A couple of weeks ago I received a humbling invitation from Professor Tracey Rowland to launch her latest book, Unconformed to the Age: Essays in Catholic Ecclesiology. The book launch will be held at 7pm this Wednesday at St Peter’s Catholic Church in Toorak.

Professor Rowland is Australia’s foremost Catholic theologian and holds the St John Paul II Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. She holds doctorates from Cambridge University and the Pontifical Lateran University (Rome). In 2020 she was awarded the prestigious Ratzinger Prize for theology and in 2023 was appointed to the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences.

I first came to know Professor Rowland as a seminarian while she was Dean of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family (Melbourne) and then during my appointment as assistant priest in Box Hill. She has always been a wonderful supporter of vocations, seminarians and priests.

Professor Rowland’s latest book is aptly dedicated to “the young priests and religious who have offered their lives in the service of something other than a multinational bureaucracy.” In recent decades, the Catholic Church has become increasingly bureaucratic, a phenomenon that Professor Rowland humorously dubs “Catholic Inc.” Professor Rowland observes that, although church bureaucracy can develop for well-intentioned reasons, it nevertheless reveals a lack of confidence in the sacramental and hierarchical structure God Himself gave the Church. Drawing on Pope Benedict XVI, Professor Rowland explains that the Church’s God-given structure serves Her God-given mission: bringing humanity into communion with the Triune God through. By its very nature, bureaucracy obstructs and frustrates this communion. In a world saturated with paralysing corporate governance theory, Professor Rowland makes the case that the Church must follow the example of her Master in being unconformed to the age.