed dramatically.

Today, Michael reflects on what the Catholic Church might have been if the decisions of the Second Vatican Council had been faithfully executed. He scoffs at suggestions that a third Vatican Council is needed, when many churchmen in authority have ignored the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

‘If you told me 40 years ago that a time would come when not a single nun would be teaching in most Catholic schools then I would not have believed you. I think the same will be said of parish priests in less than 30 years time. An even greater change is happening before our eyes. The Church is deconstructing now and this process is being furthered by the issue of paedophilia’, Michael says.

Michael believes churchmen have erred in not giving the people the spiritual freedom to ‘own’ their church and make the decisions about their church. He says the community must take responsibility for Jesus in the world and not hand it over to a seminary-trained male priest, married or unmarried.

The challenge to the Church today is that people are becoming disenchanted and, even worse, indifferent to church and religion. People are substituting religion with other things in their life, things with much less meaning, such as football, the Internet and entertainment, he says.

‘The communities are drifting. I sometimes go to Mass with my wife and I look around counting the heads. There are almost no teenagers in the church any more. More priests in Melbourne are over 80 than under 40. The powerful clerical model of church is dying.’ This can lead to a new, but different kind of church.

‘In parishes we have to reignite the notion of Christian communities. We need Christian communes of less than 300 people, so they can be a fellowship to serve in ministry of the Gospel to the desperate areas of poverty, the refugees, Aboriginals and street kids. These are all areas that would involve Jesus today. That is prayer. Prayer is about saying I can do something to change this for people.’

Michael’s prayer these days involves nurturing higher education for Aboriginal people in Australia and as well as the Khmer people in Cambodia. He remains a prolific writer, contributing papers and submissions to some of the important and controversial issues facing the Catholic Church, including celibacy for priests and the role of women in the Church.

Since receiving his dispensation in 1969 Michael has had an extraordinary career. He has published and edited twenty-four books, including Dreamer By Day; worked for the ABC in television and film, and has lectured in universities around the world including Iran and America. Michael has been married for more than 30 years and has three sons and a daughter. His wife, Mally, is very involved in the national Movement for a Better World and in the Churchill Lumen Christi parish where the family has lived for many years.

Dreaming towards the future

Forty years on, one of the participants of the Second Vatican Council, Michael Parer, still burns with enthusiasm for positive change in the Church. Rosie Hoban spoke with him.