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Religion

On page eleven of this book, Australians are called an engagingly innocent people ‘splendidly unthinking of anything but the simplicities of affluent living.’ On page twelve, they are called ‘lazy and uncreative’. On page 311, the author writes: ‘Yet in spite of a widespread belief (mainly self-generated) that we are a nation of yahoos, we have as much capacity for some unique kind of greatness as the people of any other race and nation.’

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Given the measure of promise in Archbishop Booth’s formative years, what this memoir calls his ‘golden years’ seem sadly unproductive of lasting substance. The outward flourish of his last years in public office, and the great farewell at the Olympic Pool, do not conceal but rather emphasise the feeling the reader has that he did not nourish his diocese at the spiritual depth it needed to face the sixties.

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Women, Faith and Fetes edited by Sabine Willis & Women and Their Ministry by Keith Giles

by
October 1978, no. 5

‘Women as clergy ... would be comparable to offering a meat pie on the altar of God.’ The Rev. Ian Herring, Victoria, 1971.

That is not the isolated view of a raving misogynist. The 1968 Lambeth Conference heard the now Anglican Primate of Australia, Marcus Loane, say that the admission of women into the priesthood would sound the ‘death knell’ of men’s interest in the Church. Just like a public bar.

And at Lambeth this year, 200 Anglican bishops were billeted 2 km away from their wives, so that they could more easily ‘wait upon God’.

The established Churches, like all our political institutions, have tenaciously guarded their rituals and hierarchies from female intrusion.

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This book is a missive thrown in the face of a materialistic, consumerist society. Instead of urging us to look out for number one, it encourages taking a closer look at other people in Australian society and taking account of their needs the motivation being that of Christian Charity.

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