Challenges in the Australian Catholic Church

Year 9 Assessment Catholic Church in Australia

The Australian Catholic Church has change by a large margin in the 21st century and has had many challenges arising. The decline in religious vocations, falling mass attendance, married clergy, female ordination and the role of the laity are all issues contributing to the challenges of the Australian Catholic Church. Several of today's Catholics differ, often passionately, about the qualities of the liturgical reforms as well as the reasons for the steep reject in Australian Mass attendances. Ordinary mass attendances have gone down by 50-60 percent in the 1960s to just about 15 percent in 2001.

The Catholic Church has had a number of challenges and one of these is the Decline in religious vocations. The religious vocations are on their way of a sudden decline and this has been confirmed by the pope, "typical Christianity is fading more rapidly here in Australia than in any other country." The lack of occupations will prove to be a large crisis as predicted the Church would soon have less than one sixth of the priests required to carry out a Sunday mass. Benedict XVI believes several people sense self-sufficient and feal that they do not need Christ or Christianity. He also said that many people felt that Christianity was old-fashioned which makes it harder to encourage and help people to follow religious vocations.

The other challenges that the Australian Catholic Church faces is the Married clergy. The Australian Council of Priests decided to write about this arguing that marriage should be no bar to ordination and asking the church to consider letting priests who had left the clergy to marry to be allowed to marry if a priest. The other thing they asked the church was to extend the right held by thousands of married clergy who converted to Catholicism from other faiths to practise as priests to other married men. The priests leave the Austalian Catholic Church because of these letters been rejected and these are the challenges the church faces.

The other challenge that they face is the Female ordination letting females be ordained as priests. This can be a good thing letting females be ordained because it can bring more priests which would mean more masses, but then again the argument runs that the Eucharistic leader or priest must be a male, because a natural resemblance must exist between Christ and the priest.