Concluding his US tour, retired Sydney priest Bishop Geoffrey Robinson says that he was forced to choose between loyalty to abuse victims and loyalty to the pope. The Age reports Bishop Robinson told a US audience last week that as a bishop, he took an oath of loyalty to the Pope.
But he was a victim of abuse himself, and during the nine years that he investigated clerical sex abuse cases in Australia, as a member and then chairman of a Church-appointed committee, he found himself trying to choose his side.
"I had to choose between loyalty to the Pope, or loyalty to the victims," he said. "The victims of abuse were on one side, and on the other, total silence from Rome. Nothing. John Paul II simply gave no support. He had done nothing with this."
Explaining how the millenniums old culture of the Church had to change, Bishop Robinson noted that confrontation might be necessary.
In his Culver City, California speech, Bishop Robinson said he had received letters from the Vatican saying he was suspected of heresy while he was on the investigative committee.
Ten bishops, including Cardinal Roger Mahony, of Los Angeles, earlier wrote to Bishop Robinson urging him to stay away.
Cardinal Mahony, whose archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to out-of-court settlements totalling $A766 million for clerical abuse cases, wrote again in May after the Australian bishops' conference issued a public finding of doctrinal difficulties with Bishop Robinson's book.
Bishop Robinson's book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, was published in Australia last year and, according to its publisher, has sold more than 8000 copies. It is also on its second US print run.
However, the DC Catholic website, based in the national capital of Washington, announced his arrival last month as "Disgraced Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson speaks in the Archdiocese of Washington".
"The book began as a response to abuse," he told the Culvrer City, Los Angeles gathering. "Every page in it, every word in it is a response to that abuse."
"I don't know why it happens," he said. "That priests, God help us, descend to that level … I have no explanation for how a priest can do this."
But the book was also specific to Bishop Robinson's experience in Australia. To the palpable disappointment of the audience, he refused to comment on the state of the church in America.
"It's so different," he said. "So new. Please forgive me. It's not avoiding the issue. It's that things are so different to what I expected."
Later, questioned by an audience member, he relented slightly. "I'm surprised by all the lawsuits, the way money is used on both sides, where money seems to have been substituted for reaching out to people."
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