CHARLES WOOLEY

For a nation that does so well in international sport, we seem to lag when it comes to spiritual gold

H ave you worked yourselves into a lather of indifference reading how the Catholic Church’s laborious ‘sainthood recognition process’ is looking into the life of a certain Eileen O’Connor from Waterloo in Sydney? Australia might be in line for only our second saint in 230 years. For a nation that does so well in international sport it seems we do lag behind when it comes to spiritual gold.

“Eileen was a young woman who received the love of God, multiplied it in her heart, and passed it on to others,” proclaimed the Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher. O’Connor’s story is actually much more interesting, and a braver one than that. It is about the selfless work among the poor and sick of Sydney, a hundred years ago, by a gravely ill young woman who was almost totally paralysed since childhood. She died at the age of 28 and certainly deserves some kind of recognition but maybe more than this: “It is my hope,” intoned the Archbishop “that the heroic and saintly example of Eileen O’Connor will inspire everyone to live faithful lives as disciples of Jesus Christ.”

I don’t know if there’s a central office where they produce such bland clerical cliches, but the worst I ever heard was at St David’s Cathedral in Hobart in 1996. An ABC announcer Ric Paterson, with solemn and moving dignity, read aloud the names of the 35 people murdered in the Port Arthur massacre. It was the saddest moment that I can remember in the life of our city. There was an intense upwelling of grief and tears from which we were only rescued by the unctuous remarks of the next speaker, a cleric, who assured us it was all OK because the dead would “be gathered to the bosom of Abraham.”

There is a point where anyone born after World War 1 (including my own late and sainted mum) reasonably asks, “Wait a minute, what century is this we are living in?” Is it possible for a rational modern person to believe that in the 46 billion light years stretching from Earth to the edge of the observable universe (just the bit we know about) that there is somewhere a Great Hall of the Saints where a couple of withered old retainers are preparing yet another seat at an overcrowded table? I can almost hear the old chaps grumbling: “Well the universe might be infinite but this bloody hall isn’t. There must be 10,000 saints up here and half of them are daft and difficult. How many more can we be expected to fit in?”

“Yeah and most of them couldn’t wait to be martyred. I remember the day back in the 1480s when 813 of them arrived all at once. Silly buggers preferred beheading by Ottoman soldiers rather than agreeing to convert to Islam. They could have had 72 virgins but instead they had me run off my feet.

“Mate, I’ve always said you’re a bloody saint.”

More to the point, why in that distant hallowed hall would they take any notice of the postulations of a bunch of clerics trying to run a dissolute and outmoded outfit on a remote and tiny blue planet a squillion light years away in the back blocks of an obscure galaxy with the silly name, ‘The Milky Way’?

I think I faintly hear those ancient retainers still grumbling, “I don’t know about that lot down there. They can’t even protect the kids in their care.”

With the Church on trial everywhere and clerical heads rolling right left and centre, clearly what was needed was a stunt. For the decaying house of Windsor a royal marriage always redeems the show, at least until the next royal divorce. Things are so crook right now in the Catholic firm, what better public relations ploy than the canonisation of a new Australian saint? While it might cause some grumbling in heaven, down here on Earth it might just distract the gullible.

But don’t blame the churches for all the madness. Here are a couple of lunacies from the present secular world that would make you long for the crazy thinking of the Christian Middle-ages. Two catching my attention this week were ‘They Day’ in Victoria plus an extraordinary industrial entitlement claim from transsexual actors in Hollywood. I hardly know where to start. Which is the worst? I suspect it’s got to be ‘They Day’, the one day of the month where Victorian government staff have been asked to avoid the use of ‘gendered’ language like ‘he’ or ‘she’ and use instead ‘they’ or ‘them’. These pronouns are to apply to everyone and not just to people who are transgender. Because the word ‘it’ is the only English language alternative to ‘he and she’ (but is thought offensive) we are now asked to distort the language by awkwardly substituting the plural for the singular. Hence, cop this: “I’m looking for Bob. Where is they?”

There is no further I can decently go into this mire except to reasonably wonder for how many transgender people are we doing this? The Australian Bureau of Statistics website tells me that in 2016 they counted 1260 sex and/or gender diverse people in Australia.

And finally you might not have noticed that US actor Scarlett Johansson has dropped out of playing the movie role of a transgender man. I interviewed her once and she seemed thoughtful and considerate, which might be why she succumbed to pressure from the American LGBTI community that only transgender actors should play transgender characters. But more generally in acting where do you go with that? Sean Connery, a Scotsman got away with playing a Russian submariner and Mel Gibson, an Australian raised American, won plaudits in Scotland for playing a tartan freedom fighter. And how good was Meryl Streep’s Australian accent?

I don’t want to offend the transgender acting community, where work might be hard to find, but I do remember a Hollywood story from the set of Marathon

Man. Dustin Hoffman showed up one morning tired and bedraggled and his co-star, the venerable Sir Laurence Olivier, asked him why he looked so ghastly. Hoffman explained he had slept rough because his character role required being on the run and going for days without rest. Olivier reportedly arched an eyebrow and said, “But my dear boy, it’s called acting.”