On Wednesday Peter McClellan, the NSW Supreme Court Judge leading the royal commission into child abuse in institutions, told the media that the commission’s task will be long and complex. No surprises there.
His point was to contain expectations among the media that the commission would be anything other than a hard slog, and that he expected that one of the outcomes, apart from legal proceedings that would not be the work of the commission, was the prospect of greater rigour in the execution of child protection procedures.
The following day brought the publication of the findings of Antony Whitlam QC into the handling of ‘Father F’, a serial abuser in rural NSW and then suburban Sydney.
Whitlam found Father F’s ordaining bishop, Harry Kennedy (now deceased) to be culpably negligent, for failing to act on advice from those responsible for Father F in seminary days or to follow up complaints and allegations against Father F when he was acting as a priest.
Game on. This sort of scrutiny will only intensify.
There is little doubt that the perceived inadequacy of the Church’s response to child abuse is the trigger for this commission. Alleged cover ups and the claims of a NSW police officer that Church officials obstructed investigations and protected child molesters were the immediate context for the calling the for the commission.
Many see 2013 as a miserable prospect for the Church in Australia, maybe the worst in its history. It is numbed and bewildered. Its leadership has its back to the wall, unable to say much except sorry.
But no approach to history is adequate without a sense of irony. In the long term, if handled properly, this period may well be seen as the circuit breaker that triggers many of the things long hoped for in the Church. And it will be freedoms of a secular liberal society rather than the freedom of the Gospel that could liberate the Church.
It will put a nail in the coffin of clericalism, that ‘them and us’ culture that fosters an elitism which is the very opposite of Christian discipleship, and which nurtures all those things that mark closed societies: secrecy; the power of the cognoscenti who use their access to information as a power over others; the habit of deception and obfuscation predicated on a belief that outsiders are not entitled to know things decided on by insiders.
It will display lay expertise as the salvation of the Church. Only expertise in law, communications, public advocacy, pastoral care and psychology can help the Catholic community again to hold its head up. Lay people will deliver the expertise or it won’t be seen.
It will dismantle any remaining confidence anyone has in Church status as a carrier of anything but a role description. Church leaders will find their authority and ability to be persuasive in the way they lead their communities and witness to the Gospel. Invoking the authority of their position won’t cut the mustard.
This period will reveal what the Church is and isn’t. It isn’t a command and control army or a football team doing what the captain and coach tell it to do. It is a community of faith at the service of the world and therefore must be subject to the accountabilities that are expected of such an ambition in the contemporary world. Transparency and accountability will be externally imposed because the Church is not capable of delivering them of itself.
Too often, public Church utterances against ‘evils’ and ‘abuses’ — especially in areas related to sex and gender relations and the right to life — fail to recognise the actual society we live in, which doesn’t start where Catholics do. The campaign is conducted as if Catholics have a right to legislate their morality for everyone else.
Now the boot is on the other foot and Catholics are being told their Church has to smarten itself up, bring its practices into line with best practice accepted by everyone else, or suffer not just opprobrium but prosecution. Trust has been strained and only external intervention will address why.
It won’t be the first time in the life of the Australian Church that external intervention has produced far more than was initially intended. I’ve long believed Gough Whitlam has had the largest single impact of any individual on the internal life of the Catholic Church.
Along with Susan Ryan a decade later, he removed the need for a highly committed but under-trained and poorly paid workforce to operate the Catholic school system. He made it possible for Catholic school teachers to be paid a predictable and proper wage, while Ryan oversaw the largest period of growth in the Catholic school system.
This meant there was no longer a need for the battalions of religious to keep the largest single investment by the Church in Australia actually functioning. It also led to the largest ever investment in the theological education of Catholic lay people in the history of the Church in Australia.
Who knows what will come of all this scrutiny. But if honestly engaged with, properly managed and taken as a point of departure, the royal commission may result in a great deal more than the correction of child protection provisions.
Fr Michael Kelly SJ, is the Bangkok based executive director of UCA News. Originally published in Eureka Street