It is time to stop making the faith subordinate to social and political ideas. This short, searing video says practically everything that needs to be said about the so-called “Welcome to Country.” https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOOHm9jkp4n/?igsh=MTE3b2djMDNkbW56NQ==
Let us use our brains: what is the intellectual basis of this “Welcome to Country”? Why make “country” an abstract noun like “faith” or “hope”? What you think if I welcomed you into your own house? Or into a home we share together? Are you a second-class Australian if you emigrate here, or your parents or grandparents were born in Lebanon?
More fundamentally than even that: does the land not belong to God? Do we not belong to God? Is there any earthly or human object higher than the God? Obviously not, then why allow a religious ceremony to put earthly values before the divine? There is just a short step from that to earth worship, disguised as “Earth Mother” worship, and from that to self-worship.
In other words, is the “welcome to country” not a tacit idolatry? The speaker Liam Aquilina is surely right: it has no place in our churches and religious activities.
But there is yet another aspect of the “Welcome” in this short clip which must be mentioned, because – in these circumstances – not to mention it is to be silent in the face of a most serious sacrilege. I refer to the fact that the speaker asks permission of “male spirits and female spirits.” It is too weak to say that that is unacceptable in a church – it is to be condemned, reprobated, and abjured. It is blatant idolatry in what should be the very sanctuary of faith – a Catholic church.