AUSTRALIA'S most notably Catholic politician has declared that Pope Benedict XVI has a massive job ahead of him in "relentlessly secular" Australia. Liberal frontbencher Tony Abbott said that reaching out to Australia's disillusioned Catholics should be the Pope's primary task during his July visit to Sydney, and apologising to the victims of sexually predatory clergy a secondary aim.
Writing in tomorrow's The Weekend Australian Magazine, Mr Abbott says that if the Pope "leaves Sydney without tackling the malaise of the church, people will feel cheated and World Youth Day will have been a failure".
Mr Abbott, who abandoned the seminary as a young man, warns that it appears the Pope will not have the chance to talk to the wider mass of Australians during his visit. No nationally broadcast interview has been scheduled for World Youth Day, Mr Abbott writes, nor the sort of question-and-answer session that followed the Pope's recent address to US bishops.
"He will undoubtedly be seen (in Sydney), but may not really be heard," he writes. "Reluctance to expose an iconic figure to the challenges of bolshie priests (let alone to the barbs of Kerry O'Brien or Tony Jones) is entirely understandable but their audiences are the people who need to be inspired or at least impressed if Australians are to take religion as seriously as they should."
Mr Abbott, the Opposition's spokesman on family and community services and indigenous affairs, separately told The Australian that he personally was not looking for the Pope to apologise to Australian victims of sexual abuse.
"There's a sense in which it's so obviously an abomination that it hardly needs to be said," he said.
"In the end, I think what people are wanting, are hoping for, from this visit is a sense that this is a pope who speaks our language, as it were, who understands what's going on in our souls, who appreciates that this is not an age that is naturally given to religious faith, and can meet us where we are, rather than simply talk at us as some religious teachers seem to."
It was very difficult, Mr Abbott said, to be a committed Christian in these modern times of scientific advance and social flux.
The Catholic Church had rules regarding sexual and social conduct that were very difficult to live up to, he added, but he didn't believe the Pope would or should change the rules on the run.
"I think what he may well say is that the church is big enough to embrace everyone," Mr Abbott said, "but it doesn't mean the church necessarily approves of everything that people do."
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