THE Church in Australia has to face the realities of the information age if it wants to see more young people join, General Sir Peter Cosgrove said in a question and answer with Brisbane’ Assembly of Catholic Professionals last Thursday.
He said every stream of traditional belief – be it Catholic or otherwise – “is being forced through the prism of the information age”.
Sir Cosgrove saw it in the military too, not just in ethos but in laws governing day-to-day conduct.
“Example – soldiers in Afghanistan return from a patrol in which some of their people have been blown up,” he said.
“Now in days past, you’d arrive back (and) you’d de-stress them in some way… these days, those kids jump on the phone and ring up their dad and say, ‘Oh you know what just happened five minutes ago, Bill Smith got blown up outside there and nobody’s doing anything’.”
He said the information age was responsible and “you cannot get that toothpaste back into that tube”.
The only option was to adapt and use the information age to inspire younger Australians to share the faith, he said.
More than 240 Catholic professionals gathered to hear Sir Cosgrove’s take on current events and how his faith played a role in his life.
He talked about his early life growing up in a working class Catholic family in Paddington, Sydney.
He recalled growing up in the 1950s – the communist panic, the booming post-war economy and his Catholic education that shaped him.
He said he found his vocation in the Vietnam War.
“I found out I was a natural soldier,” he said.
He recalled the day a chaplain came out on a combat patrol with his platoon.
“We were out there to fight… armed to the teeth and fire-breathing out of our nostrils, and at one stage, I put the padre… near the rear of the platoon with my sergeant and my sergeant said, ‘Thank you very much’.
“Now Catholic chaplains doing anything like this were unarmed – that was their decision.
“So we were doing our thing and a radio call came through that there were enemy coming our way, so I put the platoon in an immediate ambush so we were all lying waiting for the foe to descend upon us and you could imagine you could cut the air with a knife at this stage because danger is approaching.
“And we’re lying there, being terribly quiet, waiting for the VC to come into our position and whispered from soldier to soldier came a message, obviously bound for me – I’m lying there – and it was, ‘The padre has drawn his pistol.’
“So I sent a whispered message back, and as it went back, every soldier who received the message had a grin as he passed it to the next soldier and eventually it got to the padre, ‘Put the bloody thing away’.”
Asked about the war in Ukraine, Sir Cosgrove said he found the international response – particularly the imposition of unprecedented sanctions in severity and breadth – to be an interesting development.
He was hopeful about their effectiveness in restoring peace and stability in Ukraine but noted “if we were having this discussion now in Warsaw” he would be more concerned about military preparedness than sanctions.
Another question came up regarding his time as governor-general – should Australia have a head of state?
“We do need somebody who is the steward and the guardian of the constitution outside of the courts,” Sir Cosgrove said.
The key was to have a head of state without creating a “locus of power that sits outside the parliament”.
He saw a successful head of state more as a “guardian” and not a political player.
You can watch the full speech online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJYzyznXxz0
