Michael Kelly

Joseph Jiang’s timely essay on the Church in today’s China will annoy some but asks all the right questions.    (more…)

An extraordinary piece of evidence presented to the Commission is that up to 7% of Australian Catholic clergy have been child abusers.   (more…)

At the heart of what Arrupe sought to do was get Jesuits out of their comfort zone, engaged with the real world and most especially reconverted to Jesus Christ by their encounter with the poor.  Pope Francis would agree.  (more…)

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In our dreary world full of incredible people making claims to leadership, finding the occasional hero or heroine can’t be a bad thing. So why begrudge the Catholic Church its idiosyncratic ways of creating people for believers to admire – the saints?

Mother Teresa of Calcutta – that’s what it was called when she lived there but let’s call it Kolkata to bring the city’s name up to the present – was canonized by the Pope last weekend. The media around the world found their way to the woman “cured” of her tumor, a cure that was the first of the two miracles attributed to her intercession.

Well some do take exception to the miraculous and with good reason. The saint making process entails something offensive to post-Enlightenment ears: miracles. The mere mention of the word evokes goose bumps born of a hostility to clerical claptrap, to anti-scientific superstition or to Protestant fear of a manipulation of the Divine. (more…)

 

Despite the unpersuasive Vatican spin on Cardinal Pell’s appearance last week before the Royal Commission into child sex abuse in institutions – that his performance was “dignified” and “edifying”, his performance, in the assessment of most observers including this one, was inept, cowardly and unconvincing.

Cardinal Pell is only one Australian Catholic and he has a small following, even among the country’s bishops. But he has single handedly brought the Catholic Church in Australia to its knees. If what occurred last week happened to any other entity in Australia – a political party, a trade union or a university, for example – a death notice in the newspaper would be expected.

In fact, of course, the type of Catholicism Pell embodies has been in its death throes for some decades. The authoritarian and clericalist style and substance that Pell is the exemplar of is not only unappealing in post-modern, pluralist and multicultural Australia. It lost its theoretical underpinning in Catholic theology at Vatican II in the 1960s.

But now it is derelict. The only question to ask is what if anything will succeed it? And if there is something that could succeed it, what resources are there to draw on to see some fresh expression of Catholicism realized?

The clericalist, authoritarian Church that Pell exemplifies has been in terminal decline for decades. Why? Because there aren’t any troops to keep fighting its fights. The declining rate of seminary recruiting and ordinations to the male celibate priesthood has been obvious to any but the wishful since the 1970s.

Pell has been one of the wishful, claiming seminaries are full year after. It’s true seminaries accepted just about anyone who wanted to get into them. But the crushing fact is that few candidates who entered the seminaries in the last 20 years ever got ordained. And among those who did, at least a third left the priesthood within a decade of ordination.

The average age of the clergy in Australia now is in the low 70s. It was a statistical given in the 1970s that if the average age of any group of religious brothers or nuns moved much beyond 60, that congregation had moved beyond its capacity to regenerate itself.

As far as priests are concerned, it is a matter of supreme puzzlement to me how a Church that declares the Eucharist to be “the sources and summit of the Church’s life” (as declared at Vatican II) has been incapable of addressing this simple fact: according to current rules, there will be a decreasing capacity to provide a service that is dependent on male celibates to deliver.

So, in reality how can the Catholic Church survive in Australia given the crippling effect of the mishandling of sex abuse, the incompetence of its leadership and the beleaguered condition of its executive force – the clergy?

The Catholic Church is rightly perceived as a domain dominated by old men. That’s what appears every time there is a major Catholic ceremony. It’s what happens every time there is a significant gathering – nationally or internationally – to consider issues and challenges the Church is facing. Little wonder that the Church is seen and often described as an old boys’ club.

In reality in Australia, the interface with the Church that most Catholics experience is not the male dominated and stiff ceremonies that establish the image of the boys club. For most Catholics participating in something Catholic in Australia, the encounters occur in Catholic schools.

Increasingly the reality of the Catholic community is a school system with a church attached which most visit occasionally. And the significant leadership is not the old priests or the occasionally appearing bishop but the leaders of the school community who are almost all lay people – like over 98% – and mostly women.

There are now literally thousands of theologically well-qualified leaders of Catholic communities who are not sacramental celebrants but educators. Women have always been the most significant and effective carriers and communicators of faith in the Australian Church – in families and local parishes, within and between generations.

Now they are the formally qualified and administratively authorized leaders of over 2,000 communities across the country – over 1200 primary schools and more than 800 secondary schools.

Cultural cycles are the slowest by far. Political cycles (of ideas and policies) might be about 20 years in the making and unmaking. Economic cycles can take twice as long to work their way through national communities that end up being vastly different to what they were. Just look at Australia in 1976 and 2016.

Cultural cycles take even longer as beliefs change from being novel suggestions to their being embedded and taken for granted in a community’s self-understanding, from having statuses and roles being unquestioned to their being discarded and replaced.

What is to become of Catholicism in Australia will not emerge from seminaries and religious congregations but from mission focused and theologically informed lay people who are mostly female.

At times I have to pinch myself to be alert to what’s going on right now in the Catholic Church and to fathom the depth of it.

Throughout history, we have seen change come abruptly. It happened in Europe and Japan after WWII.

And in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall came down when democracies emerged where only tyrannical regimes prevailed.

But in the Catholic Church change comes in a different way.

It doesn’t come by a revolution that sweeps away the old regime and old ways of doing things. Change does not come in the same way as in representative democracies where a new party gains power with a new agenda and new policies.

The closest thing to change in the Catholic Church is the Japanese process of governance in politics and business.

Nothing is decided until everyone involved has been consulted and a stage has been reached where everyone accepts that a change is needed, even if they don’t all agree on the particulars.

The deal is done before the decision is announced, of course. But those who don’t accept the change are not fired because jobs are for life in Japan. They are just ‘redeployed’.

Right now in the Catholic Church, a series of changes is unfolding whose significance will be seen perhaps only years from now and in retrospect. But it had better happen faster than it has in the past because, with contemporary mobility and communications, the speed of change poses challenges to the Church that prefers a languid pace.

Today, if issues are not understood and addressed in any organization including the Church, the lethargy could well induce a terminal illness.

A number of neuralgic points or hot button issues have divided Catholics for decades. These are just three: sexual ethics; centralism in administration and decision-making; and clericalism (which has exacerbated clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up).

Nonetheless, there is an enduring failure to see and name the real elephant in the room – the virtual end of the male celibate clergy, except in the developing world where overstretched priests are being quarried to supply for the deficit of clergy in Europe, the United States and Australia.

The inability to see and do something about that elephant is the source of many of the blockages currently impeding the Church in its mission. At heart, it is the failure to address the terms of ministry needed in the Church today.

One of the distractions from seeing the elephant that blinds the Catholic Church is that its hallmark is “continuity”. That’s historical nonsense, as a casual look at the record shows.

Just take something that affects every Mass-going Catholic today – our understanding of Scripture.

A hundred years ago approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts that we take for granted now triggered harassment from the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition (as it was known till it became the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the 1960s) for many and excommunication for others.

What Pope St Pius X dismissed and condemned in the harshest terms in the first decade of the 20^th Century received fulsome endorsement from Pope Pius XII in 1944. And in that acknowledgement, Pope Pius XII was following a well-tried path for change in the Church that was described by the New Zealand-born Redemptorist moral theologian and canon lawyer, Humphrey O’Leary.

O’Leary was not completely tongue-in-cheek when he observed that change in the Church’s understanding and practice goes through five phases.

It begins when a doctrine or practice is condemned as always wrong – even to the point of being ‘intrinsically evil’ – and is absolutely forbidden.

The next phase sees ‘exceptions’ being made in defined circumstances. Then the exceptions become so commonplace that the official position is one of neutrality: Catholics can make up their own minds in good conscience.

The fourth phase is the suggestion that, among the options, one is preferred or encouraged. Finally, what had been proscribed becomes what all must do and comply with.

The approach to the interpretation of Scripture is a case in point. But there are an unlimited number of instances of this in the history of the Church.

Back to today and the prospects for history-making change.

The Synod Assembly on the Family that concluded last October addresses what is perhaps the most broadly alienating issue across the Church – the standing of the divorced and civilly remarried Catholics and their exclusion from the sacraments.

That issue is already at Stage 2 in O’Leary’s process. The Synod agreed that, though formally against the law, Holy Communion can be given to them under certain circumstances.

That Synod’s flexibility is also the tip of the iceberg for consideration of women’s views in Church conduct. It came to that point after Pope Francis encouraged the Synod to listen to the voices of the Holy Spirit and to the men and women of our time.

And if that continues, the current silence of Church officials on sexual morality will see voices other than male celibates legislating what can and cannot be done.

The next question is ministry.

It is now reported to be the subject of the next Synod. If relaxing mandatory celibacy for clerics is seriously considered it would open up a host of other questions beyond who gets to be ordained. It would have to articulate how office in the service of the Church is recognized and also how gender permissions/restrictions apply and why.

As these issues press for attention, it is not only the relevance of Catholicism that is at stake. It is also its credibility.

When episcopal leadership is shown to be so threadbare as to hide criminal behavior for fear of “scandal”, it is appropriate to ask exactly just what parallel universe Catholic leadership inhabits.

Breaking out of the parallel universe won’t happen overnight. But the writing is clearly on the wall that an absolutely typical Catholic process of change is well and truly underway.

And it will be explained in the usual way: “As the Church has always taught…”

This article was first published in Global Pulse on 15 December 2015. 

The Japanese call it’nemawashi’..John Menadue

A Catholic friend of mine who spent his professional life as a journalist at what was the then rather WASPISH Melbourne Age told me in the 1980s that two sports dominated that paper’s pages – Australian Rules football and Catholic fights.

Cardinal George Pell should have stuck to playing Ozzie Rules. In that game, shirt fronting is the common tactic used to eliminate opponents. It comes down to knocking out an opposing player usually with a side-on, full body smash that leaves the opponent flat on his back.

As a first ruck, Pell was so well known for this tactic that he aroused the interest of the scouts for the Richmond ALF club in suburban Melbourne. They used to survey leading teams in Ballarat where, as first ruck for the Christian Brothers’ St Pat’s College, Pell made his mark.

Pell has never been any good at boxing – in the ring or with shadows. He always telegraphs his punches allowing his many critics and opponents to know the punch is coming and prepare their next moves. He needs the surprise element he had in AFL. He so telegraphs his punches that when they arrive, they land with all the force of a wet sock.

His behavior at the Synod in Rome is yet another instance of failing to read the play and ending up giving his critics and opponents free kicks in abundance. Never noted for his perceptiveness or his timing, this time he has excelled himself.

He led the composition of a letter signed by 13 or 14 participants in the current Synod in Rome – the number is unclear because five who were claimed to be signatories have denied they signed it – to be handed to the Pope BEFORE they Synod began.

It warned the pope that he and they wouldn’t stand for any of what Pell’s mentor, Bob Santamaria, used to call “wishy washy liberal trendy” outcomes from the Synod.

No. They are the men from the “narrow gate and the straight path” that Jesus asked them to follow. Any watering down of “doctrine” in the name of “mercy” would be dismissed out of hand. So, a shot across the bow from Pell and his gang BEFORE the Synod was to be expected.

Talk about missing the target and ahead of time too! The Pope has made it clear for over a year that the Synod is not convened to change doctrine. Anyone who has done Theology 101 knows a Synod CAN’T do that. The Pope’s line in this as in many things is: guys, there’s a thing called reality; it hits us in the face every day; what is the right pastoral response?

There is and always has been a difference between a pastoral response to a reality and what the Church declares in abstraction which for those of an Anglo Saxon heritage apparently means legal fundamentalism: legal universals derived from abstract doctrines.

Cardinal Pell outlawed in both Sydney and Melbourne during his time there what is the resolution of these sorts of issues in the time honored way they have been for almost a millennium. Ever since St. Thomas Aquinas proposed the best definition we have for conscience in the 13^th. Century – the “internal forum” – it has been the common practice of the Church at an operational, pastoral level.

The internal forum is a person’s conscientious facing of their choices, dilemmas and failures before God, seeking of forgiveness for the failures by the remedy offered by the Church (Confession) and getting on with your life as it presents itself.

The pastoral response is what happens on the ground. For example, my parents who were divorced when that just wasn’t done by Catholics – in 1968. My mother proceeded with the divorce, as Catholics did in those days, “because the Parish Priest told me to.” The elderly Irish PP could see what a destructive relationship it was between my parents and that the only solution was to break it up which my father wouldn’t do if the law of the land hadn’t intervened.

There was a relationship breakdown where I learnt that apportioning blame in intimate matters is an absurd application of the analytic mind and the best thing to say was “it didn’t work despite the best efforts of both” and that’s that.

I find comfort in the knowledge that many others have benefitted from such sensitive and intelligent pastoral care in the Church. It is disappointing beyond words when I meet couples not blessed with such care and believe expulsion from the community is a deserved result for a failure the Church can’t forgive.

And as a priest, I’ve never come across a parish that doesn’t have divorcees (and gays for that matter) numbered among the most outstanding contributors to the life of the parish.

Back to Cardinal Pell. He’s never been noted for his intelligent approach to issues. He’s demonstrated very visibly in his appearances before the Royal Commission into sex abuse that he’s short on compassion. His approach to theology and scripture leaves those of us who know a bit about them simply gobsmacked for his virtual illiteracy beyond his capacity to recite catechism answers and the Ten Commandments.

But this time he has excelled himself. He’s created a stir about something that isn’t on the agenda – doctrinal revision – and attacked something central to the pastoral life of the Church: mercy and compassion.

And immediately the letter to the Pope from him and his entourage became public through the agency of a crank in the Italian media and ally of Pell – Sandro Magister – the well known choir of Pell acolytes chimed in: Tess Lawrence in The Australian, Tracey Rowland at the Australian Catholic University, his allies at the London Catholic Herald and all the fanatics on the Catholic Right in the US (who used to quote the last two Popes endlessly to justify their extreme views as authorized by a Pope).

Cardinal Pell has form in this approach. When he was among the Australian bishops at their ad Limina visit to Rome in 1998, he played the hierarchy card and convinced the then Pope and his Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger, that the Australian Church was off the rails. They were surprised at the end of their visit to be forced to sign a statement of conclusions that simply dismayed all but a few who were in on the deal.

A list of shortcomings and failures were listed and a set of remedies proposed to which all were to comply. This document served as the Roman background for the dismissal of the bishop of Toowoomba, Bill Morris, a decade later.

That time he won with secrecy and surprise. To shift codes – from ALF to soccer – this time all we do is to congratulate Cardinal Pell on a masterful own goal! His cosignatories have abandoned him and the reactions of other bishops at the Synod have been anger and dismay.

Current Affairs.

There’s a special irony in the Australian Catholic bishops’ recent statement “Don’t Mess with Marriage” which is a defence of the institution against proposals to recognise gay marriage.

What are they defending? It’s not just the Catholic sacrament of marriage that is their focus of attention. They are worried about marriage as proposed under Commonwealth law. Over forty years ago when the Whitlam Government introduced the Family Law Act with no fault divorce that could be applied for twelve months after separation, it was denigrated as the end of marriage as we knew it and the ruthless destruction of the foundational institution of our society.

Today the bishops see the Marriage Act as the pillar whose extension to arrangements affecting gays will undermine a foundational institution of our society.

Am I missing something? Or is this one of the least prepared responses to a basic social change that affects people well beyond those that bishops are responsible for – those seeking a Catholic sacramental marriage? Even without any amendment to the Commonwealth definition of ‘marriage’, most marriages in Australia are not sacramental marriages.

As one who grew up in a Catholic family where the divorce of my parents was adjudicated under the burdensome processes of the previous law, the change introduced by the Whitlam Government was a welcome relief. When a relationship is over, it’s over and to string it out over five years meant the experience of blaming and abuse was daily fare.

Why do the bishops undermine their own credibility in this delicate matter when they can make no claim to speak for all Catholics, let alone all Australians, and their remit extends only to a particular form of marriage?

Within days of the release of this statement on marriage, the Archbishops (minus the one from Adelaide who is facing charges related to claims he did not report a sex offender priest) leapt to the defense of Cardinal Pell who is under pressure for his part in the debacle in Ballarat where Pell was a priest. What he knew and what did he do about what he knew are questions the Royal Commission is asking.

Long before any hearing, evidence, questions or testimony, the dogs were barking. But just to confirm the whole absurdity and before anyone has heard anything, the archbishops declare their support for Pell and tell everyone to stop picking on their mate.

I wonder how many of the archbishops thought about how such an intervention simply confirms the perception that the bishops constitute an old men’s club, out of touch with the community and its concerns?

There is also a deeper problem. How do people with so little sense of themselves outside ecclesiastical definitions, so oblivious to the world they are part of, get to leadership positions in the institution? The notoriously opaque process of episcopal appointments simply produces people to do jobs they can’t perform effectively or productively.

Behind that problem is the self-sustaining clerical culture, described by the present Pope as the “cancer killing the Church”, propped up by the Vatican court which he described as the “leprosy on the Papacy”. Whatever the declared purposes of the Church, the delivery of its message about Jesus and service to people, the reality of the operation is severely at odds with these declared purposes.

This system, in its present form, has been incubated over the last 450 years – since the Council of Trent in the mid 16^th Century. Convened to correct the abuses of the medieval Church, it is now the carrier of all that is counterproductive in the Church’s conduct – the way still so many in the Church’s leadership still presume the survival of Christendom, the way bishops are appointed and operate, the way priests are trained and acculturated, the way parishes operate.

What can one man – the present Pope – do in the relatively short time left to him? Not a lot. His current focus is on the most alienating feature of Catholic life today – the engagement with people whose relationships have gone sour. He hasn’t even reached the matter he describes as a “cancer” – clericalism – and how it is to be addressed by completely and operationally revising how ministry in the Church happens.

Facing such challenges, I take comfort in the observation of Archbishop Daniel Mannix in the recently released and best of nine biographies of this commanding figure: “When it’s all boiled down, being a Catholic comes down to a few very basic questions”.

But such a minimalist approach doesn’t distract me from the conviction that getting things right – or at least better than they are now – will take a lot of work over a long time. And it requires imagination and courageous leadership.

 

The tongues are certainly waging worldwide over the Christmas message of Pope Francis to staff at the Vatican – the priests, monsignors, bishops and cardinals gathered for an end of year assessment by the pope of the year that has passed.

A few perfunctory words to round out a very busy year or a general expression for thanks for various contributions? Not at all! A full on, Gospel based account of the traps of bureaucracy, the hypocrisy that can beset professional Catholic administrators and an implied warning that more is to come when the anticipated plans to restructure the Vatican Curia are announced in the next couple of months.

“Where did this one come from and why at Christmas?” is the understandable question on many minds, not least those whose tenure in their jobs depends on the one making the damning assessment.

But there’s nothing new in what the pope said, observers of the Vatican and those who have worked closely with bishops and cardinals in Rome have told me.

“You could find any number of cardinals and bishops saying the same thing to my certain knowledge up to five decades ago,” one previously highly placed and now retired lay Church official in Rome told me.

So how and why did the Argentinian Pope come to say it now to the clergy among the Vatican’s staff, especially as he subsequently met with the Vatican’s lay staff to thank them for all the sacrifices they make in their service of the Vatican every day?

What drove the first Pope in history to “dump” so completely, publically and unceremoniously on his Curia and go to the heart of the Gospel to find a basis for his commentary?

Jesuits in Argentina I spoke to were not surprised at all by what the Pope had to say in Rome. This way of behaving was vary familiar in Fr. Bergoglio’s modus operandi with the Jesuits as Provincial and as Cardinal in Buenos Aires.

I asked one Jesuit who knows the pope well how he interpreted this declaration in Rome. He told me that such rhetorical flourishes from Bergoglio always come down to being directed against people, sometimes even just a single, though significant individual and what they represent or what he finds loathsome and intolerable. My Jesuit informant told me the pope understands power and uses it to devastating effect when there is someone or a group he believes to be guilty of behavior at complete odds with the Gospel.

To understand why the pope is such a no-nonsense individual on these matters, some appreciation of the context he comes from is needed. He began life, like many Argentinians of his age and generation, as a Peronist.

Peronism is a chaotic, at times self-contradictory, collection of populist, authoritarian and dysfunctional beliefs and political practices some of which have their foundation in the Catholic social teaching of the 1930s, particularly the corporatism of the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931.

 

In Argentina, Peronism created all manner of socially progressive laws but also left a legacy of corruption, political confusion, violence and the missing of economic opportunities. Politically and economically, the country has “underachieved”.

Economically, the ravages of international capitalism that exploited its resources and left little for the locals have not helped Argentina. And politically, the country has led a fractured life for over fifty years with the ghost of Juan Peron authorizing no end of varieties of mutually exclusive and contradictory political movements and parties.

In that political mess, violence has been the constant companion of public life, with the most outstanding moment being the “dirty war” from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s. It was something in which the Catholic Church was deeply involved – a significant part though not all of its leadership turned a blind eye to the killings, murders and torture carried out by the military dictatorship that operated in the name of restoring the Church and Catholic values to the center of Argentinian life.

The ultimately unproductive Peronism of his youth, the political chaos of the country that led to a military dictatorship, fighting a war with Argentinians, a Church where the Nuncio was the tennis partner of the military dictator and the President of the bishops’ conference was chaplain general to the armed forces and completely supportive of its “saving” role: this is the turbulence  that provided the shaping influences on a priest with a deep faith but also a keen sense of the Church’s public role. That was the world that forged Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

He developed a deep antagonism to ideologically driven solutions to anything and his recurrent return to “the people”, what they think/feel/believe. His remaining piece of Peronism is its populism, guided by rational reflection.

Bergoglio prized himself away from tribal allegiances and predictable beliefs and alliances that had been the Peronist way of operating. Then the Gospel kicked in and the parameters of his life became the Gospel and the poor. As well, a deep dose of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius as reinterpreted from the 1960s on, provided him with a Christ focused, institutionally unadorned approach to faith that could not be dismayed by evidence that the church and its leadership were not all they were expected to be.

These simple resources are the foundation of his radicalism. If you put yourself in his shoes in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, it may well be that these simple elements are the basis for his survival in the tumultuous events of those many years.

What those elements now provide to the church and the world is a distinctive personality who displays many features of a genuinely post-modern personality. He has no respect for statuses and structures unless the people holding them are delivering what they’ve been put in place to provide. He never invokes tradition to justify his claims or assertions. He seeks to engage and persuade rather than declare and direct. He is a vividly autonomous actor operating from his own subjectivity rather a received set of institutionally generated maxims and boundaries.

Maybe that is why he has captured the imagination of a postmodern world.

 

 

 

Seeing Australia from outside the island continent offers some very strange views from time to time. The outpouring of grief over the tragic accident that took the talented life of cricketer Phillip Hughes went global within a very short time.

The home of cricket – England – was profuse in the time devoted to this sad event. While he was in hospital, Phillip Hughes was part of hourly bulletins on the BBC. On the day Hughes was declared dead, the BBC gave a full quarter hour of coverage from England and Australia involving players, administrators, medical doctors, sports physicians and engineers who design helmets. And all in prime time.

The tragic accident and its sorrowful unfolding has flooded the Australian media and will remain so till his funeral.

As one who has more than my fare share to do with death and grief, I know the exquisite pain and  numbing sense of loss suffered by those people pole axed by its occurring. There’s nothing to compare with the shock and dismay that comes with the unexpected death of someone full of promise.

But the intrusion into the intimacy of the experience by the world’s media and the reaction that it provokes in communities often only held together by the media they share has been on a scale not seen since the death of Princess Diana. Even Elton John got in on the act to dedicate a song to Hughes.

Meanwhile and at the same time, an Israeli umpire gets hit on the head in a freak accident while doing his job and it is barely reported. And the catalogue of the world’s atrocity stories are readily available but hardly get noticed.

What’s going on here? Yes some of it comes down to a world – Australia – where you dare not mention the “D” word – death. It’s where we are all headed but never the subject of any conversation and little thought or reflection.

Especially among young athletes, the prospect of physical failure cannot be countenanced and the sheer lack of familiarity with death in the sanitized, fitness and success focused world of professional sport means that any accommodation of its reality is something that is put in the “too hard” basket indefinitely.

But there’s something else. Recently a senior figure in the Australian Rugby Union who played for the Wallabies when it was an amateur sport gave his account of why the Wallabies are doing so badly. It’s not that they haven’t got the talent or they’re demoralized or they aren’t fit enough or have too many among them on the injury list.

My friend reckons it’s because they’re paid too much. They’re paid so much and on such long contracts that they have to look after themselves or have their working life shortened. So, says my pal, they won’t have a go.

Whether that’s the explanation or something else is at the heart of the Wallabies’ woes is not my point. What the allegation points to is the hermetically sealed world professional athletes live in and it’s all focused on what Miss Piggy once neatly summarized: “moi” (me).

So, when reality breaks and death intrudes, worlds shatter. But not just the world of those intimately involved with the deceased, as it does for all those who lose someone close and loved. A global community that is tied up with supporting that hermetically sealed world of professional sports breaks open.

People who had never met the deceased somehow feel a sense of tragic loss well beyond the sadness we should all feel at someone else’s misfortune. Prime Ministers eulogize, commentators offer opinions, individuals put out bats and flowers.

What’s it saying about us? As a regular celebrant of funerals, I never tire of saying to a grieving family that the ceremony isn’t for the deceased. Sadly, they’re gone. It’s for the living, the ones left behind. What does the outpouring over Phillip Hughes say about the culture he’s left behind?

As I said, Australia is becoming a stranger and stranger place to me.

Michael Kelly is an Australian Jesuit Priest, now based in Bangkok. 

I’ve been a priest for thirty years and for perhaps the past two decades, I have known that when I walk into an unfamiliar setting or join a new group of people and tell them what I am, a goodly number are thinking to themselves: “What sort of a weird, psychologically deficient, sexually repressed and potential criminal do we have here?”

Part of me enjoys the dare that such subconscious assessments offer. I am none of those. I’ve made some choices in life and had to live with their blessings and burdens.

Right now such assessments are predictable enough if people making them haven’t met many priests. But I also know that I’m guilty as charged in many ways.

It’s very difficult being a priest in the Roman Catholic Church in Australia. There is such a long record of incompetent mismanagement of sexual abuse claims against priests; so much practical denial of the pain people go through and such distance from anything the founder of Christianity actually sought to foster.

I share a culture with people like Cardinal George Pell who has told two enquiries that the Church’s processes lacked both the vocabulary and systems for dealing with such psychopathological behavior. Where I part company with Cardinal Pell in his excusing his inaction in Melbourne before he became archbishop.

Fact is, we both knew what was being said around the clergy about a number of individuals.

Just days ago I found reference in the media to the death of a priest I’d known for a decade and a half. I went looking for details and then found – thanks to the Walkley Award winner and indefatigable Joanne McCarthy of the Newcastle Herald – that my deceased acquaintance was in fact the person whose abuse of children triggered the police investigation in the Hunter region which in turn gave rise to the ongoing Royal Commission into child abuse.

Joanne, who’s a champion (and I’ve never met her), detailed what this now dead priest did to victims over 40 years ago. How he wrecked their lives and then admitted it to and apologised in writing to his victims.

Journalist Joanne McCarthy

I’d known the priest – Peter Brock – on and off since the 1990s. He always seemed hale and hearty in that blokey Australian way. I understood he was something of a local hero in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley.

In 2009, allegations of crimes Brock had allegedly committed in the 1960s and ‘70s were withdrawn. I thought that was the end of the matter – that the charges had been heard and the evidence didn’t stack up to a conviction. Then last year, his religious superior told me it wasn’t the whole story. Brock, by now – after being awarded an OAM and being welcomed back to the ministry “with considerable joy” – was offering pastoral care to the elderly in a retirement village. He would never operate as a priest again, I was told. He would never be appointed to a parish. The Superior didn’t go into detail.

I had to rely on Joanne McCarthy for those details in her powerful story. I know it beggars belief, however, so many of us within the rank and file of the clergy were oblivious.

We were blindsided by the revelations.We’re still reeling.

The first thing I wanted to do on reading the victim’s story was reach for a bucket and throw up. Then I recalled how when Peter Brock was charged by police, he denied the charges.

I was a only small cog in the wheel of the Church, but had founded and was responsible for what was our main online news service and duly reported the allegations before they got to court. I was contacted by senior clerics, told Brock would be pleading “not guilty”, that they didn’t believe the accusations anyway. He deserved the benefit of the doubt.

I was also informed of a new rule.

Such allegations were not to be reported any more. The man was entitled to his good name until convicted – only then was it to be reported. We were not to record allegations, only convictions.

I obeyed.

Now I realise that I was inadvertently complicit in the legendary process of concealment of clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Again I looked for the bucket as I considered my actions to be inadvertent cooperation with a denial of natural justice – to the victims. Small cogs in a big wheel Pell and I may have been. Devoid of a vocabulary and process for addressing them, we may have also been. But, unlike some brave clerical souls who did take on the system – those who named names and called on the archbishop to do something – we didn’t.

I’m guilty as charged in ways I’ve just admitted to. And that is my dilemma and challenge. What to do now and where to go?

When I joined the Jesuits over four decades ago, it was quite different. I was attracted to the life because I had the opportunity to be a witness to and care for those who had made a difference to others’ lives. It happened in my family where “irretrievable breakdown” in my parents’ marriage had only one solution – divorce.

In the 1960s, that was absolutely taboo for Catholics of the committed kind my parents were. It only happened with the advice and encouragement of good priests who knew the real world and cared for people. And, in my experience, they weren’t uncommon. My family and most of those I knew at school and elsewhere were knockabout, ambitious and very down to earth people for whom their faith was important.

The late Catholic priest, Peter Brock

I never understood what people meant when they referred to the “Catholic guilts” because my faith never had anything to do with guilt. It was about mystery, service and self-sacrifice. It wasn’t about authority and rulebooks.

My experience over the last 30 years has been a deeply privileged one of being given the most precious thing anyone has to offer – trust. I am invited to be present at the most vulnerable and important turning points in life – from birth to death and all the hooks ups and break ups in between. I have the opportunity to assist people in stringing together their own life’s narrative with word and symbol.

It’s a mind-bending and mysterious experience for me. And I’m told from time to time that my entry into their lives has made a positive difference. But today, people looking at people like me often see something very different. They don’t see the grace I’ve received and shared.

The sense and commonsense in my experience of Catholicism has been lost and I can’t see it returning in Australia for at least a couple of generations. I believe that’s a good thing.

Away with all the humbug and hypocrisy that passed for religion; the cover-ups and deceits; the tolerance of incompetent leaders doing a very bad job; the people suffering at the hands of frauds and of clergy and others in the Church’s administration being protected by the institution’s lack of transparency and accountability.

But will the taste for mystery, the commitment to service and the practice of self-sacrifice return when the stables have been cleaned?

I look back at my life and see myriad people I’ve shared the journey with, some of whom have helped me to grow and some of whom I’ve helped to grow. I also have to believe the taste for mystery, the dedication to service and self-sacrifice will return.

Otherwise the commitment I’ve made for 43 years will have been for nothing.

And I’m not prepared to say that. Not at all.

The author, Michael Kelly, wrote this for Wendy Harmer’s ‘The Hoopla’ which is at www.thehoopla.com.au. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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It’s been a big few weeks for the clergy and their dealings with the police across the world. In legal matters in countries covering four continents – India, the Dominican Republic, Italy and Australia – clerics are being held to account by police and civil courts.

Two priests in India have been charged with murdering the rector of a seminary in Karnataka, in southwest India; a former papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic has been defrocked by the Vatican for child abuse and will face criminal charges; a bishop in Australia has been charged with sexually abusing an adolescent 45 years ago, and a priest in Sicily has been charged with seeking sexual favors from refugees he was supposed to be helping.

Significantly, the Vatican’s Polish-born former nuncio to the Dominican Republic, Josef Wesolowski, was canonically convicted in record time last Friday. He has two months to lodge an appeal against the conviction but has still to face criminal charges that carry a jail sentence.

And in Australia, where a currently serving bishop has stepped aside after he was charged on Monday with allegedly abusing an adolescent in 1969, another senior cleric will face charges following a detailed inquiry into clerical sexual abuse over many decades in the Diocese of Maitland Newcastle.

The trial, conviction and proposed sentence – expulsion from the clergy – of the Polish nuncio is a sign that Pope Francis’ “zero tolerance” policy towards clerics found to have abused children is at work. And the hastening speed with which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is dealing with cases – more than 4,000 since 2008 – is in marked contrast to the approach in the Vatican that prevailed until that year.

For example, it took 20 years and the efforts of two successive bishops in the Australian Diocese of Wollongong to defrock a convicted pedophile priest. While it will be a long time until trust and confidence in the canonical processes are restored, the evidence of recent times is that the Vatican is out to “make good”.

In fact, the Vatican has been dragged kicking and screaming to its present position. It has been shamed into action after inquiries in many countries have shown how negligent Church authorities have been in the protection provided for children in the care of Catholic institutions.

The Vatican now claims it has “streamlined” and sped up processes that used to take decades. The rule of law in secular societies – in the United States, Europe and Australia in particular – has forced Roman authorities to act outside their comfort zones and be subject to law enforcement and legal processes that they previously had thought themselves to be above.

The Catholic Church is being held accountable in ways it has never been before. The rule of law is one thing. Police, courts of law and governments that legislate on codes of conduct and mandatory reporting procedures relate to the public accountability the Church cannot avoid where there are effective police forces and independent judicial processes.

But the rule of law will flounder and eventually deliver far less than it should if there is not something else. The necessary values underpinning institutions that manage the rule of law also have to work. Without transparency, accountability and a readiness to recognize that public trust is much more important for the Church than just about anything else, the reforms of legal procedures inside the Church and a willingness to see justice done according to the rule of law will fail.

All institutions forfeit the trust of the public unless they are nourished by such values. And this is where the Catholic Church still has a lot to learn about the lasting and corrupting effect of the absence of these values.

In business and government where the rule of law applies, it is taken for granted that the failure to be transparent, putting obstacles in the course of justice, to declare a personal interest, failure to act on certain facts or worse, the covering up of knowledge of misdeeds, all bring with them the expectation that leaders, ministers and the corporate executives involved will resign.

They may not have been guilty of any offense. But their credibility is gone and so are they.

Not so in the Church. The most notorious instance is the flight of the then-archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, to the protection of the Vatican. If he had remained in the United States, he would have faced charges over his cover-ups of sex-abusing clerics while he was archbishop. But he was able to thrive in Rome as a person of exceptional influence and apparently credible public standing.

Regrettably, the phenomenon is much wider and reaches even to the circle surrounding the present pope in the person of a member of his council of cardinals charged with reforming the Curia. Last year, Pope Francis named Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, the most powerful defender of a child-abusing priest who was eventually convicted in a Vatican process, as one of eight cardinals on the commission advising him on Vatican reforms.

Errázuriz refused to act on a victim’s allegations in 2003, telling the priest not to worry, according to news accounts and legal testimony. The cardinal is yet to acknowledge and confess his failure to address the sexual abuse of adolescent boys by a popular member of his diocesan clergy. His credibility, or lack of it, rests on this failure. But is anything ever done about it in the Church?

And so it goes throughout the clergy where unless someone is charged with an offense, no recognition is given to those failures of vigilance that do most to undermine the confidence of even committed Catholics in the operations of the Church.

Yes, by all means let us cooperate fully with civil authorities, as is now happening more. Yes, by all means fix the rusty wheel that Canon Law is. But without the values to underpin the operation of the law – without transparency, accountability and the declaration of interest – the reform will be at best half-done.

Jesuit Fr Michael Kelly is executive director of ucanews.com

Read more at: http://www.ucanews.com/news/recent-cases-demonstrate-stricter-church-stance-against-abusers/71316

 

This is a time of reform in the Church. Everyone who bothers to look, from average Catholics around the world to the cardinals who elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio to become Pope Francis, knows the Church is in strife and in need of a lot of work to render it an effective means to the end it serves: to proclaim the Gospel and serve God’s people.

First steps are being taken to fix a dysfunctional Vatican. But some of the big-ticket items for the wider Church won’t be fixed as quickly. Many of them are pastoral and require cultural change as much as administrative amendments. And as anyone with experience in changing the culture of an organization will attest, that type of change is the slowest in coming.

It will start in October with an issue that is perhaps the single most undeclared but neuralgic item in the Church’s life; also the one that frequently triggers the departure of otherwise observant Catholics from the Church: divorce and remarriage.

But there is just as fundamental an issue, one that has needed, and failed, to be addressed for at least 40 years: the issue of ministry in the Church. Perhaps this will be the topic of the next Synod.

There were two issues Pope Paul VI would not allow to be discussed at Vatican II – clerical celibacy and contraception. The latter was addressed directly in 1968 with such an unsuccessful outcome that Paul VI never wrote another encyclical in his pontificate. Clerical celibacy was to have been the subject of the Synod of Bishops in 1971, but it overlooked the topic to focus instead on social justice.

It is now a subject whose consideration cannot be delayed any longer. That it is on Pope Francis’s mind is obvious from his statements about his readiness to consider ordaining married men – the so called viri probati.

But that’s the tip of the iceberg. If all such a move does is to reinforce the existing structure of ministry – where power rests in the hands of ordained men – there will be little attention given to what is needed in a Church that has vastly changed in the last 50 years.

And unless the issue is addressed in its full context, with full consideration given to what ministry in the Church is there to accomplish, such a change would also run the risk of enhancing something that bedevils the Church today and has contributed substantially to the syndrome of sex abuse.

I speak, of course, of clericalism, that culture of self-interest which promotes and sustains the presumption of superiority among clergy and their practice of protective secrecy. It is something that priests share with all would-be elites, such as professional associations in law and medicine, bureaucrats and the military.

If ordaining married men to priesthood inducts more people into a destructive culture that is the antithesis of anything Jesus hoped for among his followers, the move won’t reform but rather entrench the decadence. This is a constant theme of the present pope when he rails against careerism and narcissism among the clergy and the Church administration in Rome.

The reality is that God seems to be on the side of reform because in most parts of the world, the supply of celibate males ordained as priests has been in serious decline for 40 years.

This is a worldwide phenomenon. In the Philippines there is only one priest for 6,500 Catholics. And in many parts of Europe, North and Latin America, the Church’s capacity to provide the Eucharist – the source and summit of the Church’s life, according to Vatican II – has been compromised because of the lack of authorized celebrants.

The reality is that, in many parts of the world, the small and ageing number of priests today are not the ones who are leading Catholic communities; many are led by lay people. Catechists, school principals, leaders of communion services and lay pastoral workers now frequently fill the place occupied by priests in recent centuries.

It is lay people who communicate the faith in myriad ways – through teaching and catechetic instruction, biblical and theological research, in routine pastoral care in communities, in service delivery to the poor, sick and aged, by administering communities and institutions, by managing the Church’s assets and finances, in creating liturgies and training pastoral workers who are themselves lay people, in preparing people for the key sacramental moments of their lives in marriages and baptisms, even in performing funerals. The list could go on.

The Church would simply stop happening without the ministries – in both paid and voluntary employment – that lay people provide, with perhaps a majority of them performed by women. But none of these is celebrated and confirmed with appropriate authorization as integral parts of the Church’s ministry.

The style of priestly service – and the training of candidates to supply it – is not as old as many think. It owes its current shape and style to the reforms introduced at the 16^th century Council of Trent. At that Council, disciplinary rather than doctrinal changes occurred that tightened up a loose and decadent situation where clergy were mostly untrained, unaccountable vendors of sacraments for a price.

The next stage of reform has arrived and it needs to go deeper than a mere tightening of regulations.

Jesuit Fr. Michael Kelly is the executive director of ucanews.com.

 

The recent casual remark of a friend got me to thinking about just how people experience Easter differently. My friend and I were talking about something Christians are constantly encouraged to consider especially in Lent and which gets its highest profile in the Christian calendar on Good Friday: humility.

The way I have come to discover what humility might be is through being humiliated. In the tradition of spirituality I have learnt to love – that coming from St. Ignatius Loyola – humility and humiliation are related experiences.

And I’ve found my own and others’ most common reaction to real humiliation is not the anger, rage and indignation that is frequently the prelude to rebellion. I have found at the base of humiliation is actually dismay and confusion – about the hurts inflicted or the reversals and disappointments suffered. And, if I’ve brought the humiliation on myself, the experience of shame at what I’ve said or done is not slow in arriving.

My friend, a woman with a lot of experience as a psychotherapist, brought me up short. She told me my take on humility and humiliation was the account of a very male way of meeting the experience. Women experience humility and humiliation very differently, my friend told me. And a little thought will tell us males why.

Too often women are the subjects of humiliation. They are humiliated by the beliefs, practices and convictions that are so common among men of all nations and cultures. They come down to judgments on externals – their looks and attractive features that “sexualize” male perceptions; the often unacknowledged assumption that women are simply not able to measure up to the performance standards of men, whether or not those making the judgment recognize that too many males fail to meet much absurd performance criteria but get away with their mediocrity.

Such humiliation is rarely directly inflicted or in spoken words. It comes in looks, gestures and movements or simply in the way a conversation flows. Women are only good for a few things and one of them is satisfying an urge in men.

It is humiliating in a completely different way to the manner in which humiliation is mostly experienced by men. And it is intensified in Asian societies where caste, ethnic origins, birth parents, tribal membership and even the geographic location of home also play a part.

In Asia, of course, such bases for negative judgments apply across genders. And they generally lead to that feeling of resigned powerlessness that becomes self-fulfilling.

In many parts of Asia, such undeclared humiliations frequently register among the humiliated as a “loss of face”, the feeling of embarrassment at the diminishment inflicted, consciously or unconsciously, on someone whose status, achievements or dignity have been slighted.

Reactions to humiliation vary from fatalistic endurance to rebellion. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet put the choice starkly – to endure “the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune or, by opposing, end them” The choices are knuckle down to this: take the blow on chin, offer no resistance and say “ there’s nothing I can do about ii”; or get serious about settling the score, rebel and dissent, eliminate the offending enemy.

Or there is another way. In good faith, a person can recognize a great injustice has been done and there is little that can be done to undo it. In good faith, a person can say something is stupid, wrong and reasonable about which every effort to alter the situation has been made. But those efforts have failed.

Failure can congeal in bitterness or it can be the prelude to discovering new life. For that to happen the humiliated person has to be freed from the hurt, shame and demoralizing he or she experiences.

That’s what is holy about Holy Week. It takes us to the heart of unmerited, abusive humiliation and how to make it a triumph. No good deed may go unpunished as the old saying has it. But that’s not the end of the story

Too many Catholics associate “holiness” with places like Churches and shrines, even though Jesus said quite plainly, and was killed for repeating it, that true holiness was displayed in service and real worship is in “spirit and truth”, not in events that occur in “sacred” places.

Too many Catholics associate “holiness” with ecclesiastical or religious status when it was Jesus’ own protests about the abuse of their decision making status by the chief Priests and Elders of his time that saw him executed. That’s what we celebrate this Friday.

Holiness is discovered neither in the security of places nor the comfort of statuses but in an active engagement with the living God, to be found in our hearts and in our world, especially in those humiliated and disregarded. It’s what makes this week holy.

 

 

Pope Francis may need some help from Our Lady The Untier Of Knots

On April 27, we will witness an event that will tell us more about what to make of Papa Francesco and what to expect in his papacy. He will canonize on the same day both Popes John Paul II and John XXII. Each represents contrasting styles and records as Bishops of Rome: John XIII who convoked the Vatican Council and opened up the Church; John Paul II who stiffened and straightened the Church when some thought it was out of control.

From his opening words as pope, Papa Francis has cut a very different path to that of John Paul II and his immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI – an engaging and direct, simple and accessible approach whereas Pope John Paul drew millions to events of uncertain significance (such as World Youth Days) and Pope Benedict, as either Bishop of Rome or Joseph Ratzinger the theologian, preferred solitude as he produced books and encyclicals.

Pope Francis has been quick to commence a style of more inclusive leadership through consultation and discussion, as demonstrated in his calling an extraordinary Synod in October. And he has moved to see the Church as a whole addresses the greatest challenge to its credibility in centuries by getting the new Vatican Commission addressing the issue underway with credible members and a reform agenda. This is of special relevance to us in Australia who have witnessed appalling sight of Cardinal Pell trying to call the brutal treatment of sex abuse victims “prudential management of the Church’s assets”.

Along the way, the Pope has carefully but emphatically faced the Church in a fresh if not new direction. And, according to well informed sources in Rome, opposition to his reforms is mounting even as the  backlog of issues the Church has to face remains in place.

He started early to address some of the outstanding concerns. With two simple observations – one to journalists in the plane on the way from Brazil and the other in his long interview with some Jesuit magazines last year – he has personally managed to defuse sex and homosexuality as obsessive topics of Catholic focus.

However, the Church has virtually 50 years of unaddressed issues and reforms that need to be addressed:

• Clericalism, the restructuring of ministry and that ticket into the clerical culture at the heart of so much trouble for the Church – celibacy – which Pope Paul VI prevented the Vatican Council from considering;
• The weak grasp of human biology reflected in the Church’s sexual ethics, particularly as shown in the controversial issue of contraception;
• Centralism and careerism in Church administration and those who ambition it;
• The outdated nature of the Church’s legal processes;
• And perhaps the biggest issue: the exclusion of women from positions of decision-making significance.

That’s where the inclusion of Pope John XXIII in the beatification ceremonies next month becomes a clear indication of the style and direction of his term as Bishop of Rome.

John XXIII’s cause for canonization had been languishing. Pope Francis dispensed with the usual process and simply declared, as he can, that John XXIII was worthy of canonization.

Fans and devotees of John Paul II had started the chant for his canonization at his funeral – Santo Subito. But the canonization wheels continued to turn for John Paul II with his enthusiastic supporters declaring at his death that he should be called John Paul the Great. That title is appearing to be at least an overstatement as the details of his protection of the disgraced and disgraceful Marcial Marciel, child abusing father of two families whose crimes go back to his earliest days as Founder of the Legionaries of Christ in the 1940s.

But the association of the two Popes in this canonization process is no casual coincidence. As all leaders know, managing change requires that the leader take the majority of the community, organization or nation along with him or her as the changes unfold. Faction-ridden as the Vatican in particular and Church in general really are, Francis has to take as many as he can from all factions with him as he helps the Church face the reality of its challenges and respond constructively.

Pope Francis has already indicated how he wants to address the tense issues in the life of the Church with open discussion, inclusive participation in the conversation and a process that will reach conclusions. Along with the other hot topics, the subject of the Extraordinary Synod – family life, its challenges and how to include the divorced and remarried in the Church community – is a topic whose handling can be managed only with consultation and inclusion.

As Jesuit Provincial in the 1970s, he was widely seen as, and has admitted himself to have been, a self willed and authoritarian figure. Divided as the Jesuits in Argentina were, he did little more than antagonize many with his style. But he has learnt from that failure. At the heart of Jesuit governance is the good working relationship and openness needed between the leader and his subjects. It needs to be inclusive and consultative leadership or it fails to do what the Jesuit Founder Ignatius Loyola wanted it to be.

After failing as Provincial, Jorge Mario Bergoglio had another opportunity to learn how to govern when he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires. There, his approach was to be decisive only after extensive and inclusive engagement with those involved in or affected by the decision he had to make.

Such a process means change will only come slowly. But to govern effectively in often-conflictive circumstances, Pope Francis needs to govern inclusively, as reflected symbolically in this joint canonization this month.

These events defuse tensions while at the same firmly lead in a positive direction – defuse the cultists by recognizing John Paul II yet underlining what Pope Francis really wants: a return to the spirit of Vatican II as the animating spirit of the Church. That’s why John XXIII got fast–tracked.

The documented turning point of Pope Francis’s life after his failure as Jesuit Provincial occurred before a picture in a German church of Our Lady, The One Who Unties Knots. To do what he plainly wants to do, Our Lady will have to be working overtime.

Fr Michael Kelly is the executive director of ucanews.com

 

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Michael Kelly SJ invites Australian Catholics to embrace the humiliation that is bound to increase as the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse continues in 2014 through a spirituality based in the gospel. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola invite us to pray for the gift of identification with Jesus in the abuse and derision he experienced in his Passion.

Much of what made people pleased to be Catholic throughout our history since white settlement in Australia is gone and never to be revived. It fitted a time – one where most Catholics felt at home in the tribe, got their identity through belonging to ethnic groups that were, till recent decades, mostly populated by relatively uneducated and unskilled or semi-skilled males and house bound females who married in their early twenties if not their teens.

Until the 1970’s, three quarters of Australian school children did not complete six years of high school and matriculate. Tertiary education was taken up by little more than one in five Australians. Today, nine out of ten young Australians complete six years of high school and from my own experience, which is among those who do get married in the Church, I would rarely see a couple where the male is younger than his early thirties and the female in her late twenties.

Gone are the days of strict ethnic, religious or cultural identification underpinned by fairly rigid and exclusive social groups that impacted on employment opportunities. As well, the carriers of faith that helped many generations of Catholics to find a relationship with God have been unequal to the challenge of building a post – Vatican 2 Church whose self understanding was not to be found in hierarchy or devotional practice but as the People of God whose appreciation of their faith was to be grounded in Scripture and sacramental participation.

For robust Catholic faith to thrive, something new has emerged. People come to faith by invitation and persuasion rather than direction and fear. The invitation and persuasion are there to develop understanding, conviction and personal commitment as pilgrims on a faith journey.

Moreover, what many fail to appreciate is that now some two generations of Catholics in Australia have been better educated in faith, in Scripture and in Catholic theology than many, even most, in the generations of clerics and Religious who did the yeoman’s work of building communities and institutions, of providing services and creating the culture that is now all but gone.

What I believe is the next and deepest challenge for the Catholic faith and its prospering in Australia is to feed more than the minds of those drawn to affirm the faith. That is necessary and must endure. What is needed are various ways in which the hearts of those seeking to discover deeper conviction can be nourished.

That search is essentially a personal and intimate one, a search that is given the loose name “spirituality”.

I am not talking about the return to devotional practices of the past that are still alive and well in the seclusion of some ethnic groups more recently arrived in Australia, with patterns of Catholic devotion that are not going to the fountain of faith – the New Testament. Like their predecessors in the Irish Australian tradition, they simply will not survive the chill winds of the wider secular culture in which Australian Catholics live.

And, of course, I do not refer to that form of nostalgia evident in some Catholics for a pre-Conciliar way of being and worshipping as a Catholic that is little more than a selfindulgent distraction.

The spirituality I am referring to is the experience of the living God, felt at depth, and the experience of whom is the peace and confidence within which faith, hope and love grow. It is the experience of a relationship with God that is supported, encouraged and celebrated in the community of faith through the Eucharist especially. But it is also an experience that is deeply and essentially personal.

For faith to deepen in us, we need to absorb and face our experience of life, be honest with what we discover in the depths of our being, in our hearts where we find what is leading us to joy, light and growth and what is inhibiting or distracting us from embracing the growth we are invited to enjoy.

Of course, our spiritual growth is always done in context – the context of our own lives and their opportunities and disappointments, their blessings and failures. But it is also done in the context we share with others: in our society and world and in the Church that is our faith community.

We can each describe the changes on our personal journey home to our hearts where we discover the God who is searching for us. But I think there is something else, something that happens to us individually by focusing on an experience we all share.

I believe there is something we share as an experience right now: we Catholics in Australia are at a tipping point, in a crisis that is also an opportunity for us as a community of faith.

I refer of course to the event engulfing the Catholic Church in Australia: the Royal commission into child sex abuse. What relationship does this event have to the deepest opportunity for Catholics in Australia and those who may be drawn to our faith?

The point we always start from in approaching the living God is one of humility. We are only unworthy servants in the presence of the one who is both utterly other and mysterious but also intimately present to us, coming to us through our experience of the people and world we encounter. That is what Christians proclaim – God is to be found in and among us. Our humble and open acceptance of this mystery is our starting point.

But sometimes a humble starting point is forced upon us. We may be the object of abuse and betrayal or of others’ loathing, envy or violence. Or we may be humiliated by something we have done or been part of.

That is where most of us are in the Australian church right now: humiliated.

In a book to be published in May, the journalist and academic Chris McGillion has chronicled the sorry story not just of criminal misbehavior by Catholic clerics and religious who have abused children but also of the complete ineptitude and likely malfeasance of many bishops and religious superiors over a long time.

McGillion then looks at what is likely to happen following the enquiries which are mostly into the Catholic Church, the Royal Commission currently happening, the investigation into the handling of complaints against a “Father F” in the Diocese of Armidale by Antony Whitlam QC, the Parliamentary Enquiry in Victoria last year and the investigation into the Diocese of Maitland Newcastle conducted by Margaret Cunneen whose report has just been handed down.

While conceding that these external interventions into the Church will insist on institutional best practice for the protection of children by the Church from here on, McGillion is doubtful that they will be any more effective than such enquiries are on other subjects when conducted in universities, Government departments and other similar large organizations.

Much of it, in McGillion’s view, will lead to extensive bureaucratic red tape, adept evasion of the strictures imposed, ways around ordinances and fundamentally a distraction from what is the Church’s only way to fix itself – the revivification of its core mission of communicating and sharing sacred truth. Without that, the Church collapses into being no more than an extensive NGO service provider, bogged down in itself.

I am inclined to agree with Bishop Bill Wright, the bishop of Maitland Newcastle, in his answer to a question on ABC radio last year. Asked by an ABC Radio journalist if he would guarantee that children in the care of the Church in his Diocese would never be at risk, he responded with a firm “No”.

Asked why, Bishop Wright replied that there is no system known that can meet the challenge posed by the mercurial, deceptive and fraudulent behaviour of some of the most evil people known among human kind. He would try but couldn’t guarantee that he would beat them at their own devious game and he believed that there is probably no system that could guarantee that he would beat them.

I’m sure Bishop Wright would agree that while regulatory regimes need to be as tight as we can make them, the law won’t renew the faith life of Catholics in Australia. Only the Spirit can do that.

And, as St. Paul never tired of saying, God’s grace and the Spirit’s energy are most at work in our human weakness and there is no weaker place to be than the experience of humiliation and diminishment.

In his Spiritual Exercises, St Ignatius Loyola invites anyone following his way to a deeper encounter with God to consider and pray for what he calls The Third Degree of Humility. That is where he invites the one making the Exercises to pray for the gift of identification with Jesus in his dereliction, in the abuse and derision he experienced in his Passion.

This can sound like masochism if it’s not understood as a gift of God that brings pain yes, but also freedom and peace, as his crucifixion did finally to Jesus.

Now we don’t have to go looking for or try to invent events in our lives that can allow us into the heart of Jesus in his derelict state. They come our way uninvited on a regular basis – those times when misunderstanding, betrayal or envy may come unbidden, for example. These are the moments when a deeper unity with our Savior is there if we can accept them.

We can deny them, dance around them, acknowledge them but wish they would go away. Most of us do that to humiliation and the opportunity it offers most of the time. But embracing humiliation as a gift and an opportunity is the first sign that the Spirit is at work in and among us.

And where does the Spirit take us if we embrace what is happening in and among our community of faith as it faces the inescapable shame of deeds and misdeeds of too many, including those trusted with leadership? Just where the Spirit always takes us: to the foot of the Cross where we share in the surrender of that prototype of all disciples, Mary the mother of Jesus, in her surrender into the hands of the living God.

And what happens with that? We come by God’s grace to let God be God.

This is the present moment and the present opportunity for Catholics in Australia: face our failure as followers of Jesus and deliver on reform we must. But this is also an opportunity to move beyond the externals of the faith and accept this time as a moment of grace.

We can only do so if we let go of the securities that fostered faith for a different time and for people in a different place. Surely, daily conversion to following the Nazarene on his path to Golgotha is not the only thing we have to do to meet the challenges of our mission today in Australia. But without it, we will deliver a caricature of Catholicism and a substitute for adult faith.

It will be a distraction from the riches given into our hands not simply for our benefit but for those who may be drawn by God’s grace to find the inexhaustible treasure to be found in Christ in our country at this time.

Fr. Michael Kelly SJ, Executive Director

This article was published in Autumn edition of ‘The Swag’, the quaterly magazine of the National Council of Priests in Australia.