By Matthew Lau
“Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.” – Psalm 127:1
Catholic Answers Live was recorded on international land for the first time during last week’s fourth annual ‘Why Be Catholic’ conference in Perth.
About 800 people registered for the “Ephphatha” themed event from 17 to 19 October, hosted by Evangelisation Australia.
Apologists Tim Staples, Karlo Broussard, Stacy Trasancos and Cy Kellett each gave talks on a wide-range of Catholic topics across the three days and answered a plethora of questions in two recorded sessions of Catholic Answers – the first held at UNDA Fremantle, with the second in Corpus Christi College’s new state-of-the-art theatre.
In an exclusive interview with The Record, Catholic Answers host Cy Kellett described Australia as “a magnificent place with magnificent people”.
“I got the sense when we first got to Sydney and started talking with Catholics there that the Church is under pressure here, and I think people are feeling that pressure,” he expressed.
“In the United States, it’s actually been quite shocking how much pressure is on the Church and how quickly it happened. It seems like five minutes ago we were a respectable part of society and now, to many people, the idea of being faithful to the teachings of Christ and his Church is almost a ‘hate-crime’. So I imagine that’s probably coming increasingly to Australia.”
On the third and final day of the conference, Mr Kellett spoke on the topics of “Catholic Faith vs Modern Confusion” and “Catholic Heroes in the Modern World”.
“My basic premise is that we understand the modern story to be a story of progress [particularly in technology, politics, economics, and art]. We see ourselves as having made progress over the roughly 500 years of the modern world.
“What we don’t tell is the story of decline that goes with that, we have suffered a series of losses that are actually very damaging to culture.”
He categorised the four losses as such: the loss of the unity of the Church as a liturgical Church, the loss of faith in Christ, the loss of God, and the loss of reality.
“Christianity as it was given to us by Christ is liturgical Christianity, which was shattered in the year 1517 and following,” Mr Kellett explained.
“The loss of faith in Christ comes with the rise of French and German philosophy; in which the philosophers were perfectly willing to admit that there may be a God or there probably is a God and that the God was just, but they no longer felt that Christ needed to be at the centre of culture.
“This is followed in the 19th-century with the rise of certain scientific ideas and ideas of people like Karl Marx, with a loss of God himself – no longer did people think that progress was associated with God, they thought: ‘well humans can make progress on their own’.”
What followed, he said, was two World Wars.
“What happened after the traumas of the First and Second World War was that people turned to comfort to television, and we suffered a fourth loss – the worst loss of all – which is the loss of reality.
“We no longer live in the real world; we live in a world that’s given to us through screens. So we are isolated, alone, and living in an unreal world – this is the story of the modern world that’s not told, and if we tell it, we know then how to recover what was lost,” Mr Kellett elucidated.
“We go back to God, to Christ, and most particularly to the Eucharist, which was at the centre of medieval culture and is the thing that was lost with the shattering of the Church in 1517.”