Page 28 - October 7 - Teresa Pirola

that his statement seems to be the exception rather than the rule among Australian Catholic bishops and leaders.
Of course, public statements are but one means of exercising leadership. Were there other ways in which bishops, clerics, religious and lay Catholic leaders shifted gear and responded to what happened on October 7 in those initial days and weeks? Did they speak up with important words in quiet, unpublicised ways? I know of some who did, and I like to presume many more did. Obviously, I can’t speak about what our leaders say and do in their private communications. But what I can offer is a perspective from the grassroots experience of what things look and sound like among the general Catholic population, at least in Sydney and with an ear to the rest of the country.
With the exceptions mentioned, we did not hear our leaders speak up. In the days following October 7 there was no clear, firm, united voice to constitute any kind of robust collective Catholic response to a horrific manifestation of antisemitic terror and its global ripple effect.
Further, this reticence has only been compounded by the recently released statement of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (10 November 2023) addressing the current crisis in the Holy Land. Amidst motherhood statements calling for ‘peace’, the bishops’ collective voice offers not a word about the October 7 attacks, nor about the hostages held by Hamas or the eruption of antisemitic incidents in Australia. This silence from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference is bewildering in a post-Holocaust, post–Nostra Aetate era.
Certainly, in these past weeks, there were those who promoted and embodied the ‘prayer and fasting’ for peace called for by Pope Francis and the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. Such calls have their place. However, in terms of what happened on October 7, these generalised gestures for
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