In 1985, a wizened and diminutive Brazilian archbishop arrived in Australia for a number of speaking engagements that fired up the public imagination and set in motion an annual lecture series that continues to this day.
Called the Hélder Câmara lectures after that Brazilian, Dom Hélder Câmara, OFS, the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife between 1964 and 1985, the series was the brainchild of Br Mark O’Connor, FMS, a high school teacher at the time who saw many of his students becoming disengaged with the Church, and so wanted to find a way to inspire them to remain connected with their faith. As he said in a profile in Eureka Street recently: “I thought that we should bring out inspiring figures to just tell their stories.”
He remembers that on that visit in 1985, Hélder Câmara “could barely speak English and he looked a bit like E.T., but he had this charisma. You felt somehow that you were in the presence of God.”
Dom Hélder Câmara in 1984. Image: Wikimedia Commons
To mark the 40th anniversary of this lecture series, which Br Mark still curates, a book has just been released that explains the genesis of that pivotal tour by Hélder Câmara and charts the impact he and the many international speakers who came after him have had on the Australian Catholic Church.
The book, Reasons for Hope: Hélder Câmara, Global Catholicism and the Australian Church, by historian Julie Thorpe, was launched on Wednesday 30 July at Newman College, in Melbourne, the location of many of these lectures.
Julie Thorpe said when Br Mark, who is now Vicar for Communications in the Diocese of Parramatta, asked her to write this commemorative history he gave her two editorial guidelines: the first was that he wasn’t to feature in the story, a request she ignored, and the second was that she was “to imagine the Church as a polyphony – not cacophony – of voices”. To help her do this he sent her a YouTube video of a flash mob of musicians in a Spanish town playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.
“The concept really that he planted in my mind with very little guidance was to see this chorale of voices in the Church,” she said, “and also to do justice to some of the major upheavals in the Church globally and in Australia.”
Br Mark O’Connor at the launch of the book about his lecture series that has been running for 40 years. Image: Marc Salazar/ Parallax Media
But another impetus for bringing Hélder Câmara to Australia, she said, was to use the 20th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council in 1985 to open up discussion about the council’s merits, from someone who had been at the council and had been one of the writers of Gaudium et Spes, one of its main documents.
“This lecture series became the beginning point of really trying to receive the Second Vatican Council, and that windy road that the Church was taking not just in Australia but elsewhere. Latin America was seen as the advanced guard, if you like, of implementing that through Hélder Câmara’s work.”
Getting speakers from Europe, or the Americas, or Asia to travel to the other side of the world was often difficult, as one anecdote in the Eureka Street profile showed.
Br Mark spent several years trying to convince one of them to come, Jesuit Cardinal of Milan Carlo Martini, only to receive polite declines every time. Eventually, with the help of benefactors, he made the trip to Italy to ask the Cardinal in person, and the Cardinal was on the plane two years later.
Czech theologian Monsignor Tomáš Halík was a speaker at the Hélder Câmara Lectures in 2016 and 2024. Image: Diocese of Parramatta
Over the years, the speakers have ranged from Cardinals to journalists, academics to senior Church officials, laypeople to religious. They included Cardinal Luis Tagle SJ (Philippines); Monsignor Professor Tomáš Halík (Czechia); Undersecretary of the Secretariat of the Synod, Sr Nathalie Becquart XMCJ (France); Professor Maryanne Glendon from Harvard and former US Ambassador to the Holy See; Baroness Sheila Hollins, House of Lords (UK); and CNN’s Vatican correspondent, Christopher Lamb.
All the while Br Mark has not looked for ideological conformity in these speakers, but chosen them based on who he’s “caught faith from, who have passed on faith to me”. He told Eureka Street that what all of them had was “authenticity of the Spirit”.
Julie Thorpe said his “tenacity” in wooing speakers almost extended to Cardinal Robert Prevost before he was made Pope. Br Mark had met him several times and had been “serenading him with Tim-Tams” before his elevation to Pontiff and his diary filled up.
The book about the lecture series is on sale through Garratt Publishing. Image: Marc Salazar/ Parallax Media
Br Mark’s capacity “to see the big picture and to keep pursuing these voices of the global Catholic Church…is a way of bringing hope to the Australian Church, rather than just living in despair and negativity”, she said.
“He’s got an uncanny ability to pick, quietly, the direction in which the Church needs to travel.”
Reasons for Hope: Hélder Câmara, Global Catholicism and the Australian Church, by Julie Thorpe, is available through Garratt Publishing.
