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This was an extremely interesting read for me coming at a time when I am working my way through Edmund Campion's book Ted Kennedy: Priest of Redfern. I was also interested in Lou's other post linking to a very orthodox materialist analysis of the origins of the Christian religion. I have to confess that I found the orthodox piece uninteresting. It was too much t like the night where all cows are black. It had no feeling for contradictions or nuances i.e. the dialectics of religious practice and belief. What Yates's article does bring to mind though is the fact of the eclipse of progressive Catholicism in the USA. Campion's book is both a personal history of Ted Kennedy and also a record of progressive Australian Catholicism - especially that wing of it influenced by Dorothy Day. So it too is a record of defeat - a lament for the Church that might have been. What we are left with now in Australia would seem to be the most orthodox and reactionary of religions, where the head Honcho Cardinal Pell was, it is rumoured, the point man for Ratzinger in his bid for the papacy. And index of the ascendancy and ruthlessness of the present leadership of Australian Catholicism was provided when the radical priest, Peter Kennedy, here in Brisbane was driven out of his church, St Mary's, by the now dominant Right. I was also interested in how Ted Kennedy in Redfern had put Aborigines at the centre of his ministry. That led him to support self-determination, land rights and social justice for Aborigines. These concepts have now also become the target of the Old Right and the New Right, that has emerged around the Aboriginal intellectuals Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton. What has emerged of late is the new orthodoxy, especially in the Murdoch Press, that to be in favour of self-determination, Land Rights and social justice is to connive at the abuse of children in Aboriginal communitieses. I am trying with some Aboriginal friends to take on that new Orthodoxy but it is a daunting task. Still in the midst of this present carnival of reaction here in Australia it is worth endeavouring to remember times when progressive ideas were not so marginal. regards Gary ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
