There was a sense of a convivial but important moment in the room earlier this week in Melbourne.
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the launch of Dr Kevin Donnelly’s edition of Defend the West: The Culture of Freedom with my husband, Anthony.
The room was studded with an impressive array of personalities. Some in the room were venerable in their contributions to faith, business, arts, education, law, finance and political policy; others were young yet concerned about the “culture” of their professions and vocations.
There was a sense that people came from subtly different traditions and backgrounds, but were united in the shared space with a deep concern about the foundations and soul of Western culture and the future of Australia as an integrated and flourishing society.
The book describes itself thus:
“The Culture of Freedom traces the origins and unique nature of Western culture and argues, for all its sins, it must be acknowledged and defended. In an increasingly dangerous world where Western civilisation is facing the enemy without and the enemy within, now is the time to celebrate what is best about the West.”
It seemed like a moment of recognition. Those in the room talked of the “spiritual roots” of society, the transcendent and even principles dear to our own social Movement – subsidiarity and human dignity.
This was not a narrow and tidy conservatism by numbers.
Kevin Donnelly welcomed the audience with his amiable self-deprecation. He is a former teacher, educational researcher and advisor, author and one of Australia’s most vocal critics of faddish and increasingly absurd educational nostrums. He was an outspoken critic of Australia’s National Curriculum.
Kevin spoke of being a “Broady boy,” that is, a boy from the “other side of the tracks”. He was referring to the suburb of Broadmeadows, 15 kilometres north of Melbourne, a village hit hard by the Depression and the first place for military training sites during the war and the post-war Housing Commission to establish public housing.
Today, of course, Broady is not an outer suburb, and its housing prices are beyond the reach of the average single-income family.
Kevin spoke briefly of his younger life as son of a communist father and Catholic mother and his education at the Broadmeadows High School, which was clearly worlds from the retired grammar school principals and elder business leaders also at the launch that evening.
Through a great friend in journalism and editing, I had been invited by Kevin Donnelly to contribute to the new book. My chapter addressed Christian witness and the connection between memory and human dignity.
My chapter was a humble contribution to other chapters by such figures as Dr Paul Morrissey (president of Campion College), Kenneth Crowther (principal of St John Henry Newman College), Anthony Dillon (Indigenous commentator), Dr Fiona Mueller (educationalist), and the notable former principal and lecturer Dr Colin Black, amongst other contributors.
My chapter was written in a narrow time frame, which was challenging, but it was a welcome prompt to reflect upon the role and importance of the Thomas More Centre in Australia today.
As readers of this newsletter will know, I see the genealogy of the TMC not so much as nostalgia for “the good ol’ days”, but as a well from which inspirational personalities and ideas can be drawn to refresh and transform our own efforts in the very demanding present.
In the chapter I wrote about the existential and metaphysical place of memory in any culture, but particularly in the Western and Byzantine patrimony.
Memory is not simply about practices such as rote learning or times tables.
Memory represents an organic, growing and adaptive cultural stream that nourishes the individual, collective, spiritual and moral memory of a society. In the Judeo-Christian culture, memory is constantly moved on by individual people and their communities who are (as I write) “not only cogent and compelling in ideas, but they are also movingly authentic in their lives and faith” (p. 55).
The biblical roots of liturgy and prayer and the Christian sacramental life are built on anamnesis, an inner remembering of God’s creative personal love and justice working in history.
God’s presence in time through the liberation of Jesus Christ radiates and resonates in the conscience and soul of the present, and prompts a personal, intentional freedom and creativity that enriches the future.
In contrast, secularised and de-natured ideologies rely on vaporising our connections with all that was educative and graced about the past. We can neither build on, learn from or orientate ourselves on false memories or present idols.
In The Culture of Freedom, I name two Christian witnesses to the power of memory who “help illustrate how Christian imagination and ethical thinking is personalist and crucial to a civilisation which aims to build a common good around the universals of human dignity, reason, life and creativity” (p. 56).
They come from the Christian East and West – the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and English analytical philosopher and Catholic professor Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001).
Both intellectual and moral giants stripped off the pretensions of a thinly Christian culture of the 20th century and stand as witnesses for our own times.
They were, as I conclude in Donnelly’s book, “important and enduring prophets to the memory of God’s work in our world. Both as converts bring a fresh but deeply spiritual and concrete vision” as both examine “existential question(s) about the meaning of life, what constitutes good and evil and how best to find fulfilment”.
We work at the Thomas More Centre to recover not only the “great books”, but a literacy and conversation with the “great” human minds and hearts of such inspired and inspiring heroes and heroines.
It is on such broad shoulders that we can restore the hope of a culture suffering spiritual amnesia and an “identity crisis”. It is also by rubbing shoulders with these “greats” in the company of like-souled others that we can build our leading lights for the future.
Please share our mission with others.
Anna Krohn
Executive Director
Thomas More Centre
