The Southern Cross | September 2025

It’s funny the off-hand conversations you have in the strangest places that stick in your memory for some reason.

A few years ago, I was having a regular skin cancer check with my dermatologist when we got talking about my job at the Church and he said: “the problem with the Catholic Church is that all it ever says is no.”

It was not long after the same sex marriage debate, but he also raised a few other examples which I hardly need to name.

The conversation came back to me when I was listening to Professor Massimo Faggioli talk about the recent history of the Church and the increasing number of people who prefer to call themselves “spiritual” rather than religious.

The move away from the institutionalised Church is well documented and due in part to the sexual abuse crisis and the sense of betrayal this has caused. But there are other factors that come into play including a general disinterest in joining formal groups such as political parties, trade unions and even sporting clubs. It’s much easier to join a gym and turn up whenever you like than make a regular commitment to a team or club.

Cradle Catholics who no longer practice their faith often tell me they still ‘believe’ but they don’t get anything out of going to Mass. Their children, most of whom went to Catholic schools, are even less inclined to walk into a church (unless they are on a Contiki trip in Europe that includes St Peter’s Basilica).

That’s not to say they aren’t good people with a strong desire to help others and often advocate for justice and equality. Many of them volunteer for or support worthy causes and live by Christian values such as love one another.

I asked Prof Faggioli what the compelling argument was for this group to actively participate in the life of the Church.

His answer was both simple and complex. For a start, he said everyone needs rituals in their lives, even making coffee in the morning, and for families it wasn’t easy to engage in Christian rituals outside the Church. An individual seeking a ‘spiritual’ life outside the parish could visit a monastery or go on retreat but that wasn’t necessarily possible for busy families bogged down in work and school.

“God doesn’t need a Church, God’s grace doesn’t need that, but we do,” he said.

“When people say I am spiritual but not religious I say good luck with that, you’re better than me. I mean, it’s possible if you’re a saint, or Simone Biles, or Tolstoy but for people who have a cell phone and TV, it’s very difficult.”

But as a historian he also looked at the way that the Church has evolved and is struggling to find its way in a world of growing sectarianism and a heightened sense of the self.

To summarise, he said the Church was once viewed as the only place you could find salvation and was a place for everyone – from the aristocracy to the poor. It was also a place where people were baptised, left and came back, a pragmatic but also very human and realistic approach. Difficult topics such as sexuality were simply not discussed but nor were they a barrier to participation.

Now there are two extremes in society creating instability and forcing people to question the future of the Church. On one hand, religion has been manipulated as a tool to sustain a certain group, based on a political viewpoint, ethnicity or such

At the other extreme is the view that the Church is a place that leads to perdition and the only way you can find salvation is by being outside of it. The only religion that can be defended in public is a spirituality that has left the church, its tradition of liturgy, clergy and worship behind. The latter is a result of the abuse crisis but also the perception of injustice towards women, gay rights, patriarchy and so on.

Enter Pope Francis and his approach to issues that were once only spoken about in “smoke-filled rooms” but are now openly discussed.

It might make things more difficult in some ways because the Church is asked where it stands on issues on which Catholics disagree. But if we want the Church to be a place for freedom and liberation – spiritual, moral and intellectual – then surely this is the only way forward.

If we want to be able to explain to people why ‘no’ is sometimes more liberating than ‘yes’, and is based on the dignity of human life, then we have to, in Prof Massimo’s words, “reconstruct from scratch”.