The royal commission into child abuse will investigate the failure of
all institutions. At the beginning of last week this was far from clear; on ABC TV’s 7.30 Leigh Sales pugnaciously (or was she just throwing a well-disguised Dorothy Dixer?) asked Labor senator Chris Evans, “Why shouldn’t the Royal Commission be restricted to the Catholic Church?” Certainly it was the crimes of Catholics that brought the commission into being, and at least one priest has claimed that his church has been the main offender.
That, of course, remains to be seen.
There is a suspicion that this grim honour might go to indigenous communities.
Possibly the commission will not go there; if it does it will be treading on eggshells.
For the moment Catholics are the main persons of interest.
If the commission is to be not merely retributive, its shaking up and improvement of Australian society will also have to make Catholicism a better institution.
At the time of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a buzz phrase to describe what was happening was ecclesia semper reformanda – the church always in need of reform.
In the intervening years the phrase has rather fallen into disuse.
But it has now punched its way back with a disconcerting new twist to its meaning. A church in need of reform, not just self-administered, but reform forced on it from outside.
Perhaps there’s some visibility through the murk if we understand these contexts. The first is the Church’s attitude to sexuality. All human beings can be presumed to have problems with sex, but Catholicism’s are particularly knotty.
For two millenniums the model has been virginity, whereas sexuality and its expression is a degradation of the human ideal. If you can emancipate yourself from sex, the thinking goes, you’ve distanced yourself from the animals, and you’ve moved that much closer to the angels, a superior species.
This is not hyperbole.
The evidence stretches all the way back to Paul’s Epistles, and a rethinking of the theology of it all would require a massive shift.
Given this outlook, of course celibacy becomes the rule for the church’s officials. Their authority and their power derive not just from their hierarchical position, but from their apparent transcendence of sex. Celibacy per se engenders respect.
Awed admiration for men who had renounced sex gave priests enormous prestige. All the more frightening the power then when an apparently sexless, but in fact sexually highly troubled man, begins to groom a child.
One imagines that many clerical abusers have had a torrid time with their consciences.
Largely, however, because sexual transgression was always seen as such a gross fall from the ideal. The church’s minimal accommodation with sexuality is summed up in its simple doctrine that “sex is only permitted in a marital context and even then must be open to procreation”.
All other sexual expressions are mortally sinful – that is, they deprive a person of God’s presence. There is no gradation in the level of mortal sin.
Therefore, there is a moral equivalence between masturbation and sodomising a child.
And equally both could be forgiven in confession as long as there was “a firm purpose of amendment”.
End of story.
It was an evil that could be contained and in fact would leave no stain or trace on the soul.
The other aspect of the evil, that some sexual activity could be a crime, was never adverted to, never discussed.
Secondly, there has been the church’s reflex closing of its ranks. Catholicism, not least in Australia, is a particularly communal faith. Where Protestantism is a religion of the individual before God, Catholicism works through tribal affiliation and mediators and networks (the saints and Sussex Street, for example).
Originally a minority religion and of a subject people, the Irish, Catholicism easily developed a beleaguered mentality.
The old hymnody was rich as an epic, romantic rendition of this – “And the tempest-tossed Church, All her eyes are on thee, And they look to thy shining, Sweet Star of the Sea.”
The exotic and suffusing culture was a source of both delight and strength to Catholics, and seems to have led to some instinct for bonding.
In earlier generations the vocational destinations of Irish Catholics were the four p’s – police, publicans, public servants and priests – all appliers of a social glue. And not professions that in themselves delivered the big money. It is also a culture, it has to be admitted, that has plenty of potential for corruption, cover-up, inside jobs, whitewash . . . “Dark night has come down on us,” the same old hymn says, but the darkness envisaged was outside attacks, not some internal cancer. The instinctive reaction of the church has been to protect its sacred self at all costs.
In fact, however, the church is individual believers. For all its being founded on a rock, it is not a monolith.
The power struggle in the aftermath of the Vatican Council has been settled, for the foreseeable future, in favour of the conservative wing, and that means that in Australia the dominant if not exclusive face of Catholicism is George Pell.
It’s a face that represents so much more than the church’s response to the abuse of children – climate change denial, hostility to gays, oversight of the controversial St John’s College, in Sydney – an unholy procession of red rags.
It’s a grief to liberal Catholics, still plentiful if defeated, that they are all presumed to march under these banners.
But the red rags have proven too much of a goad to what would once have been described as “the enemies of the church”. We’re back in another age.
The virulence of some of the commentary suggests sectarianism in a modern secular form. Fifty years ago the Fairfax press was perceived as bigotedly anti-Catholic.
It represented the Protestant Establishment against Irish Catholicism.
Now it appears to some people as if the old animosity has been revived; the abuse scandal has given new respectability to antiquated, anti-clerical tirades.
Some commentators have launched themselves into a viscerally bitter crusade against the whole box and dice of Catholicism/ Christianity/ Religion.
Naked hostility is not going to lever the church out of its defensiveness.
A year ago I was asked to introduce a 78 year-old priest to a group of screenwriters.
I thought it best to tell him only two had any experience of Catholicism and that three of the group were gay.
He spoke with us for more than two hours.
The following day, two television executives came in.
One of the gay men, a very distinguished Australian filmmaker, told the executives, “We had a priest in here yesterday, and by the time he left half the people in this room wanted to be priests.”
This had nothing to do with the priest’s power or glamour or exoticness.
It was his honesty, his hard-won personal philosophy, his dedication, his enthusiasm for Christ’s message.
There are so many priests like him, selfless and alone, and these are grim times for them.