Although turning sixty-five doesn’t feel old, you keep getting little hints like this one, that you are now entering God’s waiting room. The first hint came one day five years ago, when you got on a bus and the driver already had a pensioner’s ticket in his hand for you: at sixty, you were beginning to look like an old age pensioner. Inside, you might feel like thirty-five; but the outside world saw you as an old bloke. Then there was that morning when you were running through the Botanic Gardens and a barracker shouted, ‘Good on you, Pop!’ ‘Pop’ – you? For that matter, distance running had become impossible; you stopped entering half-marathons three or four years ago because you knew you couldn’t finish the course. Other things stopped too. You could no longer stay up all night talking; or write a chapter of a book over a weekend; or enjoy loud, boisterous parties the way you had done. No doubt about it, you were slowing down. It was time for the park bench.

But what to do, once you get to the park bench? When they learn that you have retired, people pepper you with questions about what you will do now. Is another book on the way? That sounds like a good idea: once you get off the timetable treadmill you not only have more space for prayer and walking in the park, you also see great blocks of time ahead, useful paddocks for growing a book in. Yes, yes, a book is a possibility.

You even think you might have something to write about. New readers should know that I am a church historian who has written a handful of books, most of them refracted through my own experience of being an Australian Catholic. When I was growing up, a powerful idea was transforming our generation of Catholics. This was the idea that all of us were responsible for what the church did; that there were no second-class members of the church, although not everyone had the same function there; that waiting to be told what to do was foolish; there was work for us to do in the world, not as propagandists or colonisers for the church but as servants of a world which had its own destiny in God’s plan.

We were part of an international adult education network, so when we met this idea of a new laity in our Newman Society groups at university, we went looking for someone to help us explore this novel terrain. The man we made our own was an owlish French Dominican friar, Yves Congar. From an early age, Congar had seen that the critical theological question for our time was the question of the church; and he dedicated his life to exploring that question, its history and its changing cultural forms, century by century. To him the word church did not mean, as it often does in common speech, only the clergy; he gave it back its richer historical meaning, the people of God. Congar’s Lay People in the Church, published in 1953, was seized on by our generation as the book which made theological sense of our own experience. It is the key text for our generation, the book, more than any other, which prepared us for the future. That note of the future was struck by the pope when he made Congar a cardinal a few months before his death, in 1995. Because his theology aimed at the future, said the pope, it needed courage to keep working at it. Here the pope must have been thinking of the persecution Congar suffered. In 1954 the Vatican forbade him to teach, to lecture or to publish. He was sent into exile, first to the Dominican biblical school at Jerusalem (whose founder, M.J. Lagrange, had also been under a Vatican ban); then to Cambridge, where the local Dominican superior made life difficult for him.

All of this we learnt much later, when it became part of a bigger picture: those who would make a significant contribution must pay for it in blood. In the meantime, the sort of history that I began to be interested in was the story of the grassroots, the people in the pews rather than the hierarchs. Thus our experience nudges us towards the history we write. Somewhere about this time I bought a Penguin, Medieval People by Eileen Power (‘price in Australia, four shillings’) and recognised it as a personal signpost. No popes, emperors or kings – here were the ordinary people of the past with the meaning of their lives recovered from quite ‘academic’ sources, such as manorial accounts and bishops’ registers. About the same time I read an article by Ken Inglis, who even then was showing the talents which would make him the preeminent Australian historian of meaning. He was writing about Catholics and, from the outside, trying to find a way inside these unknown lives and foreign experiences. Then he discovered that Catholic magazines carried columns of advice to those with perturbed consciences: people with moral conundrums would send them in and some expert would sort them out. Inglis realised that these advice columns took you close to the tensions between Catholic tradition and living in a pluralist society. It was a lesson I would not forget.

When, decades later, I had a go at writing something, the material came from prayerbooks, plaques in churches, parish societies, sermon lists, penny catechisms, pamphlets and magazines. The true archives of popular religion lie in the devotional magazines, not in files at the cathedral. Cathedral archives give you a bishop’s agenda, the magazines tell you what people actually cared about. Theologians are beginning to realise this and to factor into their work the findings of historians of popular religion.

Today they are fortunate to have in their libraries the writings of Katharine Massam, whose Sacred Threads seems to me the outstanding piece of religious historiography in the decade. (The outstanding work of the previous decade was Adrian Pittarello’s Soup Without Salt, which pinned down the differences between religious cultures within a single credal belief, a corrective to some naive writing by highly placed academics. It was unfortunate that Pittarello’s book appeared almost as a samizdat publication, like one of those unofficial books of Stalinist days in the Soviet Union, so that there are still people who write and speak about these things who do not seem to have encountered it.) Katharine Massam’s book, subtitled Catholic Spirituality in Australia 1922–1962, is a journey into similar lush undergrowths of a people’s religion. The spirituality she studies is a religion that speaks its truths to the bodies of its adherents, as well as to their minds. It is a religion they tasted, smelt, heard, saw, felt on their skins and ate in their mouths; a religion which made holy the seasons of the year and the streets of their suburbs; one which peopled their imaginations with stories of the sacred. Massam’s findings will strike some tastes as bizarre. I am thinking of those metropolitan film critics who found Robert Duvall’s steamy celebration of southern Protestantism, The Apostle, so unpalatable and the people at the film festival showings whom I heard gasping in disbelief – this coarse and sweaty religion was so unlike the deodorised suburban graciousness of the churches of their youth, now dimly remembered. Massam’s religious world, and Duvall’s too, are real. Indeed, you might say that a church which turns its back on this sort of religion hasn’t much of a future. There are not enough PhDs or metropolitan film critics to fill the pews.

It was lost worlds such as these that beckoned to me as a historian. What was the everyday experience of this belief? What did it feel like to be a rank-and-file member of that mass movement? What did this mean to ordinary parishioners? Where did they come into the story?

In naming my preference for history of this kind, I don’t intend to put the mockers on episcopal biographies or general histories structured along the chronologies of prelates. The Brisbane school of episcopal biographers (Boland, Byrne, McLay) inhabits a necessary shelf in any library: we wouldn’t be without them. Think of Tom Boland’s revelation of the roguishness of Sir James Duhig, first of the white shoe brigade, whose juggling of church monies would not escape forensic scrutiny today. ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’ asked Patrick O’Farrell in his review, giving great offence to the fan club. But Boland showed us a human archbishop, one whose love affair with his people was ennobling even while his faults were patent. Not every biographed bishop seems as real as Duhig, alas. ‘Great men are almost always bad men,’ said Acton, a truth rarely adverted to by Australian episcopal biographers.

My quarrel with church histories which run straitly along the tram tracks of the bishop’s or parish priest’s chronology is that they do not tell you enough. Serviceable in the way that accurate dating is serviceable, nevertheless they neglect to tell you what it felt like to be there. The experience recorded in them seems thin, as if it had all passed through the parish priest’s head-and if it hadn’t, it didn’t have a right to its place in history. At base this is a clericalist view of whatever institution this historian is writing about: ‘Father knows best’. I call these productions ‘head office histories’: they are often commissioned by the bishop or parish priest, written to his specifications, to answer his questions. You notice how much of these books is written from head office files and how rarely the writers speak to ordinary members. Finally, it is an unpalatable truth that if the commissioner doesn’t like what the writer discovers, then the book doesn’t get published; that is implied in their compact. Readers of educational histories will know that there are similar books done about educational institutions. It is as if the institution were a product of the leadership, headmaster or vice-chancellor. It is important to write the administrative history of our institutions but you must not think that administrative histories tell the whole story.

When you survey the history of Catholicism in the twentieth century, the event which stands out like a vast peak is the series of meetings in Rome from 1962 to 1965, known as the second Vatican Council. A single-sentence summation of Vatican II might say that it brought the church out of the Middle Ages and tried to find a place for it in modern times. A lengthier description of Vatican II would point to some of its outcomes: the Bible placed at the centre of Catholic liturgy, theology and spirituality; Catholic worship ‘in a language understanded of the people’(to borrow a phrase from the Anglicans); the love of God replacing the fear of God as the dynamic of moral choice; a morality of striving for justice and mercy rather than a morality of guilt; a recognition of the rights of conscience and religious freedom; acknowledging the brotherliness of other churches and the authenticity of other spiritual traditions; pluralism inside the church; the freeing of lay intelligence and the slow erosion of clerical control systems; and a laity who set their own spiritual agenda. These are observable outcomes of the Vatican II era.

I say the Vatican II era rather than Vatican because this phrase can mean different things to different people. To some, Vatican II means a set of documents hammered out at that ecumenical council in Rome, 1962–65. Those favouring this approach tend to be theologians who carry in their memories the dogmatic definitions of earlier councils - the council of Nicaea in 325, for example, with its decisive (and divisive) definition of the Trinity’s ‘same substance’ or, in 1216, Lateran IV’s ‘transubstantiation’, or Vatican I’s ‘infallibility’ last century. The words of the documents themselves have the force of law. They are the control mechanism of all authentic action. If you cannot source it in the documents, you cannot call it Vatican. In other words, the documents of the council were a legal codex which required legal skills to read their meaning. That was one approach to Vatican II.

Another approach saw the Vatican II documents as valuable accounts of contemporary thinking about what it meant to be an authentic Catholic. This approach said that the bishops and the council had read the signs of the times with diligence, insight and clarity. Their conciliar documents were apt summaries of their reading and discussion – summaries which could expand Catholics’ experience of the gospel and energise them towards a creative future. In other words, the second Vatican council was a mountain peak from which the whole church could see clearly what lay behind them in the past and descry the challenges of the future.

Those who follow the first approach are like people reheating packaged food: the selection, preparation, cooking and packaging are done elsewhere, by other hands; your role is to take advantage of what they have done. The second approach does its own cooking: it spends more time in the kitchen, gets its ingredients from many markets and is never confident, although it may be enthusiastic, about the outcome. This is why I speak, not so much of Vatican II but of the Vatican II era.

This Vatican II era approach to history rests on the recognition that the bishops at the council ratified, corrected or validated discussions and experiments that took place in the decades prior to the council’s meeting. It is sometimes said that in the church everything is forbidden until it becomes compul­sory. In this view, whatever the pope told RCs to believe/say/ think/do was mandatory. I have even seen it suggested that if you wanted to know what Catholic attitudes were at any time, you only had to consult the documents put out by the pope or the bishops; these were sufficient evidence of Catholic attitudes. My own experience felt otherwise. Far from being formed by papal encyclicals or bishops’ pastoral letters, people with individual points of view mined these sources to find support for their own positions. From the inside, the church seemed a vast household with many different centres of attention: Jesuits and Dominicans, Scotists and Thomists, traditions of meditation and devotees of verbal prayers, monastic spiritualities and lay apostolic movements. In a lifetime one person could not exhaust all the options. For that matter, the church seemed to accommodate ever changing new adaptations. To be there was to be mixed up in multiple experiments in what it meant to be a Christian. This observation now looks especially true of the decades leading up to Vatican II. ln those years, without knowing it, the whole church was gearing up. for that, magisterial updating with ceaseless trial and error, research and development. In the two thousand-years-old story of Christianity this has been a truly historic moment, which now needs to be written, if only to put paid to the suggestion that it all happened one Monday morning when the documents arrived from the Vatican.

The Australian side of this story is waiting to be told too. You can go through the list of what I called above the outcomes of Vatican II and at each point put a tick to show its presence here well before the council met in 1962. I have mentioned my own generation’s involvement in lay movements which prefig­ured Vatican II ecclesiology. Equally, a historian can point to initiatives in Australia which anticipated (and prepared for) the formal teaching of the second Vatican council on the Bible: liturgy, ecumenism, social justice, ethics and spirituality.

One area deserves notice. When we were growing up, there was an idea around that you could not trust Catholics with political power because, given half a chance, they would use it to disadvantage Protestants and non-believers. The principle of persecution seemed essential teaching to the church of the Inquisition, the fires of Smithfield and the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve. Passionate in our own adherence to liberal democracy, we were nevertheless aware that there were some dead rats in the cellar stinking up the house and affecting relations with our neighbourhood. How to explain this? Our democratic bloodlines went back to Daniel O’Connell, who had won political freedom for our people early in the nineteenth century. O’Connell’s Catholic Association became an exemplar everywhere for movements trying to win power for the people. Those who erected O’Connell’s statue at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne were not political conservatives. Indeed, visiting Ireland in 1835, the French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished to report that wherever he went the temper of the Catholics was democratic. As a Frenchman, he was used to a situation where the church had shared power with the state, especially with the monarchy; good conservatives, they spoke incessantly of the rightness of this union between throne and altar. A few years earlier, some young Frenchmen, inspired by O’Connell, had proposed a novel union between the church and the people, with freedom of the press and the other freedoms making up the democratic agenda. The papacy had then fallen on these liberal Catholics with a thunderclap, issuing an encyclical letter, Mirari Vos, which brutally demonised them and reasserted in rough, intemperate language the medi­eval synthesis. Later documents, the best known being the Syllabus of Errors, would enforce this medievalism. Yet none of this spoke to our experience. We Irish knew about the union of throne and altar - the altar and throne of England had combined to take away our land, suppress our schools, exile our leaders and hunt our priests like vermin. (I myself bear the name of a man who was executed by the Anglican church because he was a papist.) Our love for democracy grew out of our detestation for Tories and their union of throne and altar.

But what of those papal documents enjoining the conservative compact? If we preferred not to read them ourselves, there were plenty of contemporaries who thrust them in our faces. In the past, Australian politicians had campaigned on the Catholic threat to civil liberties; and in our own time there were still mild-mannered academics who told lecture rooms that Catholics were doctrinally committed to persecution; they might seem nice blokes, but give them a chance and they would do what their church said. Faced with such assertions, we made ourselves go back and look at those papal pronouncements which seemed to commit Catholics to the doctrine of persecution. Was persecution a necessary part of the doctrinal package? The more one looked, the clearer it became that the documents in question had been written within an historical context. If you changed the context, the documents would be outmoded. Further, you could argue that in many parts of the world the historical context had already changed by the time the gentlemen of the Vatican were writing those documents. In the English-speaking world we had experienced pluralist democratic society, with church separated from state and the rights of conscience guaranteed, and we did not like the alternatives. This gap between experience and rhetoric allowed us to suggest that a change in experience might lead to a change in the rhetoric. And so it proved. Vatican II’ s declaration on religious liberty tore up the documents of the past and asserted the value of freedom of belief and religious liberty as good things. The Middle Ages were over at last.

When I read that historic affirmation, I thought of the Australians – Xavier Connor, Max Charlesworth, Eric D’Arey were some of them – who had worked in this stony field to close the gap between everyday experience and church rhetoric. I remembered in London honour being paid to Dr John Rock, whose research had made the contraceptive pill a reality. Asked how he squared this with a Catholic conscience, Rock said that he had drawn great comfort from the writings on conscience of the Australian philosopher Eric D’Arey (who is now, I might add, archbishop of Hobart). Someone should write this story.

So I sit on the park bench and ruminate. The air is cold now but the sun is cheering. There are ducks, geese, waterfowl and alien seagulls to watch; and every now and then a mother brings a baby along the path, offering limitless fascination. What worlds will this young soul encounter? Will there be any room there for books by someone to whom the past increasingly seems more real than this park, this bench? I wonder.