PAYING A PENALTY

And here we go again. Victorian by name. Victorian by nature. Just float the suggestion that maybe we could play a game of football on Good Friday and – judging by the reaction – you would think the heavens had opened and we all have now got a one-way ticket to Hell.

Forget the fact that you can do virtually anything else on Good Friday. Go to your favourite restaurant, buy booze, go to a brothel, go to the movies, go to the Casino to gamble in that secular temple.

And if you are a devout Christian you can go to church. But you can’t go to a football game.

And forget the fact that they have been playing Rugby League matches in other states on Good Friday night for about ten years.

A spokesman for the Anglican Church says “ Good Friday is not just a public holiday for watching sport or pursuing leisure activities”.

Sorry, Roland Ashby, for millions of Australians who do NOT go to church – or follow some other religion – it is exactly that.

For Christians, I agree, it is probably the most Holy and most significant day of the year, to observe and pay tribute to the day Christ died on the cross to atone for others sins.

But for Jews and Buddhists, and Muslims, and agnostics and atheists it is not.

And to one Catholic Church leader who said this week that there would be a “direct conflict” between a football game and the church’s main afternoon service, I would say: “ O ye of little faith”.

Good Friday, as I understand it, is a day about sacrifice. And surely good Catholics could sacrifice the footy for their church. And anyway an AFL Good Friday fixture would be scheduled for early evening or at night. The way rugby league has, as I said, for a decade.

Even Eddie McGuire, a devout Catholic, now believes a Good Friday game should be considered.

And speaking of special days. Anzac Day is the most special day of the year to me and a lot of non-Christians. Even, I suspect, to a lot of religious people.

That’s the day I honour people who also paid the ultimate sacrifice at places like Gallipoli. And, sadly, on the third day those thousands of young men did not rise again from the dead.

And yet I don’t hear our august church leaders complaining about football games on THAT day. Many of them probably go the MCG themselves.

Like with the Easter shopping hours debate Governments and churches should butt out.

As Mike Sheahan wrote in the Herald Sun today:

“We live in a secular society. Christianity doesn’t dominate it as it once did. Christianity itself is not as strong as it once was.”

I could not agree more.

Friday, June 18, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004