Could Tony Abbott be more conservative than the Pope?

Tony Abbott’s one-woman cabinet prompted biting feminist responses last week, and rightfully so. However, in denouncing Abbott’s conservatism and backwardness, some writers swiftly quipped that our prime minister could behave in no other way due to his Catholic beliefs.

ABC online’s chief political writer, Annabel Crabb, wrote: "It is 26 years since Tony Abbott left the seminary, but in many ways he takes it wherever he goes." Daily Life’s Clementine Ford described Abbott as "a man with an outlook so conservative it could only have been spawned from the Catholicism he held so dear."

Both women are brilliant writers, but it’s a little too convenient to "play the Catholic card" and paint Abbott and Catholicism with the same brush. Catholicism is used interchangeably with conservatism, but to do so runs the risk of overlooking the rich and, at times, progressive history of Catholicism.

An example of Catholic radicalism can be seen in the dynamic duo of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement and publication in 1933 in New York. The Catholic message they preached was revolutionary, but scholars had muffled the radicalism of Christ in pious tracts.

In The Green Revolution, Maurin noted that in the first centuries of Christianity the poor were fed, clothed and sheltered at a personal sacrifice. Indeed, the early church practised a more communal way of living than currently exists in capitalist, individualist Australia. In Acts 2:44–45, it is recorded: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” Such a message of communal living and hospitality resonated with the poor during the depths of the Great Depression.

A staunch pacifist, Day constantly defended the rights of workers and heavily critiqued the "filthy, rotten system" that kept people in poverty. She was jailed many times for her protests; the first time because she joined the female suffragists in their protest against the White House’s treatment of suffragists in jail.

She had an abortion, later married, gave birth, and separated from her husband. Despite such acts normally, which are usually considered significant stumbling blocks for Catholics, she has been enthusiastically endorsed for cannonisation (although she would probably be bemused at her own sainthood, given that she once said; “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily”).

There is radical leftist potential in Catholicism, as demonstrated by the Catholic Worker movement, not to mention a proliferation of liberation theologists hailing from South America. And closer to home, many Australian Catholics display a decidedly anti-conservative streak.

Palawa womanist scholar Lee Skye has conducted research into the beliefs of Australian Aboriginal Catholic women, who have melded Catholicism with their own spiritualities. Of utmost importance to these women are their Sacred Sites and connection to the Land—the care of Creation. Skye’s interviewees "see the raping of the Land as like the raping of Black women’s bodies" by white men, and further, all her subjects from the Northern Territory "hated greatly the mining for uranium there." Catholicism is not necessarily an anthropocentric religion; rather, the environmental care for the earth is written into the first moments of creation.

Father Brennen has been vocal about land rights for Indigenous Australians and the treatment of asylum seekers in Australia; he slammed the proposed Malaysia Solution and in 2004 he said: “To just care for the one who is other and marginalised takes great courage, conviction and resources in our contemporary society. To care justly for them requires a commitment to political action and a willingness to condemn that which is immoral even if it be popular and even if it be implemented by a government claiming a mandate.” It’s nearly 10 years since he said this, but it still rings true in light of Abbott's "stop the boats" slogan.

Bishop Christopher Saunders, chairman of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, earlier this year called for the government to raise the New Start payment for job seekers. He held that "It has long been the position of policy-makers that the low rate of Allowance functions as an incentive to finding work. Far from being an incentive, it has now become a barrier to work’"

Like Brennen, Saunders has also frequently criticised the indefinite detention of asylum seekers. Prior to the federal election, he urged a vote for social justice, stating that: "Asylum seekers and refugees have been treated badly, socially debased by the ambitions of political expediency." He pointed to the disempowerment of Australia’s First Peoples and, after the election, denounced the Coalition government’s cut to the foreign aid budget.

The idea that Catholicism departs from conservatism has new currency given the widely-publicised interview with Pope Francis, published in America. His comments saw a somewhat sickening realisation dawn on many Australians: perhaps our prime minister is even more conservative than the Pope.

Responses to Pope Francis’s comments have ranged from enthusiasm from progressive Catholics, to accusations of power mongering from atheists (and vice versa: no doubt conservative Catholics have been disappointed and atheists have sensed a faint ray of hope). The flurry of positive responses shows that there are plenty of Catholics who would support policies such as marriage equality, legalised abortion and the ordination of women.

While the Pope suggests that the Catholic church should stop obsessing with homosexuality, abortion and contraception, The New Republic’s Damon Linker aptly points out that "words remain mere words when they are unaccompanied by action". Nonetheless, the Pope’s words thus far do not contain that conservative flavour that many have come to expect from Catholics.

In his Easter address this year, the Pope yearned for "peace in the whole world, still divided by greed looking for easy gain.” He denounced the selfishness of the capitalist system and the “selfishness that continues in human trafficking, the most extensive form of slavery in this 21st century”—a pervasive issue that rarely makes media waves in Australia. Like environmentalists and the Australian Aboriginal Catholic women, the Pope perceived that the world was torn apart by “the iniquitous exploitation of natural resources”.

To say that Abbott’s conservatism is a direct result of his Catholicism is to overlook the crucial factors of class, race, heteronormativity and gender. The Catholic church is far from perfect – the string of child sexual abuses cases (and their cover-up) more than testifies to that. However, Catholicism is not inherently conservative. Instead of sidelining the Catholics of Australia, the left should engage with its radical wings to seek social and political change.