Category: Religion

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

Yesterday, in Eureka Street, Fr Frank Brennan SJ commented on the first interim report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses of Child Sexual Abuse. He said:

‘Before Prime Minister Gillard announced the commission, I said that the Catholic Church needed help, in part because there seemed to be a vast discrepancy in the statistics when it came to the number of abuse claims in the Catholic Church when compared with other Churches and institutions which care for vulnerable children. The Commission has not yet come up with any answers or theories about the discrepancy. But its own statistics are frightening and shaming. The commission has provided a safe space for victims to come forward and tell their stories. The commission refers to victims as survivors. 60% of the institutions where survivors reported being abused were faith-based institutions (1,033 of 1,719 institutions). Where abuse occurred in a faith-based institution, 68% of survivors reported that the abuse occurred in a Catholic institution while only 12% reported that the abuse occurred in an Anglican institution. Other churches reported lesser figures. No doubt there were many more Catholic institutions set up for vulnerable children. But that goes nowhere close to providing a complete explanation for the shameful discrepancy. It seems that about 40% of all victims who have come forward to tell their story were abused in institutions auspiced by the Catholic Church. When the royal commission was announced, Cardinal Pell said “we object to being described as the only cab on the rank”. We are not the only cab, but we are the main one when it comes to reports of child sexual abuse within Australian institutions.’

In my blog of April 3 last year, I spoke about the particular problems of the Catholic Church. The blog was headed ‘Why the Catholic Church has such a problem with sexual abuse’. The blog is reposted below.  John Menadue

Repost

I am hopeful that Pope Francis will turn the barque of Peter around but it will be hard going after the disappointments and drift of the last two Popes. What a delight it would be if Pope Francis could pick up the unfinished work of Pope John 23 and the Second Vatican Council

The role of women in the Church and the scourge of sexual abuse will be central issues for Pope Francis and the whole Church, particularly as the Royal Commission on Sexual Abuse commences its work in Melbourne today.

In my blog of 28 February, I set out the facts that indicate that sexual abuse by Catholic clergy and religious is much higher than in the community generally and also higher than in other Christian churches. I referred to the paper by Professor Parkinson

Why is the problem so great in the Catholic Church?

One important reason is that the Catholic Church is patriarchal and male-dominated. Very little sexual abuse is committed by women. It is largely a male malady. In recent weeks we have seen the powerful male Catholic Church on display in Rome with exclusive male casts of Cardinals in all sorts of fancy dress. It is quite removed from St Paul’s ringing proclamation ‘that there is no longer Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one in Jesus Christ’. Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is overwhelmingly about male abuse.

In Australian society women are often treated as second class citizens. It is much worse  in the Catholic Church .Invariably it is the Sisters in the Church who speak forthrightly and with courage  Together with lay women  they “keep the show on the road” The Bishops so often give us Vatican spin and evasion. Out of touch they just don’t get the gravity of the problem. Unless women are given a central role in the future of the Church I will remain concerned.

Another reason given for the higher incidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is the nature of seminary training. This problem is being addressed, but it has been historically damaging due to the early stage of selection for the priesthood and segregation from influences that promote balanced development.

Another reason, as Parkinson has pointed out, is that the opportunities for abuse are much greater because priests, ministers and youth leaders have a much greater opportunity to abuse boys rather than girls, given the patterns of their ministry. In the past at least, it has been more common for priests and religious to be alone with adolescent boys and have unsupervised relations with them, than with girls.

The mystique of the priesthood is probably another important reason. The assumption that the priest knows best leads to circumstances that in other situations would result in the potential victim telling the perpetrator to buzz off.

There is a lot of speculation about the effect of obligatory celibacy. Perhaps Parkinson has over-stated it. But I think that the absence of an adult partner makes the emotional life of priests more difficult. Almost all of us need a close partner to help face the difficulties and mistakes we all make. We need partners who can smooth the rough edges and tell us when to speak up or shut up. Many priests do have a naïve and idealized view of women.

But behind these particular problems is the attitude of the Catholic Church on sex going back to St. Augustine.(Calvinists followed suit) From that time we learnt fear of the body and the idea that somehow sexual relations are the carrier of original sin, and a distraction from God. As Bishop Geoffrey Robinson put it in 2010 in an ABC interview, ‘It is teaching on human sexual morality, more than anything else, that has kept the idea of an angry God alive and strong within the Catholic Church … (that teaching) has been a most significant contribution to the unhealthy culture in the Church … it can lead to the unhealthy attitude of sexuality being seen as dark, secretive and troublesome.’

The Catholic Church must face up to some fundamental issues. It will be very difficult. The big risk will be to assume that with a new Pope the problems will be solved . He will be important but all Catholics must accept collective responsibility.

As Bishop Geoffrey Robinson has put it we must follow the truth wherever it takes us and be courageous and confident enough to manage the consequences.

The Catholic Church hierarchy has now accepted that its attempts to cover up the sexual abuse of children by clergy facilitated further abuse. But there was a second reason for the increase in the abuse – the canonical disciplinary system was dysfunctional. It was dysfunctional enough prior to 1983, but Pope St. John Paul II made it useless with his 1983 Code of Canon Law. It became virtually impossible to dismiss these priests under the Code. They remained priests, and took advantage of their positions of power and authority to continue their assaults on children.

But if you read the submission of the Victorian Church, oxymoronically named, “Facing the Truth”, to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry and the submission by the Australian Church to the Royal Commission on Towards Healing, described by the CEO of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, Francis Sullivan as “the most comprehensive document ever produced by the Church dealing with child sexual abuse…a warts-and-all history, going back many decades,” you would get the impression that canon law had nothing to do with it.  The Australian bishops followed Pope Benedict’s example in his Pastoral Letter to the people of Ireland, and blamed their predecessors who, they said, were “naïve” and made “terrible mistakes”. All canon law needed, their submissions suggest, was a bit of tweaking.

In his more than 40 blogs on the TJHC website, Francis Sullivan has never mentioned problems with canon law, until a masterful understatement in his blog of 26 June 2014 when discussing the Nestor case in the Wollongong diocese: “This case demonstrates how, in the past, canonical issues have struggled to keep pace with the realities of how to deal with sex abuse cases in Australia.” He rightly praises Bishops Wilson and Ingham who said in evidence that if the Apostolic Signatura had affirmed the decision of the Congregation of the Clergy to reinstate Fr Nestor, they would have resigned as bishops. The transcript of the hearing and the exhibits illustrate the tortuous canonical path. Even the appeal to the Signatura took 5 years to be heard. The evidence of Archbishop Wilson and Bishop Ingham was a breath of fresh air. In marked contrast to their Victorian counterparts at the Parliamentary Inquiry, they were prepared to point the finger where it deserved to be pointed: at canon law and the Vatican Congregations administering it.

Nestor was finally dismissed in 2008, nearly 20 years after complaints were first made against him. He was convicted by a civil court in 1996 of sexual assault of a boy, but an appeal was allowed against that conviction, and in the meantime, there were further complaints about his behaviour. The bishops tried to use the Towards Healing processes to deal with him. That revealed a fatal flaw that had been identified by Professor Patrick Parkinson a number of times: a protocol such as Towards Healing cannot work if it is inconsistent with canon law. Without a formal approval of Towards Healing by the Vatican (which it never had), a priest can simply ignore a bishop’s decrees if there is some inconsistency with the canonical procedures.

Francis Sullivan says in his latest blog:  “These days the Vatican processors (sic) are far more streamlined.” Are they? Towards Healing has still not received the recognitio (formal approval) of the Vatican.  It still remains, as Cardinal Castrillon correctly called it, ‘a piece of paper’, despite the fact that the Vatican in 2011 called for national bishops conferences to submit their protocols on sexual abuse, presumably for approval. None have so far been approved.

The so called “streamlined” procedures are said to have begun with the reforms of Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001. It still took 7 years from the introduction of those reforms to dismiss Nestor. Fr Gannon in Victoria had been sentenced to imprisonment four times (in 1995, 1997, 2000, and 2009) for sexual crimes against children, but Archbishop Hart still could not convince the Vatican to dismiss him in 2012.

Even the best legal systems can sometimes have problems of unacceptable delay and pettifogging procedures, but the Nestor and Gannon cases, as well as the recently unearthed Milwaukee cases suggest that these problems are systemic in the canonical system. The only real way to test whether there has been any improvement is an independent inquiry into the 4000 plus cases dealt with by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 2001. The United Nations in its concluding observations on the Report of the Holy See on the Convention against Torture required it to provide data on its investigations of such matters. Whether it will is a matter to be seen.

In view of Francis Sullivan’s apparent recent discovery that canon law really was a problem, his smooth assurances of streamlining cannot be taken seriously. The Murphy Commission in Ireland in 2009 highlighted the dysfunction in the canonical system, and the canons that have caused virtually all the problems are still there, unchanged in the Code. Sister Moya Hanlon, a canon lawyer, told the Royal Commission that there is a 10 year embargo on reporting decisions of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. So even if these canons are being “reinterpreted” by the Congregation, no one knows for ten years what the reinterpretations are.

One of the most eminent canon lawyers from the United States, Nicholas Cafardi stated in 2010 that “no legal system…can be effective when its highest value is secrecy… when changes are made in the law, the revision needs to be clearly announced and explained…Secret laws serve no one.” Secrecy still rules in the Vatican and that means that the public can only be fed spin. An independent inquiry into how the Vatican has handled these cases (including the reporting or lack of it to the civil authorities) is the only way to find the truth.

Kieran Tapsell is a retired lawyer with degrees in theology and law and is the author of Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse (2014 ATF Press).

As priests we were sent out on a mission to spread the Gospel and be pastors of the flock. But it was the secular world that formulated mission statements and pastoral care policies. We had the vocation, but it was the secular world that developed vocational training. We were good at the concepts – but slow at the application. The nuances of Scholastic theology weren’t much help once we got out. The seminary had initiated us into the clerical class but we had to learn our task on the fast track of self-help – launched on a wing and a prayer.

Charlie Mayne, our seminary rector, had convinced us that the lay apostolate was central to the future of the Church. Thanks to Gerry Dowling, my predecessor, the lay apostolate was thriving in the parish. This was an early step towards lay leadership in the Church.

Fast track learning involves reflection on the realities of life. I soon learned that this reflection was effective prayer. It produced change and growth. The seminary spiritual practices were habitual routines. Those who stuck to them religiously showed little growth.

The 60s brought the baby boom – and expanding schools. New schools needed new teachers. Enterprising priests like Fr. John F. Kelly led the move to Catholic Teachers Colleges. The laity responded, first assisting, then replacing, the nuns and brothers.

In 1968 three of us were appointed to study at Melbourne University and to be a “priestly presence” there. Fast track learning took another direction. For the first time I really studied scripture. The Word of God had very human origins. Myth was as powerful as Logos. Sociology, including demographics, taught me that you can predict outcomes which otherwise would be mystery or guesswork. Early into the 70s demographic statistics showed me the looming collapse of the priesthood.

Humanae Vitae, in 1969, became a watershed moment. Its impact on the priesthood was both immediate and slow burning. The wounding of papal authority also undermined clericalism. Laity left the Church. Priests left the priesthood. Seminary enrolment virtually stopped – not to recover. Nearly everyone recalibrated their views, firstly on sexual morality, then on the whole gamut of personal morality and Mass attendance.  Confession went into terminal decline. And the laity did this themselves, sidestepping appeals from clergy.

Taking charge of a parish in the early 70s brought new learning. Parishes must be led and managed. My generation had no business, accounting or management training. Back onto the fast track.

The response of parishioners was exhilarating. Post-Vatican II enthusiasm was at its peak. A new generation of more highly educated parishioners moved into pastoral action, and parish administration. Some studied theology and scripture; others became experts at liturgy and music. I learned that my job was to articulate the vision and enable the ministries of others, not to do it all myself. It was like St Paul’s little group in his epistle 1 Corinthians 12. Theirs were genuine ministries despite some clerical objection to the term. Clericalism continued to wane.

The 90s brought a new scenario. The routine pastoral work of the Church was in demand and appreciated by those who looked for it. But affiliation was relentlessly dropping. Gen X and Gen Y largely opted out. Meanwhile paedophilia by clergy was eroding clergy confidence. This became a bigger issue as episcopal cover-up also came into focus. Bigger names became commonplace in the narrative – e.g. Cardinal Law in the USA. Rome first suggested this was a USA problem. More cases came to light. Perhaps it was an English speaking problem. Then Fr. Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ and renowned money raiser was finally proved to be a drug user, abuser of his students and even his own illegitimate children. John Paul II accepted his gifts, made a public show of favouring him and protected him when the allegations were indisputable. This highlighted a world-wide pattern of crime and criminal cover-up going right to the top. Look at the Karadima case in Chile embroiling Cardinals Errazuriz, one of the pope’s Committee of Eight, and Ezzarti, his successor in Santiago. (See: tinyurl.com/n2m7p4f). Clerical pretentions started to look ridiculous as bishops lost their moral leadership.

As priests were dying out so was clericalism. The seminary exemplifies the polarisation. The clerical profession holds no attraction for the coming generation. Don’t blame celibacy; it is the clerical profession that is being rejected. It is 45 years since we had enrolment levels that could sustain the old clerical model. The clerical ethos and quaint devotion of the seminary appeal only to an odd minority. In practice church leadership is increasingly lay.

Clericalism is legally institutionalised by insisting that the pastoral, managerial and sacramental leadership must be in the hands of ordained priests. Already many parishes have non-ordained leaders who call on ordained people for Eucharistic and sacramental ministry. It is time to let the best leaders in their fields lead. Eucharistic and sacramental ministry – important as it is – then becomes one ministry amongst the others. This ministry could then be filled by men of good repute without clericalising them.

A new pope re-articulates the pastoral style of Vatican II. He wants to eliminate clericalism. Meanwhile a thoroughly clerical bureaucracy still jealously guards its privilege. The pope, too, is on a fast learning curve. We end as we began – still flying – but on a wing and a prayer.

Cardinal John Henry Newman said ‘There is nothing on this earth as ugly as the Catholic Church and nothing so beautiful’. We have seen a lot of the ugliness recently. The following story tells us something about the beauty. John Menadue.

The prestigious Ho-Am Prize 2014, known as the Nobel Prize of South Korea, has been awarded to Father Vincenzo Bordo. This is the first time an Italian has received this accolade. A missionary with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Fr Bordo was honored for his services to the homeless, to elderly people living alone and young people on the street, through a series of programs he created.

These include a cafeteria and a youth center in Seongnam, a satellite city outside Seoul. He picks me up at Seongnam’s historical market, which is called Moran. “Welcome to the real Korea,” he says. “Here you can find everything from power drills to dog meat.” After six months in Korea, this is my first glimpse of dog meat — a delicacy that is strictly taboo in most nations.

From here we head towards Anna’s House, where Vincenzo works and lives. Vincenzo arrived in Seongnam in 1990. As a true St Francis of the modern era, the first question he asked as soon as he set foot in the Far East was: where are the poor? “When I came here there was nothing,” he says. “Today the city has a million people, all living a hand-to-mouth existence.”

For his first four years, he was an assistant pastor and worked hard to integrate in his new environment. He studied Korean for two years. Then in 1993, inspired by a nun who helped the poor, he opened a cafeteria for the elderly. This is where Anna’s House originated.

Throughout the 1990s it was the first and only place in Seoul where the poor could have a hot meal indoors. Now its volunteers number 600 altogether, divided into 30 groups of 20, mostly students. It now offers medical and psychiatric services, as well as a barber and a consultant to help people find jobs. There are cultural classes for the homeless and even religious counseling, but only for those who want it, Vincenzo stresses.

“Our goal,” he says, “is not to convert, nor to just feed the hungry, but to realize that these people have lost their human dignity. We try to restore it.” Why the name Anna’s House?” I ask him.

“In 1998 there was an economic crisis here and many people found themselves on the street overnight. At that time a man who owned a restaurant came to me and said, ‘I know you work for the poor. If you want, I’ll provide you with an extra room to make a new cafeteria.’”

“Why did he do that?” “He said: ‘I am a Catholic, but I’m a poor practitioner, I never go to church, I seldom pray, but my mother has just died and I want to do something to honor her memory.’”

“Let me guess, the mother’s name was Anna?”

“Yes. The man, who was called Matteo, funded the cost of providing two meals a week. Immediately the place was filled with 80 people. But when I asked people ‘what are you going to eat tomorrow?’ they all replied ‘we won’t eat anything.’ “So we extended the meals to three a week. But when I asked people what they would be eating tomorrow, it was still the same answer: ‘Tomorrow I won’t eat.’ So we went up to four meals a week, then five, and today we serve every day.

“Everything we built here has come from listening to what I call the cries of the poor.” As well as the cafeteria Vincenzo also operates four reception centers, looking after 40 boys; orphans, the abandoned, and those who run away from home. “That’s Ji-hoon,” Vincenzo tells me, pointing out one of them

“He’s eight years old and his divorced father beat him every day. He came to us just a few days ago.” Then he introduces me to Ye-jun, a tough looking 20-year-old with a tribal tattoo on his biceps and numerous ear piercings. When asked where his parents are, he shrugs; he has no idea. Ye-jun has been in and out of the center several times since he was 15, but is now intent on studying.

“I came back when I realized I did not stand a chance alone,” he says. “Now I want to prepare well, earn a bit of money and go to live on my own. ”

I ask Vincenzo what percentage of the guys who come here eventually manage to find a stable job and build a life. “If they’re young, as much as 80 percent can make it,” he says. “But if they’re older it means they carry so many scars inside, recovery become difficult.

“They’ve learned on the streets that they can make easy money just by stealing. When they come to us and see that they need to engage in study, follow rules, follow a certain form of discipline, then many of them abandon the attempt. The alternatives appear easier.” Vincenzo too has had his struggles. The old parish priest, he says, hated him.

“Yes, he wanted to send me away. For him this activity had nothing to do with the Church. Many think that to be a parish priest means to celebrate Mass, hear confessions and that’s all. The homeless? They stink, they cause trouble.

“I spent four years suffering and struggling. At one point I wondered if what I was doing was really the right thing, but I found the strength to believe in what I was doing. So this award was important for me psychologically. It has given me great satisfaction.”

Read more at: http://www.ucanews.com/news/a-st-francis-of-the-east/71186

Cristian Martini Grimaldi is a correspondent in Seoul of UCANews.

The sad saga of the Catholic Church in its response to sexual abuse goes on and on and on. Pope Francis is yet to grasp the nettle.

Invariably it is people outside the hierarchy and clergy who are responding and calling for action. The latest has been former NSW Premier, Barry O’Farrell, who spoke in the NSW Parliament on this issue on 17 June 2014. He called on Fr Brian Lucas, the General Secretary of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference to be stood down in light of the report of the Cunneen Commission into alleged cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Maitland/Newcastle. Barry O’Farrell has a particular interest in this issue as he had appointed the Cunneen Commission.

In parliament, Barry O’Farrell added. “On the day the [Cunneen] report was made public, Bishop Wright issued a statement that suggested the report would be scrutinised, its findings taken on board and action taken. Yet last week, despite the damning exposition by the commission of Monsignor Hart’s lack of action in 1993, Bishop Wright simply stood him aside from advisory positions in the diocese. As a response to such a damning enquiry it was completely underwhelming “

Australian bishops just don’t get it. It has been the same around the world.

It was the secular media in Boston in 2001 and not the church leadership or church media that first drew attention to the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Boston under the ‘leadership’ of Cardinal Law. In Ireland it was a succession of royal commissions and enquiries that exposed the scandal within the Catholic Church.

In Australia in 1997 Bishop Geoffrey Robinson called for action on sexual abuse problems in Australia. He was disowned and rebuked by his fellow bishops. It was a parliamentary enquiry in Victoria that told us last November “No representative of the Catholic Church directly reported the crimes committed by its members to the police … There is simply no justification for this position.” Then there was Cardinal Pell before the royal commission in Sydney. He has now gone to Rome but there is great damage left in his wake.

As Fr Frank Brennan has said “Clearly the church itself cannot be left alone to get its house in order.”

Our bishops, who are appointed through a secretive and manipulative process, are failing us badly. They are not responsive to the people of the church.

One action which pastoral bishops could take would be to call urgent synods in their dioceses to tackle this problem of sexual abuse and the systemic and cultural factors which give rise to it. The Second Vatican Council recommended that synods should ‘flourish’. They have died of misuse in Australia. Only five bishops have convened a diocesan synod since 1965. The Melbourne archdiocese has not had a synod since 1916 and the Sydney archdiocese since 1951. Synods are a long-established and traditional form of collegial discussion on matters of doctrine, faith, morals and discipline. A flourishing and participatory regime of diocesan synods would enhance the accountability of bishops and improve the performance of the whole diocese. Representative synods with half of the membership from lay people would be far more knowledgeable in identifying and dealing with such issues as sexual abuse.

Our church leadership is failing us. We are tired of continual catch-up and cover-up.

Together with colleagues, we submitted a submission to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This submission can be found on my website. Go to top left-hand of this blog, click on website and then click on religion folder. The submission can also be found on the website of the Royal Commission.

In April this year, my husband and I walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. For months leading up to the event, we both imagined how a typical day would unfold. For my part, I intended taking a sketchbook and had fantasised that we would pass through many a village and I could wander into the churches and draw the religious objects. Chris enthused how we would set forth at day-break, arrive at our destination around 2pm, locate our accommodation for the night, clean up and attend mass. But as we found out, a number of factors came into play that gave our daily routine an altogether different shape and colour.

Given the limited time we had for the trip, we decided to walk one of the shorter routes called the Camino Primitivo. It runs along the north of Spain and for the most part traverses a range of mountains. We started at a place just before the beginning of the Primitivo, called Villaviciosa, with the goal of walking 400km over 16 days. This meant that we were committed to covering, on average 25kms a day. Like most of the pilgrims, we started our day straight after breakfast. If we had breakfast at the pilgrims’ hostel, we would leave around about 7am. But if there was an enticing looking café (in Spain, these are mostly bars), then we would get away by about 8 or 9.

Initially, we looked at the map of our route and saw that we would be passing through quite a number of villages. It was easy to assume that we could stop off at a café for lunch or even buy something at a local ‘corner store’ on the way to have a picnic. But what we found was that for the most part, these places were just clusters of houses. As we discovered later, Spain has experienced a huge internal migration of people from villages to cities in pursuit of work, so tend to have much smaller populations of mostly elderly people and therefore can’t sustain amenities. Also, with the advent of motor vehicles, people can drive to larger centres to get supplies. As a consequence we had to be smart about stocking up on food at the end of the day in the larger centres where we stayed the night.

The other factor that impacted on our preconceived plans was the lack of access to churches. Even though the spiritual pilgrim had been well catered for in times past with churches and chapels along the way to pray in, many of these are now locked up. Much to my frustration, dreams of doing sketches were not to be – at least not en route. I was confined to doing drawings in museums in the larger centres such as Lugo. My way around this limited source of creative engagement with The Way, was to commandeer Chris’ iPhone and take photos (I had deliberately left mine behind in an attempt to escape the digital world that usually cannibalises my time back home). In addition, we decided that we would actually visit each church anyway (despite their locked doors) and make the sign of the cross in Spanish. Sometimes we would also sit in the porches, built specifically for pilgrim respite, and have a snack or lunch.

Chris’ assumption that we would arrive at our destination by about 2pm each day was mostly stymied by the mountains we had to cross. The reality of this hit home in the afternoon of our first day as we faced a 6km steep climb up a gradient enough to take your breath away. This was the first of many. And if that wasn’t enough to slow us up, coming down the other side was even worse. One foot steadily in front of the other as we had to take care of tender knee and hip joints and the tips of our toes pushing hard against the front of our boots. It might seem counter intuitive, but the effort and pain was something we actually came to relish (albeit in hindsight). I wrote in my journal of one such occasion walking into Lugo: “And when we were about 8km from our destination at the hottest part of the day, wishing like hell we had arrived, we thought about the words of Natasha, our Body Pump instructor. She says at the most intense part of our workout when the lactic acid kicks in and the muscles pinch in a ‘productive’ way, that this is when the benefits take place – that all the exercise is to prepare us for this pain. So, when we were so close to our destination and we were tired and thirsty and our feet were sore, we thought about how all the walking we’d done thus far in the Camino was preparation for moments like this – because we had to dig deep into our faith and motivation for walking the Camino to access the reserves we needed to push on.”

Rather than fight against challenge of the mountains we embraced it for the benefits the Camino promised. Firstly, we were rewarded with some of the most spectacular scenery we’d ever experienced: wide blue skies arching above lush undulating land. And walking at the slow pace our bodies demanded, we could fully absorb the experience of moving through mile after mile of spring flowers – very often nestled in the ancient rock walls that line many parts of the Camino. As each day passed and we found our rhythm with ‘slow’, we learnt to be totally present with ourselves. Maybe this is why we were so taken by this verse found at the top of the Hospitales route (translated from Spanish): Happy are you pilgrim, if on the way you meet yourself and gift yourself with time, without rushing, so as not to disregard the image of your heart.

In taking our time, our days were long. We tried to get away early, but sometimes delicious looking pastries, freshly squeezed orange juice and the best coffee enticed us to linger a little longer. We didn’t hesitate to wander off the path either, to pay homage to the churches that sat silently with their glory days a distant memory. Sometimes, we ate lunch on the go and other times we chanced upon a country kitchen that served nourishing soup, crusty bread, ensalada mixta (mixed salad) and a jug of wine. And when we finally reached our destination – usually around 4 or 5pm, we headed for the nearest bar for a cold beer. If we were lucky, there was a shop on the way to the hostel, which meant we didn’t have to go hunting for one after dinner. Sometimes, we just wanted a touch of luxury, so we found the nearest hotel and thought it a boon if we could get our washing done for us (packing light, you only take one spare set of clothes, which makes daily washing a necessity).  If there was time and we were in a city (such as Oviedo, Lugo and Melide), we would venture to a church for mass and some sketching. Afterwards we would find a restaurant or bar for dinner. This is where the day really stretches out, because sunset wasn’t until 9:30pm. But we made the best of it because the evenings were lively with families socializing and Asturian barmen putting on a good show with the pouring of cider. We finally got to bed at 10 or 11pm.

Another feature of our days was our blog. Called Facebook.com/OurCamino2014 it was an efficient way of letting people know about our adventures. Out on the track, we would talk about a feature of the day that we could write about.  All that beautiful scenery, architectural features and details of church exteriors, interesting houses and other mood shots we captured on camera. Then in the evening, over dinner, we would compose our blog post together.  Taking advantage of the WiFi flowing freely in most cafes and bars throughout Spain, we uploaded the post and pictures. Like an offering to our friends and family back home, we hoped to share the best of our day.

Even though our typical Camino day didn’t quite work out as we’d thought, it definitely didn’t disappoint. We could not have imagined the wonder and awe, not to mention the pain and the spiritual benefits that came with it. As they say in Spain; Sin dolor, no hay gloria (“no pain, no gain”). So even though we couldn’t get to daily mass or do as much drawing as I’d have liked, we faired even better with all the surprises the Camino promises as long as one submits to the experience and has no expectations of any given outcome.

Irene Sutherland is Communications Officer at the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and is a practicing sculptor.

On Friday afternoon, I called into the Canberra Magistrates’ Court to watch an hour or two of proceedings at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The court was packed with lawyers.  These are shameful times for us Australians as we realise how great has been the problem of child sexual abuse in our society, and presumably still is.  They have been especially shameful times for us Catholics as we realise what a problem this has been in our schools, welfare institutions and parishes.  Thank God, we have the help of the State to investigate matters thoroughly and transparently.  We know that no royal commission can solve all the problems.  No royal commission ever has. Think just of the royal commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody which promised so much.  The Aboriginal imprisonment rate is higher now than it was before the Commission was held.  But hopefully with this royal commission, there can be new laws, new rules, and new protocols which can help to reduce the incidence of child abuse in all our social institutions, especially those which work most closely with vulnerable children.  These new laws, new rules, and new protocols will apply just as much to our church organisations as to any other social organisations.

Much of the Commission spotlight has been on institutions in our own Church.  Let’s hope and pray that everyone from our Church who is involved in any way with the Commission comes with a commitment to honesty, transparency, justice, compassion and healing.
But we are not just citizens of the state.  Our organisations are not just like any other organisations.  We profess to be the Church, the people of God.  Seeking to follow the way of Jesus on the path of our Catholic tradition, we pride ourselves on caring for the poorest and most vulnerable; we hold ourselves out to each other and to the world as people who nurture trust and the finest values being applied and lived universally.

No matter what the findings of any royal commission, and no matter what the new rules, protocols and procedures, the spotlight of this commission brings us back to ask ourselves how we are responding and living as God’s people.  We know that the way of Jesus requires us to focus first and foremost on the victim, the vulnerable child.  We know that any abuse affects not only the victim, but also their loved ones and family members.  We know that the effects of the abuse can continue for life; it can completely wreck a life.  We understand how over time the victim might come to be and to feel alienated from us, the people of God. And yet he is or she is one of us, one of the flock.  The abuser is also one of us, one of the flock.  He, and it is usually he, is often in a position of authority and trust, providing the opportunity to abuse and fracturing the trust and professed values of whole community.

For too long, those in authority in our Church but also many people in our society were not aware of the reality or effects of abuse, or they were slack and incompetent in dealing with abusers.  The result has been that the abusers, like rotten apples in the box of fruit, have infected all around them.  It’s like throwing a stone into a pond.  The ripples go everywhere.  The abuse has wreaked havoc in our institutions as well as in the lives of those who are victims.  There’s damage everywhere.

No royal commission can put all these things right.  As well as pledging ourselves both to co-operate fully with the processes of the commission and to renew our institutions so that their rules and procedures reflect the values and moral norms we profess, we need to attend to the more radical call to redemption in today’s scripture readings – readings which reflect the life of God in relationship – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – in relationship with each other, and in relationship with us.  Jesus tells Nicodemus that “God sent his Son into the World not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.”  As a Church we do stand condemned in the eyes of many of our fellow citizens.  Some of them are anti-Catholic, but most of them are not.

We can pick ourselves up from this, confident that the Lord is in relationship with us providing a way forward to salvation rather than condemnation.  We can understand how many victims might now feel alienated from us, but our door must always be open, not just providing what justice and the law require, but also offering a homecoming and grateful acknowledgement of the added burdens they carried so that we might come back to our true selves as the people of God.  Any victim, like the unknown solider, “is all of them and he is one of us”.

What is harder for all of us at this time is also to acknowledge that the perpetrator is one of us.  We harboured him, we provided unwittingly or foolishly the opportunity for his repeat offending.  Ours, as Exodus reminds us, is “a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness and faithfulness”.   We cannot be whole again, our institutions cannot be trusted again, our leadership cannot inspire us again, until we face the enormity not just of abuse but of abject failure to counter it even when the signs, evidence and complaints were there.  Having faced the truth and having accorded justice, we might again embrace God and each other with tenderness and compassion, kindness and faithfulness.

After communion, you might like to offer your own reflections.  Meanwhile in this Eucharist, may the grace of our Lord Jesus, Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” be with us all, especially with the little ones who have been wronged and who have had the courage to speak out.

After communion, a couple of parishioners spoke.  One reflected that she had just returned from overseas and was grateful to be an Australian, a citizen of a country where there could be a royal commission, putting a light on the darkness.  She recalled the song about setting the downtrodden free.  And this is what we must now do.  Another lamented that the horse has already bolted, and that with the effects of clericalism, control had been taken away from the local church and from the people of God these last 50 years.  It was time for the laity to be resolute so that the stable door might be fastened again.

Fr Frank Brennan SJ
Professor of Law
Australian Catholic University

After Bishop Bill Wright appeared on television to register his reaction to the findings of the special enquiry into the Church’s and the Police response to the paedophile activities of two priests in the Newcastle diocese, and to express his sorrow for the whole messy scandal, there was an inter-change of emails between two ex-priests – both have had a second career in the law, each with a family of his own and an abiding memory of what it was like to have been “eternally and ontologically” changed into a special and sacred person by the ordaining hands of his Archbishop – ex-priest Geraghty and ex-priest Marr.

First email.

Dear Chris,

I jotted down some thoughts after hearing Bishop Bill Wright say sorry.

I became really angry. Kieran is not helping me. (Kieran is the author of the recently published book “Potiphar’s Wife – The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse”, a copy of which Chris sent to his friend, Peter)

What are you sorry about Bill?

Sorry about what?

Sorry for the abuse and hurt.

Sorry about the scandal and publicity.

Sorry it will happen again.

Sorry you are a part of the organization.

Sorry the good done by the organization is outweighed by the evil.

Sorry the structure of the organization protects the abuser and promotes abuse.

Sorry you think you are special and special rules apply.

Sorry you can’t criticize the Vatican.

Sorry you took an oath.

Sorry you don’t speak out.

Sorry the organization misuses imaginary power against the vulnerable, which has nothing to do with the Gospel.

Sorry no one is listening to the organizations message except the vulnerable.

Sorry the organization has lost credibility and can no longer control what happens in the privacy of the bedroom.

Sorry the organization has been shown to be just a badly run human institution.

Sorry that Jesus is crying.

Sorry the organization thinks it stands above and separate from the civil community with its own rules and peculiar standards and code of law.

Sorry that you toe the line and blame the old and the dead.

Sorry you are forced to accept a party line of secrecy now and blame the past.

Sorry that the present is the problem and there is no fundamental change.

Sorry you can’t even get the line right, ”You are right; we are wrong, I am sorry.” Simple really.

Sorry that you are nothing more than a bureaucrat in a corrupt, deceptive, manipulative organisation.

Sorry – I don’t think so.

Stand up and shout your outrage.

Do you think I should send these thoughts to Bill. Will they be helpful.

Peter.

PS had to get it out.

The email in reply.

Dear Peter,

Are you demented? Unhinged, like Andrew Bolt? The older you get, the more uncontrollable you become. How does Linda cope?

Yes. Send it off. What have you to lose? You’ll feel better – and Bill will also feel good after the flagellation and humiliation. You are right, of course. In these circumstances, words can’t carry the message.

A year in sack-cloth and ashes for all the clergy, including the bishop;

Or a clergy pilgrimage on foot, fasting on bread and water, in loin-clothes, for forty days in the desert, abandoning all the parishes of the dioceses;

Or a public proclamation in the Cathedral in the presence of the assembled clergy and the victims (if willing to attend), their parents, relatives and friends, describing each of the offences, identifying each of the offenders, recording exactly what each of them did, and what was not done in response after the matter came to be known by those in charge, and recounting the damages suffered to each victim, followed by the closure of the Cathedral for a year and an invitation addressed to all Catholics of the diocese to consider abandoning their membership of the Church, or at least their financial contribution to their parish

Or proclaiming a Year of Shame for the whole Church and striking a bronze medal of

SHAME to be minted and supplied (free of charge) by the Vatican to all members of the Church throughout the world, to be worn in public at all Church services.

I hesitate, Peter, to recommend that the incumbent bishop of Newcastle should return to the good of days when the Church was significantly more pro active. In 897, at the Synoda Horrenda which was held in the Basilica Salvatoris (later to be rebuilt and known as St John Lateran’s) in Rome, Pope Steven VI disinterred the putrid corpse of his predecessor, Pope Formosus who had been dead for ten months, dressed the black body in full pontifical regalia, seated it on an episcopal chair and, in the presence of the assembled local bishops and parish priests, charged the deceased with heresy, tried him, found him guilty and excommunicated him, post mortem. The cadaver was then stripped of the pontifical robes, its two blessing fingers of the right hand were severed and, dressed in a penitential hair-shirt it was re-buried in un-consecrated ground. Not very subtle, you’ll agree – some might think a little macabre, but the message was clear and, as you would appreciate being a lawyer, justice was seen to be done.

I am reluctant to suggest that the corrupt bodies of  John Toohey or Leo Clarke (both bishops of Newcastle diocese during the relevant period, from 1956 and 1995) should be given the same treatment, if only because a week or two after the famous synod summoned by Pope Steven, a minor earthquake shook the Basilica Salvatoris to its foundations, causing destruction from the high altar all the way down to the entrance doors, or as you would understand, Peter, being a member of the old brigade, having been taught Latin as a pre-requisite to your ordination, “ab altare ad portas”.

Even though the trial of Pope Formosus might have been a touch extreme, in the name of Jesus and its faithful members, to say nothing of the victims and their families, the Church has to devise a radical, dramatic and appropriate response to the many breaches of solemn trust by members of the clergy and in response to the institutional cover-up.  As you see Peter, I’m struggling to find a language which could, however inadequately, express the outrage, the scandal, the seriousness, the pain and anger of the community as a whole, of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, those of faith and unbelievers, and especially of the ones who experienced the dirty hands and listened to the foul words of the Church’s consecrated and predatory priests. The institution cannot simply pretend that it has dealt with the problem and “ looking forward” (as they say), move on. The Church should not be allowed to conduct its business as usual, making saints, staging extravagant, Byzantine ceremonies, dressing up in fine vestments, collecting money and telling the world how to conduct itself – perhaps it won’t be for some centuries.

Send it.

Brother Geraghty.

Peter Marr, solicitor, replied by telephone to say that he knew Bishop Bill Wright and that he was a decent human being, but unable to come to terms with the depth and breadth of the catastrophe which confronts him in his diocese, to communicate to the world and to his people, the horror and diabolical treachery visited on the diocese by the criminal offenders and by those who were responsible for dealing with it. The whole sorry mess is beyond him, beyond his brother bishops and certainly beyond the imagination of the Vatican.

On 30 May 2014, the Report of the Special Commission of Inquiry into Matters relating to the Police Investigation of Certain Child Sexual Abuse Allegations in the Catholic Diocese of Maitland–Newcastle (“Cunneen Report”) was published by the New South Wales Government. The Report rejected allegations by former Detective Inspector Fox that there was an attempt by the NSW Police not to properly investigate cases of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy.

But the Report severely criticized the Church in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese for covering up those allegations over a long period of time.

When it came to canon law and the obligation to report such crimes to the police, the Report stated:

6.2 The relationship between canon law and civil law (that is, the ordinary law of the land) is complex. In many important respects, however, canon law does not displace civil law obligations. Thus, for example, the 1983 Code of Canon Law places no restrictions on any civil law obligation of a church official to report to civil authorities (such as the police) allegations of child sexual abuse committed by a priest.

It is true that the 1983 Code of Canon Law places no restrictions on reporting – in fact it says nothing about it one way or another. But the 1983 Code of Canon Law is not the whole of canon law. The “pontifical secret”, the Church’s top secret classification, a permanent silence, is imposed by the 1974 decree of Pope Paul VI, Secreta Continere, Art 1§4, on all allegations and information about child sexual abuse by clergy that the Church has obtained through its own internal investigations.

In 2001, Pope John Paul II issued his Motu Proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela (which is also not part of the Code) in which he changed some of the procedures under the Code for dealing with child sexual abuse and other canonical crimes. Article 25 of the “norms” attached to that document specifically provided that “cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret”, and footnote 31 that immediately follows refers to Art 1§4 of “Secreta Continere”.

In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI revised the 2001 Motu Proprio and Article 30 of the revised norms provides that “cases of this nature are subject to the pontifical secret”. Footnote 41 then refers to Art 1§4 of Secreta Continere. The 2010 revision even extended the pontifical secret to cover cases involving clergy sexual abuse of intellectually disabled adults and the possession of child pornography. Those who are bound by the pontifical secret are obliged to keep it “forever”.

Art 1§4 of “Secreta Continere does contain one exception. It provides that the accused can be told about the allegation if it is necessary “for his own defence”. One might have thought that this was implied, but when it comes to the pontifical secret, nothing is left to implication. There are no exceptions for reporting these matters to the police.

In 2010 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that it would be instructing bishops to comply with civil laws relating to reporting. If there is such a civil law, then there is an exception to the pontifical secret. The only State in Australia that has such laws covering all allegations of sexual abuse is New South Wales. In all other jurisdictions, the pontifical secret still applies, and bishops are required to comply with it under their oath of office.

Canon 22 provides that where there is a conflict between civil and canon law, Catholics are obliged to follow canon law, that is, to break the civil law. Further, bishops on their ordination are required to take an oath that they will obey canon law. Prior to 2010, when most of the cover up in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese took place, there was a conflict between the requirements of Secreta Continere and S.316 of the Crimes Act 1900 (NSW).

If the only expert evidence on canon law before the Special Commission was as stated in its Report, its comments on canon law and reporting to the civil authorities are understandable. The Royal Commission has indicated that it will be inquiring into the issue of reporting, and no doubt we will be hearing a lot more about Secreta Continere, and its effect on the cover up, either directly or through the culture of secrecy that its very existence entrenched and deepened.

Kieran Tapsell is a retired Sydney lawyer with degrees in theology and law. His book, Potiphar’s Wife: The Secret of the Holy Office and Child Sexual Abuse is published by ATF Press.

A few weeks ago the Roman Church gathered its heavenly forces, summoned her faithful from around the world to assemble in the eternal city, and in the midst of extravagant Renaissance-style splendor, infallibly declared two of her recent CEOs to have been translated into the presence of Almighty God, amid hosts of angels and Archangels on high. Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II were enrolled in the official canon of saints by Pope Francis, in the presence of his predecessor Pope Benedict and a gaggle of episcopal turkeys. Business as usual in Rome. Crazy triumphal ceremonial. A vial of papal blood in one reliquary, a sliver of Pope’s skin in the other. You have to admit that in view of what was happening down in the dungeons under the Vatican and the scandals unraveling in parishes and schools, the Roman Church was exhibiting a high degree of religious chutzpah. To engage in such a public display, she had to have real balls – and no brains. CEOs giving each other a brotherly leg-up, encouraging pats on the back, colorful ribbons, medals and badges, while in hot-spots throughout the world the company was coughing up blood.

In 2002, in a fit of self-aggrandizement for such a tiny kingdom with no midwives to call on and no entitlement to middle class paid parental leave (in fact, no middle class), the Vatican signed a United Nations convention which sought to prevent the practice of torture and to suppress all forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. Little did Rome imagine that this convention would come back to bite her on the bottom. When the Holy See recently made its very first appearance before the Torture Committee of the United Nations, its ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, under attack for the Vatican’s pathetic attempts to draw a line under clerical sexual abuse scandals throughout the world, asserted that its jurisdiction to enforce the United Nations treaty provisions stopped at the borders of the eternal city state. Pure nonsense. Specious casuistry. Moral gobbledygook. It was disingenuous, even dishonest for the Vatican to run such a line in an attempt to get out from under its involvement in the worldwide, damaging scandal caused by its ordained officers inflicting torture on innocent children. In Potiphar’s Wife, the author, Kieran Tapsell, a retired lawyer, an old ex-seminarian from Manly and a good friend, tells us why the Vatican cannot escape its responsibility.

Like the Roman poet Virgil who guided Dante through the sultry passages of Hell, Kieran Tapsell takes the hand of his reader and walking backwards, carefully guiding her through the subterranean tunnels under the Vatican, explaining the turns and twists of the Pope’s peculiar legal system, introducing her to the many faceless men in studded cloaks, in coloured frocks and high hats he and his reader meet along the way. Damp, smelly corridors. Shadowy figures, wrinkled and suspicious. The smell of decay in the air. “That’s a pile of detritus over there, blocking our progress.” “An endless maze of obfuscation begins down that laneway where the sewers are overflowing and a collection of canonical garbage bins remain unemptied.” “Those guys we just passed, with their self-satisfied, piogeous smiles, used to work as ecclesiastical spin-doctors for the Vatican, sometimes referred to as ”safe, reactionary theologians”. Did you notice the thinness of their lips and the fork in their tongues?”  “In this section, we’re surrounded with secret trap-doors and hidden holes.”  “But don’t be afraid. With the help of a Royal Commissioner, we are gradually making our way towards the light.”  As your guide will demonstrate, O reader, the pathway through this under-world has been perilous.

With forensic attention, Tapsell traces the Vatican’s responses to the unexpected and faith- shattering revelations of the contamination by predatory priests of the Church’s precious little ones. The way the Roman authorities decided to deal with the scandal caused by paedophile priests changed radically at the beginning of the 20^th century. In 1917, with the publication of a codified system of law, Rome abandoned its traditional practice of handing the guilty offender over to the civil authority for punishment. With the stroke of a Latin quill, the new code abandoned the relevant provisions which had been operative for centuries. Then in 1922, with the “publication” of a secret document, Crimen Sollicitationis, Pius XI effectively revived, through the back-door of secrecy, the ancient privilege which provided special treatment for his clerical brothers. Members of the modern clergy who indulged in criminal behavior were to be investigated, charged, tired and punished by the Church’s own ecclesiastical tribunals – and in secret. Those who failed to comply with the Vatican’s order to remain shtum, were to be punished by a very special and terrifying excommunication which could be lifted only by the Pope himself. And the Vatican document which had promulgated this parallel regime had to be kept safe and out of sight in the secret archives of the diocesan curia, for internal use only. A secret law! Secret legal procedures! Just what every institution needs to protect itself and its staff. Ecclesiastical “on–water” events were off limit, beyond scrutiny – and especially beyond the reach of any civil authority.

When the Pope reads this book of Kieran Tapsell, I am hoping he will be shaken to his bowels to think how far his beloved Church has drifted away from Jesus. When Jesus picks it up in the celestial book-shop and turns the pages, I imagine tears of sadness will appear on his bloodless cheeks. The Royal Commissioner might be surprised to find how far the tentacles of this dirty cancer of secrecy and clerical privilege extended, and how tightly they were wrapped around the panting heart of Rome.

When you read this book, some of you won’t be able to put it down. Fascinating. Engrossing. Some will want to burn it – and the author. Others will simply say “I told you so” – and so they did. Some won’t believe a word of it. Just another conspiracy – like the ugly rumours of man-induced climate change. “I don’t care what thousands of scientists say, I don’t care what the evidence is, I don’t accept it – and that’s my right.” What Tapsell has to reveal is confronting and explosive. Rome has played a part, a major part, in the protection of dangerous criminal clerics, and in the cover-up of their predatory pursuit of innocent boys and girls. The Vatican enabled the cancer to grow and spread, more damage to be done, and more lives ruined. The wicked blindness, the clerical stupidity, the incompetence, the arrogance and dishonesty are breathtaking.

In this book,  the author unravels the story of Vatican policy of secrecy from 1922 – a story which some might say amounted to national disloyalty, to criminal omission and conspiracy,  a story of official double-speak, of blame-shifting, power-plays and petty jealousies. The Vatican promulgated and continued to enforce laws which would undermine the fabric of the communities and the State, and while protecting its own reputation and its priests, which would inevitably cause maximum heartache within families.  Explosive devices encased in canonical terminology and manufactured in Rome, to be detonated in homes and in local communities throughout the world.

Potiphar’s Wife is a good read, but disturbing. The author goes a long way to explaining why the Catholic Church has dealt so badly with the scandal of paedophile priests in its ranks and why the Royal Commission, in responding to its terms of reference, can’t avoid making a series of trenchant findings involving the Vatican, and perhaps some recommendations to assist her in the process of putting its haunted house in order.

What do we pay attention to, what do we look for? It sounds like such an innocent question, yet it is a reflection of who we are, and how we have been shaped.

I went to a Matisse exhibition when I was in London recently. What struck me was a comment the artist made as an older man, with only fourteen years of life left to him, that it was only now that he had to learnt how to ‘ see’.  And this seeing would take him on a totally other path, and would revolutionize what was considered art.

Of course artists, poets and mystics have always been involved in a kind of stripping of the layers, cleaning the windscreens of perception, of dust. Whatever we spend time thinking about and how we have chosen to live are what we will become. And this in turn will also shape our  seeing/ hearing/feeling.

Matisse would learn to see each object and give it its life.

As I live my life right now, I’m away from the familiar, live and pray in a bedroom, I have few props, and no buddies. I am interested to see what this does to me. Can I stay open and flexible, change my moods, do things because I always have?  When it comes to prayer, do I begin, do I start with those so familiar processes and what will happen then?

I hear the same things going on in my mind, and often the familiar instructions from the outside are the same. But acting on instructions is not the point as they are meant only to guide and focus the intelligence and spirit.  But subtly we can be seduced into thinking that these instructions, this knowledge, are the thing itself.

I sit at dinner parties and conversation is about things, but rarely are our fine gifts of intelligence given any room to develop and discern. We become governed by our world of thoughts and rarely do we actually get the chance to look at the thinker of the thoughts.

Of course this is what starting to contemplate is about. Yet the mind is very interested in what it has thought before, what it already knows and it is rarely interested in what it doesn’t know. It will be interested in unknown facts to increase the stockpile of facts, because this can appear as intelligence (aren’t we often impressed by people who know a lot about everything!). But are we really curious about entering into the wordless world?

Not having a formula to control our movements at this time puts us at risk as we grope blindly. We often need to invite silence to hear what is initially wordless.  Our darker places inside emerge: fear of the unknown, risk of being wrong, seen as lacking.  Yet all of these qualities keep us on the wheel that spins faster and faster as we seek to be in control.

Like Matisse, I think we are developing ourselves to become sensitive, to see from our own experience?  But the first thing is to know that we will need courage and a kind of solidarity with ourselves.  Matisse would live his whole life outside of what was acknowledged as “good art”, yet now people will queue for months to taste and see this freedom.

The trick to finding a way forward is to recognize that we are the only ones who can do this, there is no formula, the only pointer is that others have set this course and have done it before us.  Usually people we admire can show us how. But I often wonder if we want it enough for ourselves, I mean the deeper desires, those that will really satisfy us. We may not at the time be appreciated by  our fellow travellers,  but it will certainly bring aliveness and creativity.

The last part of Matisse’s statement is that in truly learning to see, we learn to love. That sounds like a good outcome.

With searing eloquence, 11 men bravely told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Perth of the devastating impact of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Christian Brothers in residences at Castledare, Clontarf, Bindoon and Tardun in Western Australia more than 50 years ago.

No one could be but moved by these men, who told of their painful experiences of stolen innocence, of being subjected to physical brutality and the depths of sexual depravity by supposedly religious men from whom they had every right to expect care, nurture and respect. Instead they were betrayed and treated as objects for sexual gratification.

A regret I have is that every Christian Brother in Oceania was not present to hear the testimony of the men, victims of an earlier generation of Christian Brothers.

The ongoing suffering of children so wantonly abused by those charged with their protection demands of their carers an immediate and effective response. That response is demanded from Christian Brothers for survivors now in the later stages of their lives.

At the Christian Brothers’ Congregation Chapter held in Nairobi in March, I went on the record as saying there will be no future for the Christian Brothers unless and until we do all in our power to address the devastation inflicted on the lives of children and vulnerable adults by the sexually, emotionally and physically abusive conduct of some of our number. However, I am conscious that rhetoric is validated only by appropriate action. We have to find additional ways of engaging with those victimised so their voices are heard.

As the representative of all the decent, committed Christian Brothers living and working throughout Oceania, I accept our shame and ask forgiveness of those whom my Brothers have harmed. I have spent the past 25 years reaching out to victims to try to address the hurt they suffer. I ­acknowledge that there have been times when my efforts have been less than perfect. I can only promise to work at doing better. However, I am confident this royal commission, at which I was a witness, will give us some direction. I pledge the co-operation of the Christian Brothers in working with the royal commission in whatever way we are able.

And as we wait for the findings to provide a pathway for the future, the Christian Brothers commit to continuing our work with survivors each and every day, knowing that help, care and compassion are needed in the present. I commit the Christian Brothers to working with survivors now on their individual needs and circumstances in an atmosphere of care, compassion and dignity.

I also urge the Catholic Church, of which the Christian Brothers are but part, to open itself to examining the causes and embracing the learnings from what has been a shameful episode in our history.

We cannot delegate our ­response to others to formulate but rather must look inside ourselves for the way forward, listening to views from within, however confronting we might find them.

The report into sexual abuse by Christian Brothers published by Brother Gerry Faulkner some 16 years ago offered some analysis of causes, some learnings and some suggested ways forward.

Moreover, I believe that the church cannot continue to ignore the voices of people such as Bishop Geoffrey Robinson and Sister Angela Ryan, who have campaigned for decades to ­address the blight of sexual abuse by priests and religious orders. They have been the conscience for us all in this matter, but at times it would appear that they have even been punished for their courage.

I would like to thank Judge Peter McClellan and the other commissioners and their staff for their work and dedication in pursuit of the painful truth, and I can assure them of our continuing support and co-operation.

And to the men who continue to suffer so greatly, we will not abandon you.

Brother Julian McDonald is deputy province leader, Christian Brothers Oceania Province. This piece was run in The Australian 12 May 2014.

The Holy See has found itself before the United Nations once again, this time in relation to the Treaty on Torture. According to Reuters, Archbishop Tomasi told critics of its sexual abuse record that it had developed model child protection policies over the last decade and that its accusers should not stay “fossilised in the past” when attitudes were different. He said that the “culture of the time” in the 1960s and 1970s viewed such offenders as people who could be treated psychologically rather than as criminals, but this was a mistake, and it is all in the past.

This is a repetition of the claim made by the Church to the Murphy Commission in Ireland and the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry that the Church, like the rest of society, has been on a “learning curve” over child sexual abuse, and that regrettably the Church was also infected with this culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Both the Murphy Commission and the Victoria Parliamentary Committee rejected the claim, but it is still being trotted out by the Australian Church to the Royal Commission and now once again by the Vatican representative at the UN.

Civil society is always on a learning curve about everything: science, human behaviour, town planning, global warming and even motor vehicle accidents. The fact that we can now fly to the moon does not mean that we had only just discovered it, and the fact that there has been considerable research on child sexual abuse over the last 50 years does not mean it was unknown and ignored before then. “Child sexual abuse” is a euphemism for raping and sexually assaulting children, which has always been severely punished by secular society, almost invariably with a jail term except where it is of a very minor nature.

The Church had the same attitude for about 1500 years until 1922. The first Church law declaring that child sexual abuse was more than just a sin punishable in the next life, but was a canonical crime punishable in this life, came out of the Council of Elvira in 306CE. For virtually its whole existence, the Church accepted that its canonical punishments of restrictions on ministry or dismissal from the priesthood were insufficient for child sexual abuse. From the 12^th century onwards, there were decrees of four popes and three Church councils declaring that clerics involved in this crime were to be stripped of their status as priests, and where the crimes were serious, were to be handed over to the civil authorities to be punished in accordance with the civil law. Sometimes that involved execution.

Archbishop Tomasi suggests that the Church (like the rest of society) succumbed to some secular psychological theories of the 1960s and 1970s that thought that paedophiles could be cured. That is simply untrue. In 1904, Pope St. Pius X set up a Commission to codify canon law. That meant going through some 10,000 papal and conciliar decrees and discarding those that were no long relevant (such as those against usury) or were embarrassing (such as the 50 or so anti-Semitic papal bulls), modifying others and creating new ones into a unified code. The Commission was headed by Cardinal Gasparri and his assistant was Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII.

The Commission threw out all the decrees requiring priests who had sexually abused children to be handed over to the civil authorities. Under the 1917 Code, priests could be dismissed in “serious cases”, but there was no mention of handing them over to the civil authorities. Five years later, in 1922, Pope Pius XI issued the decree Crimen Sollicitationis that imposed the Secret of the Holy Office, a “permanent silence”, on all information obtained by the Church in its internal inquiries into the allegations. There were no exceptions for reporting to the civil authorities. Breach of the secret meant automatic excommunication from the Church, and that excommunication could only be lifted by the Pope personally. In 1974, Pope Paul VI renamed the secret of the Holy Office, the “pontifical secret”, and it still applies to all allegations of child sexual abuse by clergy.

Crimen Sollicitationis also introduced what became known as “the pastoral approach” to clergy sex abusers. A priest could only be dismissed if there seemed to be “no hope, humanly speaking, or almost no hope, of his amendment”. The 1983 Code of Canon Law went even further by extending that “pastoral approach” so that even before a priest could be put on trial, the bishop had to make an attempt to “reform” him.

This idea that the Church had somehow been contaminated by some psychological theories of the 1960s and 1970s is nonsense. The requirement to try to reform a priest before imposing the punishment of dismissal was enshrined in canon law 40 years earlier in 1922, and it is still enshrined in canon 1341. You can look it up yourself: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P50.HTM

In order to show how much the Church had changed, Archbishop Tomasi summarised the procedural changes introduced in 2001, but he made no mention of Article 25 of the 2001 Motu Proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela and Article 30 of its 2010 revised version that again imposed the permanent silence of “the pontifical secret” on all allegations and information about child sexual abuse by clergy. In 2010, the Holy See granted a dispensation to allow civil laws requiring reporting to be obeyed – that is just enough to keep bishops out of jail. In Australia, only NSW has such laws. In every other State, there is no requirement to report possibly as much as 99% of all cases of child sexual abuse, and in those cases the pontifical secret still applies. The Church is still fossilized in the past, and will continue to be so for as long as it imposes the pontifical secret on allegations of child sex abuse of its clergy, and refuses to report such allegations the police for investigation – irrespective of whether there is a reporting law or not. The cover up continues, and so does the spin.

Kieran Tapsell’s book: Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse will be launched at 4.30pm on 27 May 2014 at the Auditorium, 99 Albert Road, Strathfield. http://atfpress.com/

In this book by Kieran Tapsell which is to be launched on May 27 we can learn about canon law and secrecy in the Vatican, particularly in relation to sexual abuse. Kieran Tapsell has been a guest blogger on these issues on this site. John Menadue

For 1500 years, the Catholic Church accepted that clergy who sexually abused children deserved to be stripped of their status as priests and then imprisoned. A series of papal and Council decrees from the twelfth century required such priests to be dismissed from the priesthood, and then handed over to the civil authorities for further punishment.

That all changed in 1922 when Pope Pius XI issued his decree Crimen Sollicitationis that created a de facto ‘privilege of clergy’ by imposing the ‘secret of the Holy Office’ on all information obtained through the Church’s canonical investigations. If the State did not know about these crimes, then there would be no State trials, and the matter could be treated as a purely canonical crime to be dealt with in secret in the Church courts. Pope Pius XII continued the decree. Pope John XXIII reissued it in 1962. Pope Paul VI in 1974 extended the reach of ‘pontifical secrecy’ to the allegation itself. Pope John Paul II confirmed the application of pontifical secrecy in 2001, and in 2010, Benedict XVI even extended it to allegations about priests sexually abusing intellectually disabled adults. In 2010, Pope Benedict gave a dispensation to pontifical secrecy to allow reporting to the police where the local civil law required it, that is, just enough to keep bishops out of jail. Most countries in the world do not have any such reporting laws for the vast majority of complaints about the sexual abuse of children. Pontifical secrecy, the cornerstone of the cover up continues.

When Tapsell lets daylight into the dark rooms of canon law, so much that seemed inexplicable about this scandal suddenly makes sense. For all of us trying to understand why the church stumbled here, Potiphar’s Wife is a book of the first importance.

David Marr, journalist

Kieran Tapsell takes the reader by the hand and guides her carefully through the dark, subterranean tunnels of the Vatican, explaining the turns and twists of the peculiar Papal legal system and introducing her to the many men in frocks they bump into along the way. A journey not to be missed!

Christopher Geraghty, retired judge of the District Court of New South Wales

Kieran Tapsell studied for the Catholic priesthood at St. Columba’s College, Springwood, and St. Patrick’s College Manly in the 1960’s, during which time he studied Canon Law. After leaving the seminary, he studied Law at Sydney University. He was admitted a Solicitor and Barrister of the Supreme Court of NSW in 1973, was a partner in the firm of Watkins Tapsell from 1973 to 2004. He was an Acting District Court Judge from 1996 to 1999 and the author of many articles in legal journals on topics within his area of specialization. Since his retirement from his legal practice in 2004, he has been translating Latin American literature and newspaper columns from Spanish to English.

The link is below for an order form for Potiphar’s Wife.

http://atfpress.com/media//order_form_Tapsell.jpg

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.

If we think about it, each of us has an Easter story. Mine goes back to the death of my father.

Dad died when I was a young nun. It was my first experience of the death of someone I deeply loved. Where once the word “loss” seemed a somewhat evasive euphemism, it was now acutely apt. I felt empty and fell into an abyss of grief, a grief that had begun eighteen months earlier, the day Dad was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He was 57.

People were kind; sympathy and support were generous and heartfelt. Yet when people spoke to me of God, faith and heaven I felt affronted. Many ‘holy’ words seemed vacuous and trite to me given that I felt nothing of the presence, let alone the comfort, of God. God was nowhere to be found.

The ‘unfairness’ of this bewildered me. Wasn’t I a nun and a person of faith? Hadn’t I given my life to God, for God’s sake?    Shouldn’t I at least expect a modicum of divine comfort?

Months later I decided to make a weekend retreat at a monastery under the wise guidance of an elderly Benedictine monk. He listened to my grief and wasn’t embarrassed by my tears. He simply invited me to reflect on the story in John’s gospel of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene on the first Easter morning.

Mary comes to remember and honour a loved one and, like me, she encounters emptiness. She weeps. Mary turns from the empty tomb and wanders in turmoil and anguish until Jesus, initially mistaken for a gardener, calls her by name.

As I read the words from this familiar Gospel scene, I had an inchoate sense of myself being called by name. I had a sense of some kind of presence within my confusion and emptiness. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy experience, and even then I didn’t really have a strong sense of the presence of God. But there was a knowing, as real as it was delicate and deep, that somehow God was with me, calling me, loving me within my emptiness. And I was greatly comforted.

Not surprisingly, Jesus’ appearance to Mary Magdalene has become my favourite Easter story and like any classic text it continues to contain a surfeit of meaning for me in new times and new situations.

Years later when studying John’s gospel as part of a theology degree I chose to do my scriptural exegesis on this passage for my major assessment.

The words “noli me tangere” “do not cling to me” came to the fore.  Mary had wanted to cling to the idea of who Jesus was for her before his resurrection. When Dad died I had wanted to cling to him and naïvely to a God who would shield me from human grief.

Theological giant, Karl Rahner is unapologetically forthright:

The God of earthly security, the God of salvation from life’s disappointments, the God of life insurance, the God who takes care so that children never cry and that justice marches upon the earth, the God who transforms earth’s laments, the God who doesn’t let human love end up in disappointment – that God doesn’t exist.

Sobering but true. God never demeans our humanity by circumventing it.

I had to let go of my ‘lesser’ God. I had to grow up a little in my faith and, in the words of Rahner’s fellow Jesuit, Anthony de Mello, I had to “empty out [my] teacup God.” Instead of concentrating on loss and emptiness, I had to search for a sense of the presence of my father’s spirit with and within me. With the help of the post-Easter Jesus and Mary Magdalene I began to experience the truth of John Chrysostom’s words written sixteen centuries earlier: “He whom we love and lose is no longer where he was. He is now wherever we are.”

Mary Magdalene has become a companion and a hero. But history has not been kind to her and it is hard for the real Mary to shine through. She is often portrayed as the “good time girl” come good. Yet there is no scriptural justification whatsoever for asserting that Mary was a reformed prostitute. Nor is there any evidence to support the claim of Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame, that Mary and Jesus were lovers, married, had a child, and for a time lived, not in Memphis (!) but somewhere in the Middle East.

If we accept the orthodox definition of an apostle as one who encounters the risen Jesus and announces this Good News to the community, what we have in John’s Easter gospel of Mary Magdalene is the story of the first Apostle. She is truly, as Hippolytus second century Bishop of Rome names her, the Apostle to the Apostles.       

This Easter, with Mary Magdalene as guide and mentor, I pray that I may once again hear a voice offering love and life in the empty tombs of my life. I pray that this may be so for you.

Good Samaritan Sister Patty Fawkner is a writer, adult educator and facilitator. She describes herself as “a fairly Good Samaritan”.

How often do we fall in love, the sort that turns us around, strips us and re-orientates us, shakes the foundations of what it is to relate and be with another?  Not very often, mostly we are too guarded.  But at times it happens, and I have come to take this as a call, our feelings leap forward and say follow me.

A person I loved died this week.  He was an old man, though he did not feel old to me. I just loved him. He had been a training supervisor when I was becoming a psychotherapist, so I came to know him in that particular way.  This man stretched me.  He was shy and very private, but he knew the way the human heart worked, and what it needed to grow. Mostly he worked with children, and they are great teachers, open, and available to their needs.  This man taught me about my ‘duty of care’.   Sounds clinical, but it was far from that, it was his relationship with me that showed me what this means.  He mentored me into the depths of what another really needed of me, and then what I needed to do/grow within myself to get there.  This man knew how to keep an opening for the other.

What does love, mentoring and passion have to do with the story of Jesus and Easter? Could they be the template for relationship, how love shapes us if we let it?   We are many things.  Parts of us do not move toward love, they resist and fear, but there is a part of us that leans toward the light.  We desire love and it is in love that we are again ‘little ones’, vulnerable and in the moment. In the story of Jesus we are shown how.

Today, mostly, we are concerned with ourselves, interested in our psychology, health, security, and what will become of us.  We feel safe with certainty, and threatened by the unknown, by mystery, unsure of the idea of giving over to another.  Yet paradoxically we thirst to feel that we are known and loved by another.

The story of Jesus walks in through the door that the thirst opens, touches us where we condemn ourselves, inviting our needy, desiring hearts into a passionate love response, which will shape us entirely.  Our needs and our stories are particular to us, and it is mostly how we understand others, but not only so, we also need to walk in the shoes of others, being stretched out of ourselves into the bigger family.

God longs for us, and Jesus stirs us to an intimacy, a closeness, which cracks our self-absorbed protective shells and gentles us to pay attention.  The light can shine in.  We can be many things, shy, resistant, stunted in love, and this is what we learn, and these wounds he will carry for us. This, our smaller self, and often  the only picture we can form for ourselves, is transformed by love, the falling in love, being loved.  The possibilities expand.  He calls us and we are awakened, our heart quickens, he draws us, stirs our senses, excites our interest, and we find our desiring selves, our deepest desires.  The Sufi poet Rumi says ‘Your longing for me was my messenger’.

Desire then is what St Ignatius uses in his spiritual exercises to invite the pilgrim into the discovery of God’s love.  It is our own story, but we walk beside this man Jesus, discovering ourselves in this relationship, finding what moves our heart, breaks our heart. It is a human story, nestled in the divine, and our story with our God.

The power of the exercises is that rather than sealing off from what is happening inside of us, we use our feelings to grope forward, toward the light, walking with him, through the gospels, and inside our own imagining being, the being that is loved and desired by God.  In the weeks of the exercises we walk his entire life, being shaped and becoming aware of ourselves in this relationship. But here too, this is the small thing, the big thing, is what we will do, desire to do, for this great love we feel and which we are given.  There is a longing to get out of our own way.  We are given ‘duty of care’, such abundance of love it must be  shared.

How blessed we are each year to have the ritual of Easter. From ashes we proceed to ashes, loved into life and loved into death that brings life, stretched into the mystery of all of this with Him, His way.

Caroline Coggins works as a Psychotherapist.

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

The Church is not the best guide to moral values. That is the response of some Catholics to the questionnaire which the Vatican sent out in preparation for the October Synod of Bishops. Many practising Catholics do not agree with the official opinions of the Pope on moral rules associated with marriage and sexuality.

The disagreement list is long:

• No living together before marriage;
• No sexual activity except between a man and a woman officially married in the Church;
• No contraception;
• No masturbation;
• No civil marriages or partnerships;
• No re-marriage after divorce;
• No sexual activity by homosexuals;
• No homosexual partnerships, let alone marriage;
• No IVF;
• No refusal of sex to a reasonable request from a marriage partner;

Many Catholics would say that they used to believe everything on the list was wrong; but not now. The times have changed. Implicit in this is the judgement that what is right and wrong is determined not by the Church but by the surrounding culture. That’s why it changes.

On reflection we were effectively taught that in the seminary. Doctrinal statements could be infallible; but moral rules (laws) could not. They were too dependent on outside circumstances. Yet Catholic leaders like John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Cardinal Pell insisted that these were God’s law, and not open to question. They even tried to have Humanae Vitae accepted as infallible. They would say that the Church teaches these rules. But all the while the real Church – that is rank and file Mass-going Catholics – did not believe them. Reception by serious believers is necessary for doctrine or rules to be binding – the sensus fidelium.

Meanwhile the immorality of bishops and popes has been embarrassingly displayed by their cover up of paedophilia by some of their priests. They knew it was happening and made it worse by moving offenders to other posts – thus spreading the offence. They were trying to protect the good name of the institution. In so doing they were harming the people entrusted to them. Basic human rights took second place to the institution’s appearance. Their moral compass was badly wrong. Many of them still do not get it. Nor do their superiors who refuse to sack them. The superior officials’ moral compasses are wrong too.

Looking at it from a distance the preoccupation with personal, sexual morality as sinful is doing a disservice to sin. Real sin is a big thing. Exploitation, sectarianism, warfare, greed-induced poverty, manipulation of power, domination of the powerless by the powerful are the real sins of today. Sex can be an area of sin, too – but when and because it is exploitative, whether systemic, as in white slavery, or individual. Margaret Farley gets this one right in “Just Love – A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics.” But personal consensual sexual activity cannot be in the Big Sin category despite papal obsession with it.

On the other hand Pontifical Secrecy is central to all Vatican official business. Diocesan curias also work in secrecy. What happened to transparency and accountability? Some secrecy is necessary, but it is more nuanced than that. Too much is accepted as secret when it should not be. What do you know about diocesan finances? Dare you ask? Yet diocesan spending should be transparent if its authorities are to be accountable. At some levels church secrecy is thwarting transparency and accountability. The moral presumptions are back to front. The secular world is moral and the Church is immoral.

Some big sins of the past – so often sexual – are not really sinful. Some things which were OK in the past are really seriously wrong. Changing cultural values can be confusing but they are part of living in a changing world. Our challenge is to be part of the debate and to admit when we are wrong. This can be hard when we are emerging from an authoritarian, monist culture to a pluralist one. Meanwhile we cannot claim moral superiority unless we observe the ethics of the society in which we live.

F. X. Harriott – The Tablet’s renowned voice of common sense – suggested in one of his last articles that the Vatican should take a decision to say nothing about sex for the next 50 years. Since its voice as a guide to personal morality is so thin, maybe it is time to extend that to all personal moral issues. The Ethics Committees advising governments and research institutions seem more aware of basic human rights and are in touch with the prevailing values of society. Should we take note of them, use our own common sense and make this our new moral compass?

Eric Hodgens is a retired priest who ‘writes a bit’.

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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.