Is our Prime Minister more conservative than the Pope?

By MARY WARD

Australians just love talking about Catholicism, don’t they?

The fascination became pretty clear when the installation of Pope Francis occurred within the same fortnight of the installation of the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Justin Welby, earlier this year.

Two near-identical positions – each within a different branch of Christianity. With not exceptionally disparate numbers of faithful in Australia (17% of Australian identified as Anglican on the 2011 census, compared with 25% identifying as Catholic.)

And yet all we wanted to talk about was the Pope.

What would he be like? Would he support gay marriage? How about his stance on abortion? Would he be black? Would he be Cardinal Pell?

I am at a loss as to why anyone would care about these things if they weren’t Catholic themselves. But secular media really does love the spectacle of the Papacy. The pomp and ceremony are arresting for our media.

And ever since Pope Francis was voted into the top job, they just haven’t been able to get enough. Because, this new bloke is different to Pope Benedict XVI. So different, in fact,  that the UK Guardian’s Marina Hyde has gone so far as to ask: “Is the Pope Catholic?”

It all started with this:

That’s the Pope taking a selfie. Well, if you look close enough, you’ll see that it’s actually the Pope being a party to a selfie, taken by the young lad with the blue sleeve.

And the Pope has since done a variety of non-Instagrammable things that have made the headlines.

He spent a plane flight talking to the media at the back of his jet, he rang a woman who was pregnant with a married man’s child to let her know that he would baptise her child for her, and he even gave an interview in which he said that he didn’t want his Church to judge those who didn’t strictly adhere to the Church’s teachings on sexuality and the sanctity of the unborn.

A religious leader telling people not to judge other people. How scandalous.

Oh wait, that’s right. That’s totally one of the foundational principles of all Christian denominations.

I could even go all Protestant (FYI – I am Catholic) and break out a Bible verse. Here you go:

“Judge not, that you be not judged.” (Matt 7:1)

The Pope’s promise to baptise a woman’s child born out of wedlock is similarly uncontroversial from a doctrinal perspective. In fact, back when Pope Francis was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (admit it, you miss listening to newsreaders struggle over that corker of a name) of Buenos Aires, one of his most notable acts was stamping out a small group of priests in his diocese who were refusing to baptise the children of unwed mothers, claiming that they were “hijacking” the sacrament.

So, why are we treating Pope Francis like he’s the Ryan Gosling of The Vatican?

Because in Australia, we’ve come to view Catholicism as synonymous with conservatism.

It’s an association that would have been laughable 80 years ago. Back in the days of Lang and Chifley, when Australian Catholicism meant unions, Labor and the power of the working class.

But now the tides have turned. Our country’s best known Catholic politicians are middle class. They are economically liberal. And they are socially conservative. Very socially conservative.

In her article, ‘Could Tony Abbott be more conservative than the Pope?’, Erin Handley wrote of the media’s coverage of Abbott’s now infamous one-woman cabinet:

In denouncing Abbott’s conservatism and backwardness, some writers swiftly quipped that our prime minister could behave in no other way due to his Catholic beliefs.

ABC online’s chief political writer, Annabel Crabb, wrote: “It is 26 years since Tony Abbott left the seminary, but in many ways he takes it wherever he goes.” Daily Life’s Clementine Ford described Abbott as “a man with an outlook so conservative it could only have been spawned from the Catholicism he held so dear.”

Both women are brilliant writers, but it’s a little too convenient to “play the Catholic card” and paint Abbott and Catholicism with the same brush.

[Insert thunderous applause here.]

Now, I get that the leadership structure of the Catholic Church leaves a lot to be desired by way of gender equality. And that, no matter how prominent and active Catholic laywomen and women in religious orders are in the Church, there will be those who will assert that the Catholic Church is ‘anti-feminist.’ (Hopefully not in front of my mum, though. Because she will beat them over the head with her Masters of Law and her copy of The Female Eunuch.)

But why are we always so quick to attribute Abbott’s conservatism to his Catholicism – when so many of Abbott’s key policies and election promises are explicitly against Catholic teaching?

Here’s a quick compare and contrast of the Catholic Church’s and the Abbott Government’s position on one of Abbott’s key policy issues: asylum seekers.

The Catholic Church:

Here’s an excerpt from Pope John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris (‘Peace on Earth’) which explains the Catholic Church’s position on asylum seekers and refugees quite clearly:

105. … it is not irrelevant to draw the attention of the world to the fact that these refugees are persons and all their rights as persons must be recognized. Refugees cannot lose these rights simply because they are deprived of citizenship of their own States.

106. And among man’s personal rights we must include his right to enter a country in which he hopes to be able to provide more fittingly for himself and his dependents. It is therefore the duty of State officials to accept such immigrants and—so far as the good of their own community, rightly understood, permits—to further the aims of those who may wish to become members of a new society.

More recently, Pope Francis has also been advocating mercy for refugees.

In July, his first official trip as Pope was to Lampedusa, an island of Sicily, to commemorate the thousands of migrants who have died crossing the sea to escape turmoil in Northern Africa. He said: “We have become used to other people’s suffering… their condition cannot leave us indifferent.”

Earlier this month, the Pope met with several hundreds of refugees at Centro Astalli, a refugee centre in Rome owned by the Jesuits (the religious order to which Pope Francis belongs.)  While he was there, he said that more of the Church’s buildings should be used for housing refugees, telling reporters: “The Church does not need the empty convents to be turned into hotels to earn money. The empty houses are not ours. They are for the flesh of Christ, which are the refugees.”

Prime Minister Abbott:

Prime Minister Abbott’s attitude to refugees and asylum seekers are outlined in his policy: Operation Sovereign Borders.

It involves denying access to family reunions and permanent residency through Temporary Protection Visas, refusing to process those without identification documentation, committing to exclusive offshore processing and “turning back the boats.”

It is so far away from the position of the Catholic faith that, earlier this year, students from Abbott’s old (Jesuit) high school wrote him a letter begging him to reconsider his approach.

The Bishop of Darwin, Eugene Hurley’s, open letter to the Prime Minister denouncing his asylum seeker policy has been widely shared on the internet.

A similar disparity becomes apparent when you compare the PM’s policies with Catholic teaching on the environment. And foreign aid. And yet we view Pope Francis as a crazy leftist Catholic, and our Prime Minister as the archetype.

Catholicism is a broad church. Its adherents sit at various points on the political spectrum. In Australia, our most prominent Catholic leader, Cardinal Pell, would definitely sit on the right-hand side of that spectrum.

But there is no way that you can construe Catholic teachings to support the majority of the Abbott Government’s conservative policies.

Tony Abbott is not conservative because he is Catholic. He is conservative because he is conservative.

But that doesn’t make as good a news story, does it?

Do you care about Pope Francis? To what extent do you think that Tony Abbott’s Catholicism is responsible for his conservatism?