The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has illustrated once again that Australian Catholics should not look to their church for high-level collective moral leadership.

The best that can be expected is a piecemeal response. That is my recent experience anyway, which began painfully with dealings with the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and ended more positively with engagement with Caritas Australia.

The purpose of my story is not to point fingers but to throw extra light on the Catholic ecosystem; that is, to illustrate how diverse and complex the Catholic Church in Australia is, as a guide to others inclined to urge the church to action on any cause.

The story begins with the creation of a new advocacy group, Catholics for Justice and Peace for Palestinians. In mid-May, this new group, initiated by a distinguished Catholic, John Menadue, publisher of Pearls and Irritations, attempted to call on our Catholic bishops to take a stronger position in support of Palestinians. Referencing Popes Francis and Leo, this included support for an immediate ceasefire, release of hostages and prisoners, and recognition of a Palestinian State.

On asking the ACBC general secretary for contact details for each bishop, the group was told that was not possible, and that the position of the ACBC was contained in the previous year’s Social Justice Statement called “Truth and Peace: A Gospel Word in a Violent World”, a general treatise on misinformation, violence and truth. This was our first rebuff.

We then decided just to write to the smaller, more senior group of archbishops, seeking their support and alerting them that we would be going public in due course. We thought this was the next best step because of their potentially higher profile. Silence. Our second rebuff. We feared that our approach was dead in the water.

A little later, on 20 May, our statement, “Time for Catholic Bishops to Speak Up for Palestine”, was issued to the media, and published in Pearls and Irritations and later by the Australasian Catholic Coalition for Church Reform, which forwarded our statement to each Australian bishop.

Slowly we began to hear back encouragingly from some of the individual bishops, members of the Bishops Commission for Social Justice, Mission and Service, that something was in the pipeline. They even welcomed our intervention. On 3 June, this Bishops’ Commission issued a call for peace. It joined with Pope Leo in expressing concern about the “worrying and painful” situation in Gaza, and called for “the entry of dignified humanitarian aid and to put an end to the hostilities”. It recalled the 2024 Social Justice Statement and suggested three positive steps: genuine dialogue, truth telling and education.

It was a low-key and careful statement, in typical church language, lacking much sense of urgency, which also suffered from being issued not by all the bishops but by this small commission chaired by Bishop Timothy Harris of Townsville. Still, we appreciated it. Some diocesan Catholic media gave it some extra publicity, but it seems to have made little impact in mainstream media.

Taken together, the failure of the ACBC and senior archbishops to engage and the caution of the bishops’ commission may reflect internal episcopal disunity, their instinct to preserve unity in a divided Catholic community, and fear of political entanglement. But their stance risks further eroding the moral authority many Catholics still look to them to exercise.

About the same time, a much stronger statement called “Time to end the silence” was published on 23 May in Pearls and Irritations by Julie Macken, Facilitator at the Justice and Peace Office, Archdiocese of Sydney. Macken stated that the office “cannot remain silent in the face of such normalisation of state violence [by Israel]. We cannot have our silence taken as consent for ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide”. Furthermore, “we of the Justice and Peace Office apologise for our silence. We have no excuse but — perhaps like millions of other Australians — we kept waiting for those in leadership to take the lead, for Israel to withdraw, for a ceasefire, for international treaty obligations to be respected. That day has never arrived. These are not excuses. There are no excuses. But in the absence of leadership and respect for our shared humanity, we say enough is enough”.

Macken did not specifically mention her own Australian church leadership. But she might well have, because the cap fitted.

From its base elsewhere in Sydney, Caritas Australia, the church’s aid and development agency, has been running its own Gaza Emergency Appeal since October 2023. It works with its partner, Caritas Jerusalem. Over time its concerns for the people of Gaza have escalated. On 14 May this year, building on the words of Pope Leo, it joined with Catholic Religious Australia to call for “an end to human suffering” and unimpeded humanitarian aid access. Caritas chief executive Kirsten Sayers called out “the grave level of human suffering in Gaza” and executive director Anne Walker decried the “intensification of offensive actions in Gaza”. Then, on 17 July, the Holy Family Church in Gaza, a favourite of Pope Francis, suffered a devastating attack by Israeli forces.

Out of the blue, I was delighted to be contacted by the Caritas advocacy team who mentioned that Caritas had noticed with interest the statement by Catholics for Justice and Peace for Palestinians and issued an invitation to us to participate in a 24-hour “Voices for Gaza” vigil on Parliament House Lawns in Canberra on 22 July honouring the 17,000 children killed in Gaza. My wife and I did so. Caritas jointly hosted this very moving vigil with several other well-known civil society organisations, including Oxfam Australia, Save the Children and Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). Such public acts of witness shared with secular organisations add powerful energy to public statements.

Caritas officials have followed up, participating in the March for Humanity across the Sydney Harbour Bridge on 3 August. It has offered briefings with Caritas Jerusalem, working with some bishops and religious and planning further collective action. Our CJPP group was among those invited to a special inter-faith service at the Australian Overseas Aid Volunteer Memorial in the grounds of the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture in Canberra hosted by Caritas, among other groups, in honour of World Humanitarian Day on 19 August. It was a profoundly spiritual occasion addressed by representatives of various faith communities, including Cardinal Mykola Bychok of Melbourne.

The church has many different eyes, ears and voices. How do we reconcile the differing approaches within the church? There are silences, silos, work behind the scenes and in public, advocates of balance, dialogue and common ground, and some willingness to build inter-faith alliances and to “go public”.

I am left wondering how best Catholic activists should proceed when public moral leadership is needed. If the church leadership is doomed to tag along or, worse, lag behind civil society on such occasions, then other Catholic groups, agencies and individuals must take up the slack. In so doing, they help to recover something of the lost moral authority of the wider church.

Republished from Eureka Street, 20 August 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.