Why I'm still a Catholic

Until now, I've seen my duty and vocation as pursuing my personal journey, always guided by the wonders of our great tradition, knowing how much it could both humble and stretch me. I have tried to introduce my children to a Pilgrim Church's offerings (though I am not sure how successful I've been ... as oneEureka Streetcorrespondent replied to an Andrew Hamilton article recently 'they don't want our Catholicity').

And I would have been alive to requests from ordained ministers and religious to serve the Church. I would have happily left the bulk of it to them: the job of ritual, of teaching and administration and I would have respected them for fulfilling that role.

Whereas now I feel naïve and, yes, angry. I am struck by some unpalatable truths about some key Church officials' priorities ... amid them warning about the perils of the secular world!

So why do I still bother? Partly because I'd feel so much poorer without my faith. It anchors me. It introduces me to the whole notion of a journey in life, such an inviting metaphor.

It brings a great capacity for rapture, beauty, sensuality, joy, alongside the capacity for acute vices because emotion is not mortgaged in the scheme of offerings made to us, that's the majesty of it all. Risks are invited within our faith. 'Ours is a faith of possibilities' was a wonderful phrase included in a Redemptorist pamphlet distributed in my home parish in South Perth back in the 1970s. It influenced me to my core, then and now.

So, I treasure the sheer tradition of our faith. I seek it out. It helps me fulfil the natural human urge to make meaning; as the British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks insists: 'We are meaning-seeking animals.'

My conviction is that our children and grandchildren will be immensely the poorer for not growing up with a Catholic sensibility, without access to the rich armoury of belief, consolation, glimpse of the divine, the whole notion of commitments, of artistry, of abundant life.

So somehow, we, lay people especially, have to ask ourselves some big questions. How much are we prepared to commit ourselves to refreshing this Church of ours? How much do we value it in our lives? How much have we sought to replace it with other elements (because meaning is offered in various parts of our society — it's a more contested space than before)?

How much have we dodged evaluating its impact on ours and on community lives? How much have we left it to the officials; abandoned them and left them unreformed, when all about us we're experiencing considerable institutional reform in our daily working lives? I've been through about three big restructures in my media life and more could be coming. This rarely proceeds at a pace that we choose. It dislocates, often profoundly.

Did we seriously delude ourselves that the Church could escape all that? One can rarely prophecy the exact manner of acute challenge. Otherwise it wouldn't be a crisis, just a big problem. But truly to see the Church 'crucified' on the cross of something as awful as sexual abuse and cover-up, is very hard to bear. Who would have thought this would be the vector? But it is.

In the words of respected Vatican reporter John Allen, from his bookThe Future Church: 'The real question ... is not whether the bishops are up to the challenges of the 21st century. The question is whether the rest of us are?'

Again, why do I bother? Because somehow I can't just stand back from it all. I'm not sure what is asked of us individually. I don't even know my talents for any new roles.

But then again, I am haunted by a bold statement from St Edmund Campion, before returning from safe France to England in Elizabethan times, and to almost certain martyrdom: 'The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun, it is of God, it cannot be withstood: so the faith was planted; so it must be restored.'

The setting may be different. But some of his courage and surrender rings a bell. How many of us are up to it?