Tuesday, October 16, 2001

"God forgive our Prime Minister!" is Sister Veronica Brady's prayer for John Howard.

The author, academic and social justice advocate, was commenting on the Federal Government's policy on asylum seekers at the Fourth National Ecumenical Aged Care Chaplains' Conference, meeting in Kurrajong, western Sydney, this week.

Brady said the asylum seekers policy had left her "beginning to feel ashamed to be Australian". She said the Prime Minister "will not acknowledge the truth. I have a hunch that the God he worships is the God of the winners, the ones who win gold medals in the Olympics.

"The God in whom we believe, and who believes in us, is not. The God we believe in is the God of the losers. Jesus, in a sense, was a loser."

Hospitality, Brady said, "is a great gift of God. We're a country of migrants. Did we turn away starving Irish immigrants? I feel very distressed by the kinds of things happening recently. We seem to be losing some of the things we were taught were very important."

She said, "A 'fair go' might sound like a cliché, but … we've lost sight of the living God. We worship instead what I call the 'unholy trinity' … money, violence and instant gratification."

Brady said, "We're at one of those moments in history, when one empire is falling to pieces, and the key thing is a small group of people who keep the light alive.

"The nation, like the market, is an abstraction and an invention. What exists are communities … We simply have to love one another, respect one another, or destroy ourselves."

Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen, a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Semitic Studies at the University of Sydney, told the conference that if ageing was to be venerated, not denigrated, and the spiritual needs of older people taken seriously, the chaplains would have to start the process. "We may not finish it, but we have to start it ... We've got to start convincing those who don't come from our disciplines of the importance of pastoral care and chaplaincy."

The conference, involving 142 participants from ten denominations and all states of Australia, is supported and organised by the UnitingCare NSW.ACT Ageing & Disability Service Chaplains' Network. It continues through Thursday. Veronica Brady will give the keynote address tomorrow, Wednesday morning, at 8.50.

For more information, contact Les Underwood at the conference (c/- Robert Hall) on 0419 422082 or Steve England on 0418 638 873; stevee@nsw.uca.org.au