Sheridan was referring to a speech by Joe de Bruyn, who used three examples to reflect on how to live a Catholic life. Joe de Bruyn is a retired trade unionist, Labour figure and Campion College board member.

Sheridan says that "at the first mention of the word 'abortion' a walkout began, which included a majority of graduands and a majority of university staff present".

"A serious vice-chancellor would have attended the speech himself" wrote Sheridan.

He is calling on the vice-chancellor to apologise to de Bruyn for the rudeness shown him and reiterate ACU's commitment as a Catholic institution to Catholic teaching.

University offers counselling

However, the university later offered counselling to those affected by the speech.

It said it was "deeply disappointed the speech was not more befitting of a graduation ceremony" and that it would refund ticket fees for graduates.

de Bruyn was being presented with an honorary degree by the Australian Catholic University.

In the speech, de Bruyn claimed abortion was the "single biggest killer of human beings in the world" and referred to is as a "tragedy that must be ended".

Living a Catholic faith in the public square

However Monica Doumit, writing in the Catholic Weekly, says that media reports were wrong to characterise de Bruyn's address as an inappropriate, self-indulgent rant about issues of life and human sexuality that had little relevance to a graduation ceremony.

Contrary to how it was portrayed, Doumit says de Bruyn's speech was not just a rehashing of the Catholic position on contentious issues, but a reflection on how to live one's Catholic faith in the public sphere.

De Bruyn told the graduands that for more than 40 years he had worked in a union that covered warehousing, retail and fast-food companies, fighting for the rights and wages of some of the lowest-paid workers in the country.

He explained that bringing these aspects of his Catholic faith to his work and advocacy was not controversial, but that bringing other aspects of his Catholic faith was contentious.

To illustrate his point, de Bruyn offered three examples: abortion, IVF and marriage. His point was summed up in his concluding remarks:

"As happened to me, you will be faced with issues in your professional and personal lives where the general opinion of the majority of the population is at odds with the teaching of the Church.

"My experience is that many Catholics cave in to peer pressure. They think their professional lives will be harmed if they promote the teaching of the Church. My experience is that this is not so.

"Despite my view on some issues being at odds with the views of my contemporaries over the past 50 years, it never affected my career at all."

Listening Church

Australia's new cardinal-designate, Mykola Bychok, has backed de Bruyn's anti-abortion speech.

"Freedom of speech is an important pillar of our society, so is freedom of religion'' he said.

"We must be free to say that which we believe to be the truth as passed to us by Our Lord. Jesus says to us ‘Be not afraid'.

"I grew up at a time when my church was banned and persecuted in Ukraine. A church of martyrs and confessors.

"We survived this persecution because people loved God and their church. They were courageous and passed on the faith to their children and grandchildren.''

Cardinal-designate Bychok said he did not believe there was any division within the Church on the sanctity of life.

While Pope Francis told the Church to be a "listening Church'', that did not mean others did not have to listen to Christ.

Sources

• The Australian
• ABC
• The Catholic Weekly
• The Australian

Greater intellects than mine have considered this question before. John Henry Newman — a saint of the Catholic Church and the patron saint of the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University (ACU) — is perhaps the greatest among them.

Newman's eloquent articulation of a universal Catholic liberal arts ideal claimed traditions from the Oxford of his happy youth.

He foresaw an institution which could explore harmonies but also probe tensions; which was committed to truth; which would dedicate itself to the pursuit of virtue and the celebration of Catholic culture; which embodied the simple love of learning; which harnessed both faith and reason in its wide-ranging engagement with those who lie beyond the reach of Church teachings.

As first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman developed and realised his vision for learning, enriching young lives and passionately defending the idea of knowledge for its own sake. All this was the science of humanity.

I have thought a great deal about Newman's vision and its importance now that my own Catholic University told us it is to make devastating cuts to teaching and research staff, and to the University's ability to engage in knowledge creation as Newman understood it.

Some 32 full-time humanities posts are being permanently disestablished.

Other staff will retire and will not be replaced.

More staff on temporary contracts will see those not renewed.

History and philosophy — core disciplines of the Catholic tradition — are the disciplines worst affected.

Theology, literature, political science, and sociology will suffer as well from these cuts.

The University claims that this is a critical moment when its academic model requires change to ensure it can meet long-term operational needs in an economically sustainable manner.

It says it wishes to align education and research better to its major thematic directions and operational needs. But it also just does not have the money.

ACU went from surpluses of over $30 million in 2020 and 2021 to a deficit of $8 million in 2022 and a forecast deficit exceeding $30 million for 2023. Critics might ask: where did the money go?

ACU says it no longer has the students or the revenues to sustain the interest in humanities fields it was investing in as recently as the start of 2023.

But the scale and speed of its retrenchment are scarcely precedented in the history of the humanities anywhere.

The effect on the lives of individual academic employees will be a hard cross to bear.

Many ACU staff moved heaven and earth to heed the University's call to speak truth.

Some have been teaching here for years and are now forced to compete with cherished colleagues to retain their jobs.

Others left tenured positions in Britain, America, or other parts of Australia to join ACU. Only recently arrived, some will now be marooned on this island continent with no loved ones, little financial support, and no valid visa.

ACU brought over their possessions, but no one will foot the bill for their lonely return to a place of origin.

The moral tragedy of this situation is grave. It is a deplorable, heart-breaking situation which raises many questions.

Where did ACU lose its way?

Should not Newman's vision have held even in the brave new world we find ourselves in?

A twenty-first-century Catholic University cannot always conform to his golden ideal.

It must work with the secular: with research metrics, performance indicators, funding requirements, and all the knowledge-creating bureaucracy's other paraphernalia.

Those who have made decisions about our lives and futures repeatedly emphasise this.

Yet Newman's vision recognised something which risks being lost in all this: the exceptional difficulty of quantifying truth's value.

Is there a litmus test for validity of truth?

What even is a truth?

How is one truth to be separated from any other?

Is the authenticity of truth to be measured in terms of the number of pages needed to describe it or the frequency of its citation?

What of its impact factor or potential for commercialisation?

Only an unworldly ivory-tower dweller could remain self-cocooned from these questions. However, only a fool would deny that truth is not narrowly confined: it has a universality, a Catholicity.

At a practical level, truth must also be less abstract.

It must be found in the experiments scientists run, the accounts of the past historians give, arguments that philosophers reason.

A modern Catholic University must embrace all such modes of truth-telling which, properly constituted and understood, complement and inspire one another.

As Newman recognised, the Catholic University also needs to confidently embrace the daily concerns, perspectives, and languages — technical and everyday — of a wide world of stakeholders from across a global communion and academy.

ACU retains its Biblical and Early Christian Studies programmes and Theology and Religion.

It will spare a small number of history and political science posts in areas of perceived teaching "need".

But a significant question remains: is this sufficient to fulfil Newman's shining concept?

Will this lead to the impoverishment of Catholic intellectual life?

As yet incomplete research projects to be abandoned by the University, and perhaps lost to the world at large, include pioneering studies on the concept of home and problem of homelessness, on the origins of conspiracy theory, on transgender Australia and Queer Medievalism, on AI safety, and epistemic humility.

My colleagues work on understandings of gender, on stories of migration, on the entanglements of empire, and on ecologies of experience.

Such projects, disciplines, and those who pursue them, ought to be utterly central to Catholic intellectual life.

They search the innermost corners of hearts and consciences; they interrogate pasts known or unknown; they challenge perceptions of what we think we know about stories, artefacts, identities, ideas.

Charity, a primary Catholic virtue, should begin at home for the Catholic institution — and where better than through a detailed study of Catholic contributions to hospitality and treatment of the displaced and destitute?

Sexuality has been perhaps the area of the Church's greatest influence on human behaviour and the human condition. Is it not entirely fitting — indeed, essential — that a Catholic University fosters deep engagement with the difficult questions which inevitably emerge from every manner of expression of human bodily desires?

What also of our relationships to generations past and future? To art and beauty? To our fragile earthly and celestial environments?

The list of questions that were being asked by these abandoned projects is sad and long.

My intrepid ACU colleagues have pursued truths in relation to such topics and such questions without fear or favour.

They have interrogated ideas that every Catholic must ponder every day and they have answered them in language that bridges the secular-spiritual and faith-reason divides.

I suspect some see these endeavours as a threat.

They are afraid of an inexact science in which conclusions cannot be quantified and are unappreciative of irreconcilable disagreements that nevertheless benefit from being aired. But such discomfort and disagreement are part of Catholicism's universal, all-embracing identity.

As Catholics, we must all recognise that.

We must also recognise that Catholic education, especially one that benefits from the largesse of the state, is universal and for everybody. That means articulating truths in ways understandable to those of faith and those of none.

What will be lost? For what gain?

I grieve for what might have been.

And I fear there can be no optimistic chord on which to end this lament.

ACU is the second-ranked Catholic university in the Anglophone world in philosophy, and is tied for sixth-place in philosophy of religion (according to the Philosophical Gourmet Report).

Once ACU has gone down its chosen path, will it be able to recover, much less retain, its standing in the world of learning, nationally or internationally?

It seems doubtful.

Which scholar will henceforth want to settle in Australia to tell truths if it means giving up security for precarity?

Who will dare speak truth to power when that power may strip them of their livelihood in the blink of an eye?

• Miles Pattenden is, for the time being, Senior Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Australian Catholic University.

On the day that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Catholic Religious Australia formally responded to the Royal Commission's final report, comments by Australian Catholic University Vice-Chancellor Professor Greg Craven are contained in the simultaneously released four-volume final report from the TJHC.

"I am deeply concerned that the Royal Commission largely lost sight of the goal of restorative justice in both its hearings and its report," Prof Craven wrote, describing his contribution to the report as "an avowedly personal account".

He was the only council member not to endorse the final TJHC report, which, from its introduction, accepts that "the Royal Commission has laid bare the extensive history of the Church in the sexual abuse of children in its institutions and of the devastating failure of the Church to put the interests and the protection of children and vulnerable people first".

"An almost inevitable conclusion is that too many of those who were in a position to protect children instead looked to the preservation of the reputation of the organisation and thus to the shielding of perpetrators," the report said.

"The lives of victims and of their families and loved ones have been devastated by the effects of clerical sexual abuse and that must be, and remain, at the forefront of the Church's thinking and actions as it tries to come to grips with the tragedy and to deliver justice to those who have been harmed while in its care."

However Prof Craven's criticism is largely levelled at the way the Royal Commission was conducted and its focus on churches, particularly the Catholic Church.

"This was a lawyers' Royal Commission, and its overwhelming reliance on changes to civil litigation and raw compensation reveals the narrow obsession of lawyers with crude monetary solutions," Prof Craven wrote.

"I am deeply concerned for the future of victims with life-long mental health issues, which cannot be addressed simply through the once-off award of damages or redress."

Prof Craven criticised the Royal Commission report for "its reliance upon ill-defined concepts like ‘clericalism' as a short-hand charge sheet that can be deployed to substantiate virtually any accusation or ground any negative finding".

"Similarly, the Royal Commission proved itself overwhelmingly ready to draw links between child abuse and such practices as celibacy by processes of reasoning that were tendentious and unconvincing," he wrote.

Tempering his criticism, Prof Craven described his own witness of the Royal Commission and the work of the council.

"… No experience will ever surpass the realisation of the extent of the horror that had been perpetrated within my Church and upon its members," he said.

"The extent of abuse, and the numbers of perpetrators, and the failure of authority was - almost - beyond belief.

"Yet alongside this awful reality was an appreciation that for many long-term critics of the Catholic Church, all this was as much an opportunity as a tragedy. You Catholics, they said, are nothing but child-abusers.

"For me, this is abuse of the abused. Who were the victims of Catholic sexual abuse but other Catholics? These victims are - or were - people I know, I like, I love.

"As a Catholic, I do not hang my head in shame. I share in some small way the enormous anger of victims toward those who perverted their part of the mission of our Church." Continue reading

• Professor Greg Craven is Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University
• Image: Catholic Leader