Michael Kelly

Early in the 20^th Century, the French Catholic poet and writer Charles Peguy observed that, at the turn of each age, the Catholic Church arrives a little late and a little breathless.

It was not till the 1960s, at Vatican II, that the Church absorbed and authorized the major influence of the French Revolution – that sovereignty inhered in the people rather than the Sovereign – when it declared that the Church was the People of God rather than the aristocracy of the Church (the Pope, bishops and clergy).

John XXIII brought the freedoms declared in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights a little faster – only a lapse of fifteen years between its proclamation and John XXIII’s encyclicals effectively endorsing them as Catholic belief too.

The internal procedures managed by Canon Law are taking a little longer, as Kieran Tapsell has described in this blog of November 17. The Vatican is catching up with where everyone else is, but slowly and reluctantly. It is only in recent years that the Vatican has allowed bishops to report sexual abuse by clergy to the police of various jurisdictions and has itself expelled convicted clerics from their status.

A key document about the practice of the Vatican – to keep any accusations against a cleric an exclusively internal matter for the Church and away from the police and any legal proceedings – is the letter to the Irish bishops from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), led then by Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict in 2005. It was written in 1997 and reported in the New York Times in 2011. In 2010, Pope Benedict wrote to Irish Catholics about how “concerned” and “disturbed” he was by clerical sexual abuse in Ireland.

The 1997 communication, emphasizing that civil procedures could harm the Canonical processes, is conveniently overlooked when Benedict is being shown as the hero of the Vatican on the subject of disciplining clergy on sex abuse.

And the activities of the CDF, a small office of 25 people who were directly managed by Cardinal  Ratzinger, had their impact in Australia where some of the first formal steps by bishops’ conferences anywhere in the world occurred under the leadership of Bishop Geoff Robinson. For his efforts in the development of Towards Healing, the national protocol on what is referred to as “Professional Standards” expected of those employed in the Church’s work, the CDF attacked him for being a trouble maker, even heretical.

The truth of the matter of Cardinal Ratzinger’s change on the subject is that he was a late convert to recognizing just what a problem sex abuse had become, how extensive it was and how utterly inadequate the provisions of Canon Law were to meet its challenge. He and his then assistant and later Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, both played down attention to the issue claiming that it was exaggerated by the media and stirred up by enemies of the Church.

During Benedict’s reign as Pope, the law changed substantially and the level of openness to civil authorities went from zero to the encouragement of full cooperation.

Joseph Ratzinger’s conversion, as was explained to me by the biographer of the notorious Marcial Marciel, the disgraced and deceased founder of the Legionaries of Christ, only happened from 2004 when he discovered just how perverse, abusive and utterly deceptive Marciel was. I asked the biographer how Marciel came to be exposed.

He said that someone in the inner circle of the leadership of Legionaries had finally had enough of Marciel’s lies, deception and hypocrisy. He decided that Cardinal Ratzinger was the only one of the powerful Cardinals in Rome who could do anything about it because he hadn’t been on the receiving end of financial “gifts” from Marciel. as others had been.

It was pointless going to Pope John Paul II at the end of his long reign who could see nothing wrong with Marciel, thought him a devout supporter and that the accusations against Marciel were those of the disgruntled and disaffected whose views were biased and prejudiced.

This disaffected Legionary leader knew that every day Cardinal Ratzinger walked from his apartment on one side of St Peter’s Square, straight to his office at the CDF on the other side of the Square and at the same time every day.

He decided to introduce himself to Cardinal Ratzinger out there in the Piazza. He did just that. The Cardinal professed shock and amazement at what he was told of Marciel’s abuse of Legionary seminarians and of his two families and children from them.

Cardinal Ratzinger asked the Legionary to come to his office later in the day where he got one of his staff. a Maltese Monsignor, Charles Scicluna, onto the job immediately. From then on, Scicluna made a name for himself as an energetic prosecutor of sex abusing clerics, culminating in an unprecedented international conference (with experts and bishops and Vatican administrators attending) on the subject of sex abuse in the Church. It was convened by the Jesuits’ Gregorian University. Scicluna was the keynote speaker. He is now a bishop in Malta.

Joseph Ratzinger was a late convert not only to the scale of the problem but also to doing anything about it. The continuing presence Cardinal Bernard Law, the Archbishop of Boston who fled his See when the whole horror of sex abuse in his Archdiocese and his handling of it became clear a decade ago, is testimony that some in the Church are brought to justice and others escape it.

Cardinal Law is a prisoner of Rome and if he returned to the US, he would be charged with, among other things, extensive cover-ups which, in Australia, would be called perverting the course of justice.

 

It may be because I’ve been in Ireland and dealing with people who are the heirs of those responsible for most of the heritage and works of the Australian Jesuits. But I don’t think so. What struck me most deeply after a month or more among European Jesuits, and registering the scale of challenge to the Church as it is represented in the new Pope, is what a “fin de siècle” state the Church is in throughout all its moods and tenses.

 

It is difficult to overestimate the rate and depth of change and the collapse of a phase of the Church’s life that is currently underway. Throughout the world, but particularly in Ireland, the sense of the end of an era that delivered the largest growth in the history of the Church, something foundational is happening. In Ireland for 150 years from the Famine in the 1840s, a cast of Catholicism was exported worldwide. It’s plain that this phase in the Church’s life that seemed as though it would last forever is in fact over.

 

For example, the Irish Jesuits who sent hundreds and hundreds of missionaries to Asia, Africa and Australia now have more members aged over 90 than they do less than 50 years of age. They have four under 50 and can only look at “consolidating”, also known as shutting up shop. One British Jesuit told me that on current figures, there would not be a Jesuit in Britain NOT on the aged pension by the middle of the next decade.

 

It’s not as though the statisticians throughout the Jesuits and the wider Church in Australia, Europe and the USA haven’t seen it coming and haven’t already been advising the Congregational and diocesan leadership for a long time on the unsustainability of various Provinces, dioceses and works. But in Europe it would appear that the future has arrived a little earlier than expected, as John Battersby once said of the Archdiocese of Brisbane!

 

Such has been the case for many congregations of religious women across the world far earlier than for some male clerical religious congregations and for the supply of clergy in dioceses. For clerical religious, the provision of the sacraments has been an enduring need to meet and one that provided relevance. That has kept numbers up quite apart from any special focus offered by the charism of founders and their relevance and attractiveness to prospective members. But not now.

 

As far as absorbing the impact of these well-known and common experiences, not much work has been done apart from scaling back, sometimes done with an energetic press of the panic button by superiors and bishops to underline the urgency of their actions.

 

For the rank and file among religious and clergy, even if these realities were not anticipated when most joined their congregations or dioceses, the challenge is great. The most common reaction is something I have come to call the spirituality and missiology of the last of the Mohicans.

 

Everyone can see the reality; everyone is reluctant to utter the D word for DEATH; everyone hopes that at least there will be something around for when the inevitable admission to the aged care facility occurs. ‘Don’t ask me why it’s all evaporated; I’ll be the last of the tribe and I don’t want to have my life complicated by being asked to “please explain”. The ‘collapse’ is the way many respond’.

 

At the turn of an age, as the early 20^th Century French Church historian Peguy once remarked, the Church always arrives a little late and a little breathless. The turn of this one is no different because the reality is that there are no reinforcements coming from traditional sources to support existing ways of delivering the service.

 

For believers, the future belongs not to fears but to God. The only authentic and spiritually persuasive response to being in the middle of a change of eras like this is one that allows the Spirit to do what the Spirit does. And what the Spirit does is always surprise. Discipleship asks that we be attentive to the unexpected ways we may be drawn.

 

What I find very discouraging about ways of addressing this inescapable reality is the abject failure to see how the mission of the Church is actually delivered today.

 

Despite our blindness to it at times, God is still vigorously at work. Only a conception of mission and the resources needed for it entirely reduced to clergy and religious as until recently trained and authorized could see it as something where God hasn’t been energetically active.

 

To borrow from what Bill Clinton did to beat George Bush Senior twenty years ago – “the economy, stupid, the economy!” The real context for the Catholic Church in Australia and much of the developed world is “the laity, stupid, the laity”. There actually has been an explosion in lay participation in ministry at every level, except the sacramental. What’s needed is to acknowledge that fact.

 

The acid test of whether there has been any acknowledgement of the facts is whether any real power sharing has occurred whereby lay people have become part of decision making processes of dioceses and congregations. Lay people and women especially have taken leadership roles in the services that are offered – in health, welfare and educations – because they require a professional expertise that these days the congregations and dioceses don’t have among their members.

 

But do lay people and women in particular actually become part of the processes where the most significant decisions are made – on Congregational Councils and in the diocesan bodies often reserved for exclusive clerical membership?

 

At a strategic and organizational level, acknowledgement of and decisive involvement by lay people in mission, leadership and ministry can go a couple of ways.

 

One currently proposed response to this change of eras adopted by some in the Church, and reinforced by Emeritus Pope Benedict, is quite happy to welcome this decline in the Church as we have known it. They have seen it as a God given opportunity to scale the Church back to a faithful remnant that would be distinctive because of its orthodoxy and compliance with what Rome and its utterances required under the management of the last three decades.

 

Shame about the mass of Catholics, you might say. They can amuse themselves. There is the elite and that’s all there really needs to be any concern for.

 

The more recent, but also more ancient, view – proposed by Pope Francis who also accepts a reduced size and presence of the Church as inevitable and perhaps desirable – is to say that elitism is for the birds and what is needed is for the Church to be present and make its contribution as leaven: distinctive, even vital and decisive, but not all consuming and dominating.

 

The faithful remnant – and not the usual clerical and religious suspects – in this view will be distinctive because it engages directly with the issues and concerns that the average person has, is in the market place and is ready to give an account of the hope they have. It is not hidden away behind sacristy doors and locked into conversations with the already signed up membership.

 

However the present becomes the future, one thing is sure. The latter won’t be like the past. We might just be in a situation of such abject poverty and resourcelessness that we can allow God to be God.

Pope Francis has pressed all the hot buttons that get Catholic and other tongues wagging- a pastoral response to divorced and remarried Catholics, homosexuality, the place of women in the Church, the excessively centralized nature of management in the Church, liturgical adaptation to local pastoral circumstances and wealth and triumphalism as the all too frequent public face of the Church to the world.

Pope Francis has also commenced a process for addressing at least one of them by convening an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in 2014 on how to address what is probably the issue that sees most adults part company with the Catholic community in the Western world:- divorce and remarriage.

Considering themselves to be unacceptable to the Church because they have failed in what is the biggest risk they can take in their lives, the divorced and remarried often see the Church’s attitude as one that punishes the victims of the failure

But the convening of this extraordinary synod is only the tip of an iceberg that Pope Francis has indicated he wants addressed. What the review by the Council of Cardinals he has appointed want him to accomplish is now clear: reform of the Vatican and the creation of a pattern of Church governance that is both decentralized and at the same time participatory.

The Vatican Curia is already feeling the pressure.  To witness the spectacle of the leader of the Vatican’s doctrinal commission attempting to close down discussions actually begun by the present Pope is remarkable. It would appear that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has moved from being a service to the unity of the Church’s belief to one of some sort of “loyal opposition” in the Vatican. This is occurring in respect of discussions the Pope himself started.

The current Pope’s ambitions to open up discussion in the Church go some way to addressing the comments made last October by one of three surviving theological advisors at Vatican II, These comments were made on the 50^th anniversary of its opening in 1962. Fr Ladislas Orsy, together with Pope Benedict and the controversial Swiss theologian Hans Kung, are the three remaining “periti” from Vatican II who attended its sessions as theological supports to bishops from different dioceses.

Orsy was interviewed on the subject of what remains to be done after Vatican II .The first thing he nominated was the need to remedy Vatican II’s biggest shortcoming. He said that Vatican II was long on excellent ideas but was short on frameworks and structures for implementing its excellent ideas. And what frameworks and structures it did create were quickly dismantled or neutralized by the Vatican Curia.

This has been pointed out in reports after the first meeting of the Council of Cardinals advising Pope Francis on reform of the Vatican and its processes, The Council of Cardinals has pointed out that the Synod of Bishops that meets every three years is a fig leaf of consultation where speeches are choreographed by the Vatican The Curia has then been left to write up what was “agreed” by the participating bishops, much to the disbelief of the Bishops when the document actually appeared.

Under the new Pope’s reforms, head office may be updated in line with the Vatican II Council that concluded half a century ago.

But the challenge that lies ahead in addressing the other hot button topics won’t be resolved as speedily. There are inherent problems for a Church still anchored in the processes of a monarchical and aristocratic age for its governance.

To their credit, Vatican offices have already begun consultation with high level lay organizations concerned with the role of women in the Church and suggestions about including women in significant and decisive roles in the administration of the Vatican are advancing. This will allow the Vatican to catch up with what is common practice in many parts of the Church where women lead many of its major services in health, welfare and education.

But when it comes to addressing and resolving contentious issues, the structures for their consideration in a fair and informed way simply don’t exist. The sad truth is that the Catholic Church’s governance has so isolated itself from the world that it has simply missed many of the main developments in what can be called “best practice” in leadership and governance.

Synods of Bishops won’t fix that. They are made up exclusively of bishops who are all by and large elderly men. That is hardly a helpful way to tap the wisdom of the Church or hear all the voices that need to be heard for the wide array of issues faced in the Church.

What alternatives exist? It took the peoples of Europe, North and South America hundreds of years to develop structures and process of participatory government that work and that provide a release valve for tensions that can plunge populations into turmoil. Countries and societies in many parts of Africa and Asia are only slowly learning what they need to know for their peoples to survive and thrive as nations and communities.

In the Church, the models of parliamentary democracy or representative government now common in many parts of the world do not fit with the complexity and uniqueness of the sort of community the Church is. An institution of divine origin cannot be reduced to having the democratic mean decide its destiny. It would be crass and a formula for disaster to assume that democracy as such is all the Church needs.

All the same, the Church is the people of God and Pope Francis has said for many years before he became pope that the sense of faith of the people is the sure rock of authentic belief. If that is to be accepted, something other than top-down direction, discipline and censure of miscreants who question the wisdom declared by authority will have to be found.

Whatever happens, one thing is clear with this Pontificate – the Church is in for a shakeup. And how it happens and what results is as much in the hands of the Holy Spirit as anyone’s.

 

 

But what was the question? For a very long time I have puzzled over what fanatics, bigots, sundry village idiots and fundamentalists have in common.

I used to think it was fear – the fear of losing control. So, all manner of extreme positions, programs and political strategies are worked out to keep control.

It’s plainly evident in societies run by religious leaders: there’s only one way to do things and that is according to the Book, whichever Book might be invoked. It’s obvious also in the totalitarian politics that keep Communist Parties in office in several Asian countries.

Though, as is the way with hardy totalitarians, what is prescribed as the “only way” tends to change to meet the convenience of those in power who want to stay in control.

But now I’ve discovered that there is another crucial ingredient in the mix of motivations and intentions among those who adopt such positions and it is something that can be seen in everything from domestic disputes to the ruthless rule of totalitarians of all stripes.

And what’s more, this ingredient is a theory that won its inventors a Nobel Prize. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Well, it sort of won a Nobel Prize – the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.

Dunning and Kruger received their satirical “gong” in psychology for their paper entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessment”.

What Dunning and Kruger proposed is that, for a given skill, incompetent people will do some or all of the following: tend to overestimate their own level of skill; fail to recognize genuine skill in others; fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy; recognize their previous lack of skill if they are exposed to training for that skill.

Simple isn’t it! So why do we do it? It happens everywhere.

It happens in tedious meetings, even around dinner tables, where self-appointed authorities lecture far better qualified people on things they know little of.

It is at the heart of the besetting crisis of the world where terrorists with simple answers to complex questions (i.e. kill those they’ve demonized).

And it becomes seriously destructive of the Church’s mission when incompetent and inexperienced clergy and Religious are given jobs which lay people are far better qualified to manage.

For light relief, it can reach comic proportions when celibate Catholic clerics tell married lay people all they need to know about sex!

But the sinister side of this phenomenon in the Church is evident in the culture it creates in which clergy and laity conspire to keep a feature of Church life alive that should be strangled.

At the heart of the Church’s authorized corruption, so lamented by the present Pope, lies something that eats away at the plausibility of Catholicism – clericalism.

This is a culture that clerics can create and share where they install themselves (and laity meekly comply with the installation) as unassailable authorities, beyond correction and in possession of whatever it takes to get their way.

And, when one is threatened, the group closes ranks to protect the vulnerable party, joins the chorus of shaming and blaming any accusers and categorizes the critics as “dissidents”.

It is under widespread assault in many parts of the Church. But, like hardy cockroaches in warm, wet climates and despite the best efforts of their assailants, they survive and even thrive.

Clericalism is under greatest threat in the West where an educated Catholic laity has called the bluff of priests, bishops and Religious to either practice what they preach or move away. And, by the way, this is a laity that is often the outcome of the Church’s best efforts to increase the knowledge and skill levels of lay people through all its schools at all levels.

But clericalism has rich soil to grow in when combined with features of the place of men and local religions and hierarchies in some Asian societies.

Where ever men are seen to be (and assume the prerogatives) of a more powerful status than women, where ever existing social hierarchies revere either or both “holy men” and “professors”, Catholic clerics can slip into a set of pre-arranged hierarchies that intensify the worst features of clericalism.

So what’s the answer to these internal forces that corrupt the Church’s ability to proclaim the message of Jesus in word and deed?

Then first thing is to recognize the wisdom of a recent remark of Pope Francis to some bishops visiting the Vatican. Their role is to lead their people, “sometimes from behind”. Why? Because, the Pope said, their first duty as pastors is to listen to their people. There’s no substitute for a humble and attentive attitude of listening.

The second thing is to follow the old maxim of the scientific method: recognize that “the facts are friendly”. That means accepting that we live in a world where all closed and presumptuous societies – large and small – are ripe targets for justified attack.

The answer to that accusation, justified in too many instances, is transparency and openness to engage and address the criticisms. Defensiveness and denial suffocate the Church and just create more trouble in the future.

A third response is to take seriously what Dunning and Kruger have to say. There is simply a dizzying amount of information on just about every subject under the sun today and to a level and degree unimaginable by our forebears.

The skill the Church at central level has learnt slowly and reluctantly is the legitimate autonomy of the many and varied departments of knowledge that no single authority can pronounce on just about everything, as Vatican authorities once believed they could.

What the Vatican learnt the hard way (remember Galileo among many others?)  is that to skill up in any area of competence opens up all the other areas  of one’s incompetence.

An approach of respectful solicitation becomes the next step.

 

So Pope Francis said to himself when he was elected Bishop of Rome, as he told journalists in Rome on last Saturday, what about the poor? Bishop of Rome means Pope and his question was what does it mean to take the poor seriously as Bishop of Rome?

That’s Pope Francis’s question. But it’s far from clear how Jorge Bergoglio is going to handle the practical consequences of becoming Pope Francis.

The issues are clear: reform of Church governance, root and branch; giving voice and status to local churches in the governance of the Church that has been centralized in Rome with ever increasing magnetism for the last three decades; listening to the issues and concerns of everyday Catholics.

But what might be most significant early on in his Pontificate and suggestive of directions is an answer to this question: how long can someone who walked out of the palatial residence of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires to find a home in an apartment near the poor want to live in the Borgia apartments where Popes have lived for the last 500 years.

Festooned with wall paintings by Rafael and adorned with works by Michelangelo and other Renaissance masters, how long can a man espousing a Church of the poor for the poor last in such Renaissance glory? Pope Paul VI was the first to dispense with the elevated “gestorial” chair on which Pontiffs were carried. John Paul II did away with precious stones in episcopal rings, preferring a simple cross and unadorned rings for his own right hand finger, and many bishops have followed his lead.

The next thing to go must be the titles introduced for bishops and Cardinals which are an invention of the 18^th Century for Church officials to be able to match what the Italian aristocracy claimed for themselves – Excellency, Your Grace, Your Eminence, etc.

Benedict XVI brought back the red shoes, the ermine adornment of his jacket and even the funny hat worn first by the Medici Popes. But that will be seen for the aberration it is.

Now comes the simple man from Buenos Aires, the son of the railway worker.

What does that mean?

Plainly it means he’s his own man.  And that’s not surprising. His body language screams it.

But as a Jesuit, his formative experience is the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. For good or for ill, the Exercises are a radically personal matter. They sheet home responsibility to the individual for the spiritual journey.

Many have said that he carries baggage from his time during the reign of the military dictatorship in Argentina – 1976-1983 – when “disappearances”. Torture and all manner of inhumanity prevailed.

The Jesuits have been quite open about his history then. He had nothing to do with the barbarians who abused their people but he could have done more to defend, advocate for and support the victims of that dreadful regime.

Perhaps like us all, he’s learnt from his experience. Perhaps as a good practitioner of the Spiritual Exercises, he has learnt a lot more about what a sinner he is. Perhaps like a flawed human being who has recognised his flaws, he’s become more human.

Certainly his early performance as bishop of Rome indicates that he has his theology right: he’s not the CEO of a multinational with braches around the world. He’s the pastor of a particular community – Rome – which has an added responsibility: presiding in charity with the bishops of the Church over all the Churches.

But what is he to do about his living arrangements?

The answer is simple really: stare down the security freaks concerned about him and the assassins who want to kill him, find an apartment in an appropriate area, commute to work like everyone else, even heads of State, operate out of an office like any other CEO, make the Borgia apartments into offices, appear for the two Angelus events each week from the window where he addressed the people of Rome, and get a life!

Fr. Michael Kelly SJ

While everyone agrees that the election of Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis is unprecedented in many ways, it is not entirely a surprise. He was runner up to Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 Conclave that saw him elected as Pope Benedict XVI.

Bergoglio is the first Jesuit, first Latin American and first Pope from the South. He is of Italian migrant parents but not a “Romano” or a Curial Cardinal having had no time in his working life at the Vatican.

He is considered a theological conservative but an informed pastor and especially attentive to the needs of poor, reflecting that commitment in the simplicity of his own life style.

It is not so much his being a Jesuit that interests me. As one myself, I am certain that the stereotype of the liberal intellectual associated with membership of the Order does more to obscure than reveal the reality of its members’ views. The Society of Jesus offers a rich panorama of ideological, theological and ecclesiastical inclinations.

What I find significant about the appointment of this Jesuit are the times and forces that have shaped him, the jobs he has done and the challenges he has had to face.

Raised in the high time of socialist fascism – a political cocktail mixed uniquely for Argentina by Juan Peron – he joined the Jesuits in the 1950s. Quite unusually, he was made Provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina in his 30s – 1973 to 1979 – when the Jesuits in Argentina were in turmoil and the Jesuits internationally were reinventing themselves.

The 1970s were years when the Jesuits in Argentina were riven with factions and conflicts, with many leaving the Order, The conflicts were as much about directions for the Order and the Church as Liberation theology burst upon the scene in Latin America as they were about local politics. Decades of political conflict over Juan Peron and his legacy followed by a military dictatorship divided Argentineans and the Jesuits there too.

Holding the Jesuits together at that time in Argentina was no slight challenge but he was also fully engaged with the worldwide impulses for change in the Jesuits then. They received their decisive expression in 1975 at an extraordinary meeting of the highest level of governance in the Order – a General Congregation. Bergoglio was intimately involved in that process.

For both Argentina and the Jesuits, the 1970s were a point of highly contested decisions about direction. The direction of the Jesuits incurred the wrath of the Vatican with John Paul 2  in 1981, setting aside the General of the time, Pedro Arrupe, proroguing the Jesuit Constitutions and imposing a Visitor to investigate and if needed correct alleged excesses during his time as General.

Maggie Thatcher’s escapades in the 1980s over the Falklands began the process of removing the military dictatorship and the restoration of democracy.

Bergoglio is criticized for his apparent fence sitting during the dictatorial regime in Argentina during this period but led public calls for the repentance of the Church for its silence over the “dirty wars” and “disappearances” during the military dictatorship.

Bergoglio has been a bishop since 1992 and archbishop of Buenos Aires since 1998. While not the largest archdiocese in Latin America, that leadership experience gives Francis a solid 15 years in charge of something substantial and an experience of the political and, as an Argentinean, the economic games that are played.

His time leading that archdiocese and the Jesuits during their turmoil in the 1970s should have led him to ask the right questions, appreciate the processes required for systemic change and insight into the sort of people he needs around him to effect change.

He might also have a few others in mind – two Jesuits : the missionary Francis Xavier and the third Jesuit General, Francis Borgia, a widower, father of a large family and Duke of Gandia who joined the Jesuits in mid life and because of his administrative experience, quickly shot the top job in the Jesuits.

It only remains to be seen if a smart and experienced outsider is equal to the task of reforming the Curia and bringing wider Church processes closer to what Vatican 2 invited the Church to become. In taking the name of Francis, Bergoglio is said to invoking the memory of Francis of Assisi.

Michael Kelly SJ

It happens every day. People in public life try to grab hold of and change the public narrative about themselves, those they represent or lead. For most of the second half of last year, the Prime Minister had charge of the public narrative, leaving the Opposition Leader flat footed as he tried to capitalize on the Coalition’s lead in the opinion polls.

He failed. Julia Gillard made a policy announcement here, called a Royal Commission there, published a report on anything from disability insurance to the place of Australia in the Asian Century.

The PM looked in command and to be driving the agenda. Tony Abbott was playing catch-up all the time as he weathered the storm of attacks on his alleged “misogyny” and said no with ever less effect to everything.

In recent weeks I’ve been developing a media and communications strategy for the Catholic Church’s two national agencies dealing with sexual abuse – the Professional Standards Committee that engages with victims of abuse and the newly established Council set to interface on behalf of the Church with the Royal Commission on sex abuse.

A desultory task you may say. I agree. I was asked to get involved by the bishop responsible for Professional Standards and on the newly established Council. Why. Simply because these agencies, one of which has been running for 15 years, has no media and communications strategy or protocols. Little wonder that the Church has been and been seen to be like Tony Abbott vis a vis Julia Gillard.

And the Catholic Church has a special problem: the fact is the Church is a verbal metaphor with no legal or effective operational coherence. It is the antithesis of a “command and control”, centralized authority structure as it is often perceived to be. It’s in excess of 200 separately incorporated entities who choose to cooperate or don’t.

Back to the public narrative. There’s really only one way the Catholic Church is going to get beyond the mess it’s in over sexual abuse – a particularly destructive own goal that has developed through a combination of ignorance and cowardice on the part of Church leadership and mendacity and diabolical cunning on the part of a criminal element incubated in the institution.

That way is transparency, accountability and the confession of failure and the seeking of forgiveness.

But only actions will have any effect in this public narrative of ecclesiastical failure. Anything in the way of actions that vindicate suspicions of cover-up will just send the narrative into a downward spiral.

Actions like opening all records to access, welcoming an independent audit of current child protection procedures in the Church or providing visible evidence that Church institutions have amended their ways – such as offering a national 1800 number for victims to use or for the general public make complaints or offer suggestions – will not only display good faith but allow the public narrative to move beyond recriminations and mistrust.

Guest blogger: Fr Michael Kelly S.J.