The Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia, is butting heads with the government after the Australian Law Reform Commission released a report that suggests big changes to the Catholic education system. The situation has become so tense that the archbishop has threatened to close all Catholic schools in the nation, which would present something of an education crisis in Australia.
Crux reports that the changes were proposed to the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984. The commission recommended the end of exemptions that allow the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney to hire their own staff according to the Catholic faith. This would mean that Catholic schools would not be allowed to take sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, marital or relationship status into consideration in hiring or enrollment.
If the recommendations are heeded, Australian Catholic schools may only give preference to Catholics if the situation is deemed “reasonably necessary,” assumedly by the commission, but it still must be wary of being seen as breaching the sex discrimination laws. In summation, Catholic schools would lose a considerable amount of their ability to self-determine their operations.
Not one to see the archdiocese’s schools held hostage to politics of the day, Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, has reacted by offering to simply close the schools, if they are viewed as such a problem. According to CathNews, a ministry of the Australian Bishops’ Conference, the archbishop warned that the schools may be forced to shut their doors “if we were told we were not allowed to take religion into account in who we employ, or in the ethos of our schools, which is quite a push at the moment.”
CathNews estimates that there are more than 800,000 students enrolled in some 1,750 Catholic schools throughout Australia. The sudden closure of so many schools could cause some serious problems for the enrollment of the remaining public schools. The Australian Curriculum, Assessment, and Reporting Authority reported in 2023 that Catholic schools account for 18.3% of all schools in Australia.
The archbishop went on to suggest that Catholic hospitals may be forced to follow suit if they were forced to perform abortions or other “deeply troubling” procedures that go against Catholic ethics. He went on to cite the Church’s withdrawal from offering adoptions in many countries, because they are not allowed to “choose married couples as parents.”
While Archbishop Fisher conceded that he does not yet support such an approach, noting that there was great risk of backfire, bringing it up at all suggests that the archdiocese is growing weary of the Australian government’s recent tendency to overreach in their dealings with the Catholic Church.
In 2023, Aleteia reported on the takeover of a Catholic hospital in the Canberra suburb of Bruce. The hospital, Calvary Public Hospital, had been Catholic since 1979, but the archdiocese was not consulted when the government abandoned its negotiation for a sale of the facility, choosing instead to annex it by force.
