Just a quick post to update some of the stories we’ve been following around the ecclesiastical traps - Irfan Yusuf, writing in New Matilda, contrasts the treatment doled out to Sheikh Al-Hilaly with the response (or lack thereof) from media and political figures to Bishop Anthony Fisher’s comments about survivors of sexual abuse. In an article on the same theme in Crikey, Yusuf links to a rather damning take at Media Watch on the News Limited coverage and commentary of accusations of church indifference to the victims of sexual abuse day raised during the World Youth Day event they were paid sponsors of.
Meanwhile, at the Lambeth Conference, conservative Anglican bishops are taking every opportunity to interrogate their fellow prelates about their ideological soundness on the loud condemnation of teh gay. Probably heretically, the Archbishop of York has suggested that there might just be more important issues for Christians than the ordination of gay bishops.
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It was a very easy contrast to make for the media - while World Youth Day 2008 has been acclaimed as a success by the Catholic Church in Australia, Anglicans were tearing themselves to pieces, with the decennial Lambeth Conference reduced to a farce. A large number of quasi-schismatic conservative bishops boycotted, having earlier set up a quasi-church outside the Anglican Communion’s traditional structures at GAFCON in Jerusalem.
What’s all the fuss about? Teh gay.
Continue reading ‘Homosexuality not actually work of the devil, report finds’
The text of the papal apology, delivered this morning at a Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral, can be read here.
The symbolism of the setting for the apology - a mass for seminarians and members of religious orders and the consecration of a new altar for the Cathedral - was no doubt intended by the Vatican to signal that the Pope was speaking sternly to those at the centre of the institution. But it’s also deeply problematic - as it suggests that the problem is only one for the church, excluding the victims who were left outside while the pomp and panoply of the liturgy took place for the exclusive benefit of the hierarchy.
Continue reading ‘Pope Benedict XVI apologises to victims of sexual abuse in Australia’
We’ve done our best to provide a reasonably comprehensive coverage of World Youth Day here at LP, in part because the News Limited papers, being major sponsors of the Pope fest, have studiously ignored most of the actual hard news, except to cast stones at those criticising the Church’s conduct on several justifiable grounds, in favour of happy-clappy stories about the happy-clappy pilgrims and general hagiography. As I commented earlier, the irony is that B16 himself is treated more like a pop star than a Pontiff on a mission, so in the interests of balance and fairness, if anyone’s actually interested in the full text of what the Pope had to say, you can read it here. As journalist and veteran Vatican watcher John L. Allen jr. observes, it’s classic Ratzinger.
I’m writing from an office in the Sydney CBD. Catholic ‘youth’ (some of them looking a tad middle aged) have been streaming down the street towards the harbour for the past two or more hours. (The Pope is due to take a harbour cruise soon, so I guess they’re all going down to see him.) It’s official - there are a lot of people attending WYD. And they come from all over the world. I know this because they are all waving national flags. There goes the American flag, here’s New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Fiji, Australia, of course, and the Aboriginal flag … followed by a flag which is light blue with a yellow circle in the middle, Germany, Canada, more Americans, more flags which are unfamiliar to me… Continue reading ‘Greetings from Flagsville’
Elliott Bledsoe reminds us not to take men wearing robes all that seriously. Make sure you look at this photo very carefully indeed.
Note: If you don’t like what you see - tough - it’s now legal to be annoyed.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day: The dark side of the force?’
I hope that Anthony Foster and his family, who intend to confront Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell in Sydney this week over the Catholic Church’s treatment of their late daughter, Emma Foster, who took her own life in January and her sister Katie, both of whom were raped as primary school children by Father Kevin O’Donnell, aren’t dismissed as “Catholic bashing” and raining on the World Youth Day parade or subjected to victim blaming as Anthony Jones was. Foster told the tragic tale of his daughters’ abuse and how it marked their lives horrendously for the worse, and probably brought Emma’s life to a close, on Lateline tonight.
Continue reading ‘Emma Foster: In memoriam’
Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.
Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book - Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?
Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.
Continue reading ‘What is the purpose of World Youth Day?’
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It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.
In the context of World Youth Day in Sydney this week, this accusation has been levelled both with regard to criticism of the extraordinary powers granted to police by Greg Craven and with regard to the ABC’s highlighting of Cardinal George Pell’s ethically very questionable handling of clergy sexual abuse complaints by Andrew Bolt. More broadly, the media sponsors of World Youth Day at News Limited have worked themselves into a lather of holy righteousness, denouncing “aggressive secularism” and lauding all the Popey goodness they’re sponsoring - without disclosing that sponsorship in their journalistic or opinion pieces.
It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?
Continue reading ‘Is criticism of World Youth Day automatically Catholic bashing?’
I’m an ex-Catholic, 30+ years removed - still, I have the insider’s understanding of Catholicism. At least, I thought I did…
I’d always thought of ‘happy-clappies’ as Protestants. The folk Mass of the 1970s was a far more sedate and yes, folky affair than the sweaty swaying and fainting of the bible-bashing evangelicals.
I live, work and play in the area at the heart of World Youth Day but had told myself it would be easy to ignore it all. (Maybe I couldn’t quite believe that thousands of people would travel for an event like that.) Nevertheless, among the local soccer mums, special WYD resident parking permits began to be a conversational item a few weeks ago, along with road closures and the erection of security fences in Centennial Park. Two weeks ago in the park, a vehicle full of men in suits glided across the lawn as I walked my dog, at the Randwick Racecouse end - very secret-service-like.
I began to spy my first ‘pilgrims’ last week - young people with backpacks wandering near St Mary’s Cathedral or mulling around in Hyde Park (where there are huge WYD marquees). Continue reading ‘Greetings from Happy-Clappyville’
Gary Sauer-Thompson:
I hope that we will be spared the sermons from an authoritarian leadership about the spiritually dead, the soulless, secular uncaring, of liberal Australia society violating the sacredness of life etc etc as well as the repeat of the attacks on Islam and Muslim-Australians for undermining western civilization.
Can I suggest a theme? Sermons on reconciliation with a liberal Australia and secular humanism instead of ones on heartless and godless liberalism.
It doesn’t look like his prayers will be answered: Populate or perish: Pell
“There is a crisis in the Western world. No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable, no Western country,” he said.
Continue reading ‘World Youth Day 08′
Irfan Yusuf has the money quote on all the World Youth Day imbroglios, writing in today’s New Matilda:
I guess it really boils down to values. Cardinal Pell once accused Muslims of having difficulty separating Church from State. Unless he openly distances himself from (and not just denies involvement in) increased police powers designed to protect pilgrims from annoyance, his own secular credentials might look compromised.
On Lateline last night, in the context of new revelations about the crimes of Father Terrence Goodall, and George Pell’s casuistry in dealing with clergy abuse victim Anthony Jones, and his avoidance of any admission of culpability and therefore responsibility for the consequences of his actions, host Tony Jones interviewed prominent Catholic journalist and author Robert Blair Kaiser.
And I think that model can be applied to modern times and we can be a much more responsible, accountable church in a local situation where the bishop is not appointed by the Pope but elected by the people.
In referring to the democratising forces unleashed by Vatican II, Kaiser was suggesting that the root cause - not just of clergy abuse but also of cover-ups and grossly inadequate responses to its “horror” - is a deeply authoritarian tradition and its accompanying mindset and culture. George Pell is one of the leading lights of the Catholic “restorationists” who want to put all the genies of Vatican II back in the bottle, and return to a “Father Knows Best” model which has given us Catholics a Church marred and contaminated by misogyny and authoritarianism. Pell’s attitude to political power (which has been on show with World Youth Day) and his treatment of those whom some priests and brothers have monstered is cut from the same cloth - a desire to protect the institution and its power above all else. Continue reading ‘Annoyed! III’
This sort of thing was probably always going to surface in the media just before Pope Benedict XVI came to Sydney for World Youth Day, but I’m sure Cardinal Pell is annoyed that he’s been accused of lying to a victim of clerical sexual abuse in order to protect a priest who was later convicted. He might also be annoyed that there are documents obtained through legal action and given to Lateline which make a pretty convincing case that the allegations may have merit. When he was Archbishop of Melbourne, Pell was accused of offering victims hush money not to speak out (an accusation he denied), something that is now expressly prohibited by the Catholic Church’s protocol - Towards Healing - on dealing with clergy abuse victims. Broken Rites, a support and advocacy group, has criticised the Church’s protocols. It’s noteworthy here that the Archdiocese of Melbourne has a separate set of protocols, a legacy from the time when Dr Pell was Archbishop and his opposition (alone among all the Catholic Church’s Australian bishops) to the national standards regulating church responses.
Continue reading ‘Annoyed! II’
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To be fair to Morris Iemma and his bunch of clowns masquerading as a government, New South Wales isn’t alone in imposing risible and over the top security regulations for major “public events”. We’ve seen similar things in finance talkfests with Melbourne and CHOGM in Queensland saw Peter Beattie invent preventive detention for “known public nuisances”, as well as going to ludicrous lengths to prevent protest. But Iemma’s mob seem to have made it an art form, perhaps because as I’ve speculated before, their sense of authoritarianism compensates for their total ineffectuality in governing just about anything else than public events. (Compare - “public services”.) But the latest bunch of regulations for the Pope Fest really take the cake. It’s more or less private governance. Where’s the public benefit in preventing pilgrims attending World Youth Day in Sydney this month from being annoyed? Will their world really come to an end if someone hands them a condom or wears a t-shirt with an anti-homophobia message? What possible public justification does the NSW government have for denying basic rights to freedom of expression at the instance of the fragile petals in Cardinal Pell’s hierarchy?
Continue reading ‘Annoyed!’
The Pope had a lot to say about sexual abuse when he was in America recently. It’s now being reported that there’s “pressure” on him to repeat his apology to victims specifically in the Australian context, when he’s out here for World Youth Day. I have no doubt Benedict will, and I suspect the pressure in this instance isn’t needed. While an apology promotes healing for individuals directly damaged by clerical sexual abuse, it doesn’t address the broader problem, and nor do the protocols the church now has in place for dealing with complaints and reparations, welcome as they are. What should be quite familiar to Benedict is the concept of “structural sin” - something originating in liberation theology which he in his incarnation as Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged as a valid manifestation of human evil and wickedness, even as he disagreed with the political and some of the theological overtones of liberation theology as theorised and practiced in Latin America (and in - significantly - Germany).
The Pope would also know very well that in Catholic sacramental and moral theology, an act of contrition and indeed an act of reparation are worthless without an awareness of the fault that led to a sin, and a genuine intention to “go and sin no more”, as Someone or other put it rather pithily. All this raises the question of whether the conditions of possibility of sexual abuse are genuinely being addressed.
Continue reading ‘Papal apology?’
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