Category: Religion

Bella figura, writes Bishop Geoffrey Robinson in his book, For Christ’s Sake, pervades the Vatican. In Italian, it means putting on a good appearance, and never admitting mistakes – what we might call “spin”.  Its opposite, bruta figura means looking dreadful. Bella figura can quickly turn bruta as Sir Walter Scott reminded us: “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

In 1983, Pope John Paul II promulgated the 1983 Code of Canon Law that made it virtually impossible to dismiss a paedophile priest. He had already abolished the simpler “administrative” trial, leaving only the impossibly complicated “judicial” trial.  In 1988, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to the Church’s senior canon lawyer, Cardinal Castillo, asking for a simpler method. Castillo refused, saying that it would diminish the rights of priests. Never mind the children who were being abused.

Canon lawyers thought that the 1983 Code had repealed Crimen Sollicitationis, and so did the Vatican, because for six years, from 1988 to 1994, it negotiated a request by the American bishops to extend the Code’s limitation period of 5 years for bringing dismissal proceedings. The Americans explained that the limitation period meant there were no dismissals, because children take decades to come to terms with what happened to them. Crimen Sollicitationis had no limitation period. The Vatican eventually relented in 1994, and extended the period to when the victim reached 28 years. It gave the same extension to Ireland in 1996, confirmed it for the Americans in 1998, but left the rest of the world waiting until 2001.

Around 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger and Archbishop Bertone from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) started telling bishops that Crimen Sollicitationis had not been repealed – in other words they could ignore the limitation period, and use the simpler administrative procedure.

In 2001 Pope John Paul II issued his Motu Proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela that contained an Orwellian rewrite of history by stating that Crimen Sollicitationis was “in force until now”, and that was confirmed by a letter to bishops of 18 May 2001 from Ratzinger and Bertone. According to them, for the previous 18 years or so, bishops really could have ignored the 5 year limitation period, and used the simpler procedure. The American canon lawyer, Nicholas Cafardi says that this was all bella figura. It was not true, and the Vatican was trying to cover up a dispute between Cardinals Ratzinger and Castrillon over who was in charge of the sex abuse problem by pretending that Crimen Sollicitatonis was always in force.

But there is another more sinister explanation. If bishops were not hampered by these provisions under the Code, then they could be more easily blamed for any failure to dismiss paedophile priests. And this is exactly what Ratzinger did in 2010 after becoming Pope, when in his Pastoral Letter to the Irish people, he blamed the Irish bishops for not using the “long established norms of canon law” to dismiss these priests.

There is a less Machiavellian explanation but it is still infected with bella figura. The advice given by Ratzinger and Bertone in the late 1990s about using Crimen Sollicitatonis was canonically dubious, and actions done under their instructions could have been null and void. Legal systems have a transparent way of dealing with this by legislating to validate the actions taken. But that means admitting a mistake. Ratzinger and Bertone preferred the Orwellian solution of rewriting history, and in doing so, spun the tangled web.

On the 1 October 2006, the BBC Panorama Program, “Sex Crimes and the Vatican” alleged that for twenty years, Pope Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was in charge of enforcing pontifical secrecy for clergy sex abuse through Crimen Sollicitationis.  In fact he had only been enforcing it for two years. This was Ratzinger’s own fault, because of what he falsely claimed in his letter of 18 May 2001. The tangled web had come back to bite him, giving the impression that he was personally far more culpable than he really was.

The web became even further tangled for the unfortunate canon lawyers who had to explain canon law on sexual abuse to the Murphy Commission which found that even competent people were totally confused. In California, Monsignor Brian Ferme, told a court in 2005, that “technically” Crimen Sollicitationis was in force until the 2001 Motu Proprio. In other words, it wasn’t really, but technically it was – or vice versa. After all, the final interpreter of canon law, the Supreme Pontiff, Pope John Paul II himself, had declared something to be true when in fact it wasn’t. Bella figura had crossed the Atlantic.

In November 2009, the Murphy Commission Report on the Archdiocese of Dublin had some scathing criticisms of canon law, accusing it of confusion and lack of coherency. The bella figura had turned hopelessly bruta.

In April 2010, Benedict had second thoughts. He rewrote the historical introduction in his revision of the 2001 Motu Proprio, admitting that the 1983 Code had repealed Crimen Sollicitationis, and tried to cover up his “in force until now” misstatement with a marvellous piece of confusing prose that should have won him a prize for mental reservation. Mental reservation, explained Cardinal Connell to the Murphy Commission, involves using “an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version.”

Referring to the letter of 18 May 2001, the new historical introduction says: “This letter informed the bishops of the new law and the new procedures which replaced the Instruction Crimen Sollicitationis.” Benedict had mentally reserved the fact that the letter was false, and he simply referred to what the letter said.

Benedict’s resort to mental reservation was understandable. The Catholic Catechism says that mental reservation is justified to avoid scandal. It was scandalous enough for the faithful to know that the Vicars of Christ can make mistakes. It was disastrous if they found out they had been telling fibs.

Kieran Tapsell is a retired Sydney solicitor and barrister with degrees in Theology and Law. 

This is the best effort at an apology so far and “the leaders of the Catholic Church in Australia” are to be congratulated, finally. They have been dragged, fighting and squealing, to their knees, no, to their bellies, but eventually a thorough and unqualified commitment statement has been published and read to the faithful at every parish Mass on Sunday 24 November. I heard it and it produced a great sigh of relief in me and in those united in prayer with me. The sadness, the horror, the anger, the shame have been all pervasive, like a fog low over the landscape. They have hovered there in my heart, in my mind for the past few years, and the scandal continues to besmirch my image of Christ’s immaculate bride. But at last, some acceptance, some unqualified response, some expression of guilt, of humility, of understanding. The Justice and Truth Commission under the guidance of Francis Sullivan, as well as the bishops and senior clergy of Australia are to be congratulated. At last they have got something right.

They have stated clearly, and without blaming the secular press, alienated Catholics, money-grubbing victims or their faith-less and hostile opponents, that –

• Sexual abuse of a child by a priest is a crime.
• Sexual abuse of a child by any Church personnel is indefensible.
• Sexual abuse by priests or anyone associated with the Church is a fact of which the whole Church in Australia is deeply ashamed.
• The Church fully and unreservedly acknowledges the devastating, deep and ongoing impact of sexual abuse on the lives of victims and their families, and further acknowledges that many victims were not believed when they were telling the truth.
• The Church also acknowledges that, in some cases, those in authority concealed and covered up what they knew to be true, moved perpetrators to another place and enabled them to continue offending, or failed to report the allegations to the police. This behaviour is indefensible.
• The Church was too anxious to protect her reputation and the reputation of her priests and her other personnel rather than protect its children and their families. This behaviour is also inexcusable.
• The Church leaders betrayed the trust of their own people and the expectations of the whole community.

The leaders of the Church went on to express their deep sorrow for this whole dirty mess and to apologise to all those who have been harmed and betrayed. They committed themselves to repair the wrongs suffered.

In any other organization, the leaders would be submitting their letters of resignation; the authorities who appointed them (and without any real consultation) would be demanding their resignation, except that Rome and the Vatican were themselves deeply implicated in the whole smelly catastrophe. And in any company, business, government agency or secular institution, from the United Nations Organization to a local university or school, the shareholders, the members, the foot-soldiers would be holding protest meetings, calling out for heads to roll, or just walking away in disgust. These leaders are asking for forgiveness and a vote of confidence in the board. Well, let’s wait and see.

The problem is that most, if not all, of those in the firing-line, are dead, or at least comfortably retired – beyond the reach of the troops. Nevertheless, there are steps which can be taken to restore some confidence in the shareholders.

There has to be a better method for the selection of the bishops and clergy who minister in our dioceses and parishes; and they have to be better educated.

The selection process has to be much more transparent; the criteria for assessment spelt out clearly – and if the list of Episcopal requirements includes an oath of unquestioning loyalty to the Vatican, let it be spelt out for all to see; a panel of assessors has to be established within the diocese and in each parish, including a solid reinforcement of ordinary, local men and women to give their opinion and make their contribution.  Appointments from on high are not good enough. Recent experience has shown them to be somewhere on a spectrum between lame and calamitous.

Then, after a proper selection process, there has to be a school for new bishops and parish priests, some kind of formal education process to ensure the candidate is sensible to and aware of community needs and expectations, aware of their obligations to society in general, to the poor, to children, to the Christian community, free from an over-riding loyalty and subservience to Rome.

In the meantime, as well as congratulating the leaders of the Church for their act of sorrow and sincere purpose of amendment, let’s all offer a sincere word of profound gratitude to –

• The brave victims of sexual abuse who told their stories, exposed their broken lives and who were so often met with disbelief, with a cold shoulder.
• Bishop Geoff Robinson whose life as a human being and as a priest has been made miserable by many of his brother bishops who opposed his message and resisted the bleeding obvious for so long.
• The energetic faceless ones who persisted in exposing the scandals on the website of Broken Rites.
• The members of the secular press, of those who worked on various ABC programs and members of other television teams. David Marr deserves a special vote of thanks for his consistent and high-quality work, and Joanne McCarthy, the Newcastle journalist, for her commitment to the cause.
• Deirdre Grusovin – remember her and the shellacking she received?
• Julia Gillard for establishing the Royal Commission and Tony Abbott for supporting her.
• Those responsible for establishing the Victorian Parliamentary Enquiry and the members of the parliament who presided at the hearings and prepared such a powerful report.
• A special vote of gratitude to Peter Fox of Newcastle of whom it was said that he involved himself too personally in the pedophile crisis in and around Newcastle and became entangled in the mess. If it were so, pity the bishops and clergy did not become personally involved years, decades before the valiant Peter Fox. It was he and Joanne McCarthy who almost single-handedly exposed the disease and lanced the boil. Thank you Peter Fox. Well done.

The new Pope Francis has caught the eye of the world. Many people with Catholic friends know that there are two Catholic Churches in the world today – one of the popes and the Pells, the other of the rank and file Catholics and their priests. The first is doctrinaire. The second makes adjustments to doctrine and rules as required.

The Church’s central vision is one of life, forgiveness and hope. But in recent years this has been smothered by its pope and bishops’ preoccupation with today’s hot ethical issues – abortion, sexuality (including homosexuality), medical technology, divorce and gender. This has undermined the church’s credibility because all of these issues are in play – except within the ranks of a hierarchy. Then Pope Francis came along. He is aware that these issues are personal and pressing – and all under debate. He has changed the focus of the discussion from ideology to pastoral practice. We know the rules and doctrine, he says, but how do you handle the pastoral question in the lives of real people?

The pope’s practical answer is to call a synod (a representative group) of the world’s bishops to discuss the matter. The subject is to be The Church and The Family. In a new departure for such synods he wants the whole membership of the church to discuss the matter and report back before the synod convenes. The synod’s organizing committee has sent out a questionnaire for discussion. Its four major topics are:

• The teaching of the Church on the Family – and its reception;
• The place of Natural Law in the Church’s teachings – and its reception;
• The family’s place in evangelization;
• New cultural issues re marriage. These include:
  • Extra-marital co-habitation and de facto marriages;
  • Divorce and its implications;
  • Marriage annulment;
  • Same sex unions;
  • Education of children of irregular unions.

The questionnaire is surprising. Public consultation is a new thing. Issues hitherto discussed at your peril are now open for review, seemingly at the Pope’s initiative. Furthermore, all these issues are regularly discussed within the Church – but not openly. Many issues have already been operationally resolved by concerned pastors ignoring restrictions or defying them.

Now to the points:

Firstly, there is no single “Teaching of the Church” on marriage. Over the two millennia of the Christian Church’s existence we have had a variety of approaches. The Church had little to do with marriage till the 13^th century when it took legal control of marriage. Church registration followed. Since then control of the legalities of marriage was in Church hands until the secular state took over in the 19^th century. All this applies only to Europe and the West. Other cultures have their own customs which have been problems for Christianity as it became more universal.

The 20^th century teachings of the Catholic Church on Marriage can be summed up as restrictions on sex justified by Natural Law philosophy. Pope Paul VI’s decree “Humanae Vitae”, with its banning of contraception, is the poster child of this approach. He argued that contraception was against the “natural law”. His argument runs: if you study the nature of the human being you will deduce that sex is for procreation. To interfere with that is to violate the natural law.

Both aspects of this teaching are now culturally irrelevant due to cultural changes in attitudes to sex and the obsolescence of the Natural Law philosophy. These are facts. The dogged opposition of Church officials is a lost ideological cause.

Evangelization (spreading the gospel to newcomers) has never been a high priority of the Christian family. The passing of Christian affiliation from generation to generation has been a cultural phenomenon. The family might have indoctrinated, but evangelization was bypassed. Each new generation was inculturated into Catholicism – up till now. Evangelization has never been a serious issue even in the New Evangelization called for by Pope John Paul II. What he wanted was a return to the old mind set – an exercise in nostalgia.

The values that matter are justice in relationships and stability in partnerships – especially while children are involved. Taking restrictive stances on varieties of partnership and recreational sex and is moralistic ideology. The hierarchy may have missed the opportunity to deal realistically with today’s Western approach to sexuality, marriage and family by canonising a dull, wowserish past. They have alienated two generations.

Divorce is a punishing experience rendered double punishment by effectively excommunicating the remarried. Divorce in the West increased after World War II. Now at around 50%, it alone explains much of the post-War loss of affiliation.

Forget annulment. Fewer Catholics are using it because the Church’s rules are a mess and less and less socially relevant.

Contraception is a fairly reliable component of today’s living. So, either help people plan a family – or better – let them do it themselves and leave them alone.

Support all stable partnerships. Argue about what you call them if that is your thing.

Finally, give any support you can to partners doing their best to educate a new generation.

There is movement at the station but there is still a long way to go. How widely will bishops consult on the questionnaire? Will the responses to the questionnaire be filtered by conservative local bureaucracies? Will burning issues be addressed by the Synod Preparatory Committee? Will the conservative officials still pervading the Roman administration win this one as they won after Vatican II? What political colour will the Synod be when it convenes? Will it reflect the mind of the Church at large or just the hierarchy? If it does, will the resulting report be true or doctored? And will the result be consensus or division?

Past synods have been rubber stamps. How this one goes remains to be seen.

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

Pope Francis has published his first and very prolix papal teaching document entitled Evangelii Gaudium (the joy of evangelisation).  With a tone of delightful self-mocking he observes,  “I am aware that nowadays documents do not arouse the same interest as in the past and that they are quickly forgotten.” On the scale of papal authority, the document is called an Apostolic Exhortation which comes in below an Encyclical.  This gives the pope licence to be more free ranging, adding anecdotes and pastoral tips.  Since the Second Vatican Council, there have been synods of bishops convened to discuss particular topics.  In the past, the Pope has then written the synod document, ensuring Vatican control of  the outcomes.  Towards the end of Benedict’s papacy a Synod was convened on “the new evangelisation” which was often code for getting away from social justice and rediscovering pieties which might appeal to young people joining some of the new church movements which were replacing regular parish involvement.  Francis says, “I was happy to take up the request of the Fathers of the Synod to write this Exhortation”.  It has provided him an opportunity to roll out all the things he has been saying which have put a spring in the step of many Catholics who think this pope is good news, having a deep pastoral sense, a strong commitment to the poor, and a resolute conviction that Rome does not have all the answers.  Trying to sum up the 50,000 words in a few phrases, I would say his message is: “The gospel really is good news especially for the poor and anyone who takes seriously the sufferings of the world.  The church doors are open to everyone.  We are not a ghetto.  We engage with the world and he have something to say.  Get out there.  Do something to help your neighbour.  Do it joyfully. Do it with passion.  The Church is here to help, not to hinder.  Church teachings won’t be changing any time soon.  But don’t expect Rome to have all the answers.  Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.  And do something to change the unjust economic structures of the world.”  It’s refreshing that he liberally quotes statements by bishops’ gatherings from various parts of the world including Oceania.  He takes decentralisation and subsidiarity seriously.  He is doing it.  How refreshing to have a Pope write: “Nor do I believe that the papal magisterium should be expected to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world. It is not advisable for the Pope to take the place of local Bishops in the discernment of every issue which arises in their territory. In this sense, I am conscious of the need to promote a sound ‘decentralization’.”  Vatican monsignori in long flowing robes will be troubled to hear him say, “Mere administration can no longer be enough.  Throughout the world, let us be permanently in a state of mission”.

In the past, more conservative bishops have tried to downplay the significance of national bishops’ conferences, preferring their individual teaching role augmented by ready access to Roman dicasteries which could receive complaints from disaffected parishioners upset at the pastoral leanings of more liberal bishops like Pat Power and Bill Morris here in Australia.  Francis says, “Episcopal conferences are in a position to contribute in many and fruitful ways to the concrete realization of the collegial spirit”. He says that  “this desire has not been fully realized” and notes that “excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach.”  As a non-European pope he is particularly sensitive to cultural diversity and much of the European baggage in the Church.  For him,  the Church was never Europe and Europe is not the Church.   He happily quotes our Bishops of Oceania asking that the Church “develop an understanding and a presentation of the truth of Christ working from the traditions and cultures of the region” and inviting “all missionaries to work in harmony with indigenous Christians so as to ensure that the faith and the life of the Church be expressed in legitimate forms appropriate for each culture”. With South American gusto, he adds: “We cannot demand that peoples of every continent, in expressing their Christian faith, imitate modes of expression which European nations developed at a particular moment of their history, because the faith cannot be constricted to the limits of understanding and expression of any one culture.  It is an indisputable fact that no single culture can exhaust the mystery of our redemption in Christ.”

While not promising any changes to church teaching on contraception, divorce and remarriage, etc, he offers real hope of sacramental hospitality being offered in local churches.  Having noted that “the Church has rules or precepts which may have been quite effective in their time, but no longer have the same usefulness for directing and shaping people’s lives”, he throws open the doors with this declaration: “The Church is called to be the house of the Father, with doors always wide open. One concrete sign of such openness is that our church doors should always be open, so that if someone, moved by the Spirit, comes there looking for God, he or she will not find a closed door. There are other doors that should not be closed either. Everyone can share in some way in the life of the Church; everyone can be part of the community, nor should the doors of the sacraments be closed for simply any reason. This is especially true of the sacrament which is itself “the door”: baptism. The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak. These convictions have pastoral consequences that we are called to consider with prudence and boldness. Frequently, we act as arbiters of grace rather than its facilitators. But the Church is not a tollhouse; it is the house of the Father, where there is a place for everyone, with all their problems.”

But there are some nettles he is not prepared to grasp, and the Church will continue to suffer for it.  He writes, “The reservation of the priesthood to males, as a sign of Christ the Spouse who gives himself in the Eucharist, is not a question open to discussion, but it can prove especially divisive if sacramental power is too closely identified with power in general.” Surely it must be even more divisive if those who reserve to themselves sacramental power determine that they alone can determine who has access to that power and legislate that the matter is not open for discussion.  Given that the power to determine the teaching of the magisterium and the provisions of canon law is not a sacramental power, is there not a need to include women in the decision that the question is not open to discussion and in the contemporary quest for an answer to the question? Francis’s position on this may be politic for the moment within the Vatican which has had a longtime preoccupation with shutting down the discussion, but the position is  incoherent.  The claim that the matter “is not a question open to discussion” can not be maintained unless sacramental power also includes the power to determine theology and the power to determine canon law.  Ultimately the Pope’s claim must be that only those possessed of sacramental power can determine the magisterium and canon law.  Conceding for the moment the historic exclusion of women from the sacramental power of presidency at Eucharist, we need to determine if “the possible role of women in decision-making in different areas of the Church’s life” could include the power to contribute to theological discussion and the shaping of the magisterium and to canonical discussion about sanctions for participating in theological discussion on set topics such as the ordination of women.  As Francis says, “Demands that the legitimate rights of women be respected, based on the firm conviction that men and women are equal in dignity, present the Church with profound and challenging questions which cannot be lightly evaded.”   This paragraph of the Exhortation on women’s ordination adds nothing to a resolution of the question nor the way forward.  This Exhortation contains some wonderful material but on this issue, Francis has attempted to lightly evade the question riding the jetstream of opposition entrenched in the magisterium and in canon law by his two predecessors.

Francis makes no pretence to having all the answers.  He won’t be moving any time soon to change church teachings.  But he has done a lot with this Exhortation to move the Church back into the world and to open the Church to all sinners without discrimination.  He makes appealing his vision of a Church which is “bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Bob We Trust begins with Father Bob’s potted version of the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Five minutes of fun and irreverent theology. Over two thousand years passing in the blink of an eye.  Then Father Bob, assisted by his sinister chess opponent, John Safron in the guise of the Devil, gets down to more serious business – an old priest’s herculean struggle with an ecclesiastical dragon in Melbourne – the iron institution led by Archbishop Denis Hart and his mob. The story is a hoot.

The Father Bob in whom we trust is a bit mad – but so are John Safron and Denis Hart. In fact most of the characters in the film, with the exception of a few faithful canine companions, are at least a little off the planet. But unlike Hart, who is endowed with the shape and gravitas of a Renaissance prelate, Bob is also a little touched in a special way – touched by the Spirit of God, touched by the message of the Jesus Gospel, with compassion for the poor, the smelly, the homeless, the unwashed and underprivileged. Father Bob had been running the parish of South Melbourne for nearly forty years, opening the church doors every morning, closing them at night, greeting all comers, welcoming the dwarfs, feeding the hungry, but the Archdiocese uptown wanted to get rid of him, the sooner the better, hopefully without any fuss. An embarrassment. A trouble-maker. He was making them look ridiculous. So he was “invited to retire” despite the fact that he was in rude health and there was a serious pastoral crisis caused by a dramatic fall-away of vocations to the priesthood. Pressure was applied. Questions were asked of Father Bob at the Cathedral touching the very heart of the Gospel message. The book-keepers suspected maladministration. Father Bob’s pastoral shadow, his black poodle, was probably being fed off the parish account. Wasting church funds. The Cathedral’s Captain Queeg was on the trail of a clerical mutineer.

This movie is funny, sometimes very funny, so you’ll need to take your laughing gear along to the cinema with you. It is also challenging, even confronting, especially for any practising Catholic. It captures the conflict at the heart of modern Christian institutions – the struggle between property and power, money and influence, pomp and circumstance on the one hand, and a glorious message of service, inclusion and love, especially to the poor and downtrodden. But my overall reaction was one of profound sadness. How blind and stupid those at the controls can be!

Father Bob was obviously a good man doing a good job for his Church in the parish of South Melbourne. The people loved him. His life and mission were transparently, obviously allied to the Gospel and to Jesus. He was a Melbourne, perhaps even a national, identity in a way Archbishop Hart was not, and could never be. He was a priest all Catholics could be proud of. He was the best of us. So why close him down? Why cut off his arms and legs, and take him out of circulation? It was silly, in anyone’s language – just stupid. He provided an opportunity to focus the community’s mind on the values of the Gospel and on the real work of the institution. At the very least, he could have continued his work as a parish priest emeritus, a consultant, gradually training, educating others, handing over to them, watching his work thrive. But no – a rare opportunity lost. Let the faceless ones work until they drop, but for heaven’s sake, let’s get rid of this one.

Archbishop Hart’s mentor and powerbroker had done the same when he had arrived in Sydney, fresh and uninvited from Melbourne.

Like a craggy, crazy prophet, Father Ted Kennedy had worked wonders in his parish. He had transformed his Redfern presbytery into a drop-in centre for Aboriginal people from the city, from the country areas of New South Wales and around Australia. Everyone was welcomed. He had lived and shared with his black brothers and sisters, baptized and buried them, welcomed those in trouble, visited them in prison, nursed their babies, put his arms around them and loved them. The parish looked unkempt but it was in truth a centre of excellence. It had huge potential to project the image of a different world to Sydneysiders at large. A constant reminder of what we could be, of our better selves. The Redfern community only needed someone with Christian eyes to see what they were doing, to encourage them, to give them space, to continue Father Ted’s work after a stroke had crushed him. But no. Another rare opportunity wasted. Captain Queeg’s work is never complete. George Pell could have been the toast of the town, a champion of the poor in tinsel city, a visionary, a new Dan Mannix-type for the aboriginal people of Sydney and Australia. Instead, the narrow-minded, ultra-conservative, anal retentive and culturally foreign Neo-Cats took over, with a mission to destroy all that Father Ted had done with thirty years of his life and more. A tragedy. An opportunity missed again, and the Church is suffering.

When will they ever learn to trust the Spirit, to trust the people, to trust Father Bob?

Of course, they are only institutional men, elected to office by the organization because they possess the qualities valued by the organization – obedience, loyalty, submission. Trained team players who will not rock the boat.

But the good news is that the team has a new coach who wants to play the game in a different way. A new style. Playing on the front foot. More panache. More risks. Playing to win and even though they are rare, using our gifted players. Bob and Ted, living and working today, would be Pope Francis’s strikers playing till they drop, while Denis and George, playing at their present standard, should be on the bench or in the stands.

On Copacabana beach in Rio, Pope Francis celebrated Mass with three million people, more than the Rolling Stones or Carnivale could ever attract. With his obvious modesty he showed himself a great communicator with the young and the poor. He appealed for the rich to share with the poor and solidarity between all people. He called the bishops to accountability rather than autocracy, to walk humbly with struggling people and to meet them on their journey. (John Menadue)

The following, with a minor edit is what he said to the bishops.

“Before all else, we must not yield to the fear once expressed by (Cardinal) John Henry Newman: “… the Christian world is gradually becoming barren and effete, as land which has been worked out and is become sand”. We must not yield to disillusionment, discouragement and complaint. We have laboured greatly and, at times, we see what appear to be failures. We feel like those who must tally up a losing season as we consider those who have left us or no longer consider us credible or relevant.

Let us read once again, in this light, the story of Emmaus (cf. Lk 24:13-15). The two disciples have left Jerusalem. .. They are scandalized by the failure of the Messiah in whom they had hoped and who now appeared utterly vanquished, humiliated, even after the third day (vv. 17-21). Here we have to face the difficult mystery of those people who leave the Church, who, under the illusion of alternative ideas, now think that the Church – their Jerusalem – can no longer offer them anything meaningful and important. So they set off on the road alone, with their disappointment. Perhaps the Church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas, perhaps the world seems to have made the Church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions; perhaps the Church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age. It is a fact that nowadays there are many people like the two disciples of Emmaus; not only those looking for answers in the new religious groups that are sprouting up, but also those who already seem godless, both in theory and in practice.

Faced with this situation, what are we to do?

We need a Church unafraid of going forth into their night. We need a Church capable of meeting them on their way. We need a Church capable of entering into their conversation. We need a Church able to dialogue with those disciples who, having left Jerusalem behind, are wandering aimlessly, alone, with their own disappointment, disillusioned by a Christianity now considered barren, fruitless soil, incapable of generating meaning.

A relentless process of globalization, an often uncontrolled process of intense urbanization, has promised great things. Many people have been captivated by their potential, which of course contains positive elements as, for example, the shortening of distance, the drawing closer of peoples and cultures, the diffusion of information and of services. On the other hand, however, many are living the negative effects of these realities without realizing how they affect a proper vision of humanity and of the world. This generates enormous confusion and an emptiness which people are unable to explain, regarding the purpose of life, personal disintegration, the loss of the experience of belonging to a “home” and the absence of personal space and strong personal ties.

And since there is no one to accompany them or to show them with his or her own life the true way, many have sought shortcuts, because the standards set by Mother Church seem to be asking too much. There are also those who recognize the ideal of humanity and of life as proposed by the Church, but they do not have the audacity to embrace it. They think that this ideal is too lofty for them, that it is beyond their abilities, and that the goal the Church sets is unattainable. Nonetheless they cannot live without having at least something, even a poor imitation of what seems too grand and distant. With disappointed hearts, they then go off in search of something which will lead them even further astray, or which brings them to a partial belonging that, ultimately, does not fulfill their lives.

The great sense of abandonment and solitude, of not even belonging to oneself, which often results from this situation, is too painful to hide. Some kind of release is necessary. There is always the option of complaining. But even complaint acts like a boomerang; it comes back and ends up increasing one’s unhappiness. Few people are still capable of hearing the voice of pain; the best we can do is to anaesthetize it.

From this point of view, we need a Church capable of walking at people’s side, of doing more than simply listening to them; a Church which accompanies them on their journey; a Church able to make sense of the “night” contained in the flight of so many of our brothers and sisters from Jerusalem; a Church which realizes that the reasons why people leave also contain reasons why they can eventually return. But we need to know how to interpret, with courage, the larger picture. Jesus warmed the hearts of the disciples of Emmaus.

I would like all of us to ask ourselves today: are we still a Church capable of warming hearts? A Church capable of leading people back to Jerusalem? Of bringing them home? Jerusalem is where our roots are: Scripture, catechesis, sacraments, community, friendship with the Lord, Mary and the apostles… Are we still able to speak of these roots in a way that will revive a sense of wonder at their beauty?

Many people have left because they were promised something more lofty, more powerful, and faster.

But what is more lofty than the love revealed in Jerusalem? Nothing is more lofty than the abasement of the Cross, since there we truly approach the height of love! Are we still capable of demonstrating this truth to those who think that the apex of life is to be found elsewhere?

Do we know anything more powerful than the strength hidden within the weakness of love, goodness, truth and beauty?

People today are attracted by things that are faster and faster: rapid Internet connections, speedy cars and planes, instant relationships. But at the same time we see a desperate need for calmness, I would even say slowness. Is the Church still able to move slowly: to take the time to listen, to have the patience to mend and reassemble? Or is the Church herself caught up in the frantic pursuit of efficiency? Dear brothers, let us recover the calm to be able to walk at the same pace as our pilgrims, keeping alongside them, remaining close to them, enabling them to speak of the disappointments present in their hearts and to let us address them. They want to forget Jerusalem, where they have their sources, but eventually they will experience thirst. We need a Church capable of accompanying them on the road back to Jerusalem! A Church capable of helping them to rediscover the glorious and joyful things that are spoken of Jerusalem, and to understand that she is my Mother, our Mother, and that we are not orphans! We were born in her. Where is our Jerusalem, where were we born? In Baptism, in the first encounter of love, in our calling, in vocation. We need a Church that kindles hearts and warms them.

We need a Church capable of restoring citizenship to her many children who are journeying, as it were, in an exodus”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An approach of respectful solicitation becomes the next step.

I watched Cardinal George Pell give his evidence to the Victorian Parliamentary Committee on Monday and thought that he was fortunate to be questioned across the polished table by a team of amateur interrogators. The members of the committee were, for my taste, too respectful, and far too thankful for the inadequate information he was providing. He will not be treated so softly, so kindly by counsel assisting the Royal Commission. We should prepare ourselves for a longer and more equal contest when the trained, heavy-weight inquisitors put the Archbishop of Sydney on the rack.

I thought His Eminence’s form had improved somewhat, though admittedly he was coming off a troubling slump. He was visibly less aggressive. His trainers had persuaded him to surrender his bullying, bulldozing tactics and to eat a few crumbs of humble pie. He was more defensive in the ring, less assertive in the clinches, an old warrior who had grown weary of the fight, who was prepared to suffer a few body blows without complaint.

After watching the contest for four hours and more, I began to feel a little sorry for the main contestant. He was old and stooped. He’d been fighting in this ring for eighteen years and more, diverting blows, defending his corner, but now ready to concede, reluctantly. He had slowed down. The mind was not as sharp. The words did not flow fluently. Sad to sit and watch from the front stalls an old warrior in the ring, under lights, up against a tag-team of amateurs slowly gaining the upper-hand, as the champion gradually lost his strength and was forced to face the inevitable. A beast of the forest being eaten alive by an army of ants.

I was interested to hear the Cardinal speak of his meeting with Premier Jeff Kennett (“You clean up the mess, or I’ll do it for you.”) and I was amused when he compared his own personality to that of the Premier’s. “We’re similar in personality”. I assumed he sees himself as a can-do, barge through, take no prisoners type of guy – direct, blunt, no-holds-barred, bereft of delicatesse, hard-nosed, thick-skinned, but able to save the Church from moral bankruptcy and to produce results. Certainly that’s how he comes across in the public domain – and unable to project compassion and empathy. He said he was sorry, “absolutely sorry”, and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity. Of course he’s sorry. The Church stands naked in the marketplace. The victims are suffering, and shouting their pain from the ramparts. Clergy are in prison. The faithful are scandalized. Newspapers are selling. The Vatican protective fire-wall has been breached. Money is flowing out of the coffers. The clergy are ashamed. The dead are being blamed. Jesus is crying and the powers of evil are rejoicing. Of course, he’s sorry. But the poor man was incapable of showing his sorrow, of displaying his inner feelings on his grey face, in his body-language. His words and presentation were wooden rather than warm; formal, official rather than heart-felt. George was condemned to wear the drab guise of his official office and to project the image of a distant bureaucrat. I felt the pain of a man condemned to observe that whatever about his style, compassion is best expressed by action. And I was left wondering – what action?

I was sorry the Cardinal did not accept the challenges offered to him (albeit ineptly) – to explore the reasons for the problem of pedophilia in the Church; to explain the destructive force of clericalism; to spell out the central role of the Vatican, the Pope and Canon Law in the regime of covering up pedophilia and protecting the offending priests; to admit the central role of Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger in the process as the President of the Congregation for  the Doctrine of the Faith, and his failure to resign his post if his advice was not being heeded by his superior; to confront the fact that while the offenders were being looked after, the victims and their families were, for a long time, ignored; to report the fatal Vatican conflict between the Congregation for the Clergy headed by the Columbian, Cardinal Dario Hoyos Castrillon and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith headed by Ratzinger as they struggled in their ivory towers for control over child sex abuse among the clergy. Why does Rome take so long to do anything, and is so ham-fisted in the process?

There was much to be discussed in Melbourne last Monday. Pity the opportunity was missed. But the proceedings were only a prelude to the main event being choreographed by the Royal Commission. Fasten your seatbelts for the turbulence up ahead. For me, Cardinal Pell presented as a sad figure in Melbourne on Monday. I felt sorry for the man. But I felt far more sympathy for the Fosters and for the other, many victims of abuse.

Chris Geraghty

    A few nights ago, some fifty people went to the Veech Library, at Strathfield, to hear a retired history professor, Ed Campion, give a lecture entitled Clerical Celibacy in Context.  The next day people telephoned the library to get copies of this lecture but there was none to be had because the lecturer performed without the safety net of a text.

He started with the story of the Mass, showing how the clergy became more and more dominant in worship.  Parallel to this, their privileged civil status grew until by the time of Thomas Becket and Henry II they were a separate entity in society with their own courts, tax system and much besides.  This growth accentuated the division between clergy and laity, giving the clergy power over other Christians.  Clericalism was about privilege and power.  Prohibitions reinforced this distinction, keeping the clergy out of pubs and theatres, tonsuring their hair and dressing them in drab clothes, and barring them from trade, the money market, surgery and warfare.

Compulsory celibacy was perhaps the most significant element in the development of a separate clerical caste.  Most history, especially grassroots history, is simply lost.  It is clear, however, that in the parishes the ban on clerical marriage was widely ignored.  The Norman Conquest (1066) brought into England Norman bishops eager to further the reform agenda of the papacy, who had supported the invasion for this purpose.  It was a slow process because bishops needed the coercive power of the Crown to succeed and Kings seemed happy to let priests keep their wives on payment of a fine.  The second Lateran Council (1139) drew a line in the sand for it made clerical marriage invalid as well as illicit – after that, a girl couldn’t marry a priest any more than she could marry a tree.  Spare a thought for the clergy consorts, Ed Campion urged:  the church treated them harshly in its attempts to clean up its act.

But public opinion was against the consorts, as respect for monks and their vows grew alongside the development of education and regard for the law.  As well, there was an expansion in reverence towards the Eucharist when theologians went deeper into the mystery of Christ’s presence there.  This impacted on the lifestyle of priests:  the Body on the altar was the same as that born of Mary;  and since Mary was a virgin so the priest should be celibate.

Then the Counter-Reformation came up with the idea of seminaries, where youths would be isolated from the world and enculturated as clerics.  The dominant culture of the seminaries, clericalism, is a source of the current sex abuse tsunami – clericalism that uses its power for personal gratification whether its targets are children or adults.

If you are a pious, conservative member of the Catholic Church, stay away from any movie theatre showing the documentary Mea Maxima Culpa. You will be exposed to scenes of diabolical evil, revolting details of lives destroyed, to corruption, institutional ineptitude, chronic, sinful delay, ignorance, injustice and a disturbing misuse, no, an abuse of power – all in the name of Jesus. If you are a loyal member of the institution, a little person with a simple, delicate faith who wants to believe the best of those you call “Father”, “Your Grace”, “Your Eminence”, protect yourself from the agony of knowledge, cover your face, clench your fists and pretend that the characters of this documentary never existed.

Mea Maxima Culpa – Silence in the House of God was directed by Alex Gibney and, in this 1 hour and 46 minutes documentary, he exposes the sexual abuse of little deaf boys who could not speak, by a clerical predator in the diocese of Milwaukee, and it records the lifelong battle of four of these boys to be heard, to be dealt with compassionately and justly. It is an horrific story interlaced with vignettes involving other priests, archbishops, cardinals, popes, and serial offenders from Ireland and Italy. We learn the dirty details surrounding the life of the Vatican darling, Marcial Marciel Degollado who founded the Legionaries of Christ, a friend of Pope John Paul II, a close associate of the powerful Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a gold-carded donor to the Vatican coffers, a serial pedophile abuser of his seminarians and even of his own illegitimate children. We meet Father Tony Walsh, a singing priest in Dublin who could entertain incredulous fans with his impersonation of The King, and who, among a large field of competitors, won the reputation of being the most notorious clerical pedophile in Ireland. We watch, with mouth agog, as his bishop, the effete Archbishop Connell, tells us that he was too busy, with too much to do, to follow up complaints about Father Walsh. We witness Marcial Marciel’s friend, the silly angelic Cardinal Sodano, advise the pope in solemn ceremony, not to concern himself about “the  petty gossip “ circling the world, involving clerical pedophilia and the quality of the Vatican’s response.

But the documentary focuses its attention on Father Murphy. He was for almost twenty-five years, from 1950 to 1974, and in the face of serious complaints of criminal behaviour, in charge of a boarding school of little boys who were all profoundly deaf. He had been blessed with the special gift of communicating with his charges by sign language. Over the years, he selected his sexual victims carefully, making sure that he assaulted and raped those boys whose parents could not use sign language and therefore could not communicate effectively with their own sons. He was a monster. You will need a strong stomach and an unshakeable faith to endure this documentary to its conclusion. It is a powerful and damning indictment on the hierarchy, the clerical club and the Vatican. Watching the victims expressing their primeval, gut emotions through their eyes and hands was for me a transforming experience, beyond the world of written or spoken words. The images these men created were overwhelming.

I came away with a feeling of profound shame at the depth to which consecrated men could descend; a sense of anger at the mafia sub-culture of God’s shepherds; a sense of horror at the thought of what young, innocent, vulnerable boys had to endure, and of the raw wounds they had borne throughout their lives; and a sense of wonder and admiration at the courage and determination profoundly deaf men have brought to their fight for justice and recognition. These isolated men put us all to shame. While ever people like them are alive and demanding to be heard, the Church and her illustrious message will never die. The cardinals, the archbishops and monsignors of the Church do not give us hope for the future. They must know that they have dropped the ball. Their credibility is in ruins. But these wounded men with their thirst for justice and their amazing, powerful and explosive sign language, and the ordinary, angry, scandalized little people of the local churches are the hope of things to come.

The Australian Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse commences its hearings in Melbourne on April 3. If the experience of the four enquiries in Ireland is any guide individuals and intuitions in Australia face ordeals.

Judge Murphy headed the ‘Commission of Investigation’ into sexual abuse in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin. Her report was released in 2009. Only a few months earlier, the Ryan Report was released which dealt with abuse in industrial schools controlled by Roman Catholic religious institutions in Ireland.

Judge Murphy was recently in Australia and spoke at the University of Sydney Law School on her experiences in Ireland. Her speech can be found at http://sydney.edu.au/law/video/ (4 March 2013). Her presentation is disturbing but it is essential reading to understand what has happened in Ireland. She outlines many disturbing features-

• The public outrage which followed her report and three others.
• There was a tsunami of abuse
• Ireland was ‘shaken to the core’.
• There has been plummeting Catholic Church attendance.
• Irish attitudes to such issues as contraception, divorce and abortion have changed beyond recognition.
• The Catholic Church was more concerned to protect its reputation and assets than concern for the victims. The attitude of many in the Catholic Church was “don’t ask, don’t tell”
• Boys were abused at a much greater rate than girls.
• The Catholic Church was not ambushed as it suggested, as the Catholic Church took out insurance many years before in anticipation of the crisis becoming public and widespread.
• The cover-ups by the Church were assisted by civil authorities.
• Rome attempted to undermine the remedial actions which were finally undertaken by the Catholic Bishops.
• The Irish enquiries went on for years.

Ronan Fanning, a history professor at University College, Dublin, wrote an op ed on 6 December 2009 titled ‘The age of our craven deference is finally over … there are still rare events that not only deserve but demand to be described as historic. The publication of the Murphy Report is one such event; a truly historic landmark in the sad and squalid story of church-state relations in independent Ireland”

All individuals and institutions need daily reform. The power brokers in the Catholic Church in Ireland badly failed the “lay faithful”

Judge Murphy’s lecture is a very sober and sobering account.

John Menadue

Announced in every news outlet, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentinian Jesuit who is the first in his order and the first from Latin America has been named as the bishop of Rome – Pope number 266.

In these early hours of the announcement, we are left with the crumbs of his story. Theologically conservative, we are led to believe. Socially active and human – left his Episcopal palace and lives modestly, catches public transport, a seventy-six year old who loves to walk, and interestingly cooks for himself. Never underestimate a man who cooks.

More significantly there is some evidence that he has held the socially active and more conservative sides of the church in Latin America together as a bridge builder. A striking credential in a continent which has been famous for the birth of Liberation theology, a movement which called for powerful critique of social injustice and the primacy of marginalised people.

Many in the Catholic church today ache for the personality of a John xxiii to bring some healing and future direction to a deeply wounded church.

There may not be many around who can remember the excitement, now fifty-four years ago, when Angelo Roncalli , the first day in his job as Pope John xxiii walked out of the Vatican city and on his first pastoral visit, went to the local goal.  ‘Since you couldn’t come to see me’, the pope said, ‘I’ve decided to come and see you.’

The walk was unprecedented, or at least broke the 100 year tradition of Popes not leaving the confines of Vatican City. This visit became more than an expression of human compassion, it in many ways defined the way he saw his future ministry.

Within 18 months John xxiii was asking the Church to throw open the windows and let some fresh air into this stuffy place, as he convoked a General Council of the Church. The Catholic church has never been the same since those heady days.

What has this to do with Jorge Bergoglio, the 266^th incumbent in the Papacy?

A fact that is frequently forgotten is that Angelo Roncalli was never seen as anything but theologically conservative. Indeed, one of my personal memories was that in my last years of seminary training, a dictate came from John xxiii that all major theological studies, previously studied in one’s own language, were to be studied in Latin. We had been used to Latin, but to have such subjects as Scripture and History studied exclusively in Latin seemed to seriously restrict any proper research. This was an issue of language and words.

For John xxiii actions spoke much louder than words.  To address the question of race, he simply appointed the first black Cardinal. To address the question of the Roman Curia’s hold on the Church he invited bishops from every corner of the world to Rome for a Council to reflect on the future.  To address the divide between people of different religious beliefs, he invited representatives from every faith to be present at the council. To address the issue of women in the church (one must admit in a muted fashion) he invited women to attend the council as auditors. One of the few women present at the Council was an Australian Rosemary Goldie.

There were words, of course, plenty of them. But for John xxiii it was perhaps the actions that were more significant.

Is it too much to hope that Pope Francis will be like his namesake, that breath of fresh air, that young spirit from Assisi, a person acutely aware of the power of the symbolic action?

In a gesture of turning away from his life of entitlement, a young Francis of Assisi, so the story goes, divested himself of his rich clothes and handed them to his confused father. An embarrassed bishop standing by hastily covered his naked body with a simple peasant’s frock, a replica of which members of the Franciscan order still proudly wear to this day.

It is interesting to speculate what significance our new pope places on the name Francis. Will the Pope bring the horizon of the mind and the spirituality of that free spirit of Assisi to his immense responsibilities – or will the weight of the administration be too great?

While speculating, and that is probably all we can do on this first day of a new pontificate, what symbolic action would be sufficiently strong to send a coherent message to the victims of child sexual abuse whose lives have been so deeply wounded, or to the women who feel so sorely disenfranchised in the church, or indeed to the people of this planet who live in dire poverty and hunger?

It remains to be seen if this new Pope, a smart and experienced outsider that he is, a modest man who embraces a simple life-style, is equal to the task of reforming this damaged church and employ the immense symbolic power at his disposal.

Monsignor Tony Doherty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what is he to do about his living arrangements?

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

Fr. Michael Kelly SJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Kelly SJ