CATHOLICS are being urged to tick the “Catholic” box when they fill out their Census form on Tuesday, August 10, while Eastern-rite Catholics have been advised how to complete the Census forms to reflect their faith and practice.
Data from the religion question – number 23 on the Census form – is crucial to assist parishes, dioceses and Catholic organisations in understanding their communities and planning for ministry and mission, according a blog posting on the Australian Catholic Bishop Conference website.
“Census data tells us a great deal about the demographics of self-identifying Catholics in particular regions, and for this reason, it is invaluable to pastoral planning,” the blog entitled Census 2021: Why Catholic identity matters, states.
How to fill out the religion question has become a source of contention, with groups like the Rationalist Society of Australia, argue current figures of religious adherents are inflated, and assert the question asking people to identify their religion is “misleading”.
Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher wrote in the Weekend Australian that “Many Christians, perhaps most, through most of history, have not ‘practised’, in the sense of going to church on Sundays, or have practised only irregularly”.
“There’s recently been a campaign to get them to tick “No Religion” on the coming census,” Archbishop Fisher wrote.
He said religious believers “constitute a very broad church and to accuse most of them of having no religion is to misunderstand human beings and to misunderstand religion”.
“To say that ‘anyone who isn’t a full-time, every-time, religious hardliner believes none of it’ is nonsense,” Archbishop Fisher said.
Meanwhile, the National Centre for Pastoral Research has provided advice to Eastern Catholic eparchies to alert the faithful of the correct way to complete the Census form.
“While the religion question provides tick‐box response categories for the major religious groups, the ABS also makes provision for counting members of religious groups with small populations,” NCPR director Dr Trudy Dantis wrote on the ACBC blog.
“This option is extremely important for our Eastern-rite dioceses, so that they can obtain demographic statistics from the Census about their own individual populations,” she said.
Dr Dantis said Catholics from the Syro-Malabar, Chaldean, Ukrainian, Melkite and Maronite communities should choose “Other” and write in the name of their religious group, for example, “Ukrainian Catholic”.
“This will ensure that they are counted correctly within their own community, rather than assuming them to be Latin Rite Catholics,” she said.
