SA Weekend cover story: Patrick’s Day – Adelaide’s new Catholic Archbishop Patrick O’Regan looking to give the church a fresh start after recent scandals
As he takes up his new post as the head of the Catholic Church in Adelaide, Archbishop Patrick O’Regan says he is far more interested in building bridges than walls, writes Michael McGuire.
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There are certain characteristics you might expect to find in any significant religious leader, no matter the brand. A certain dignity, possibly even an aloofness. A seriousness. A sense of moral purpose that can be a little intimidating.
A sense of humour is possibly not near the top of the list.
Adelaide’s newest Catholic archbishop, Patrick O’Regan – who will be officially installed on Monday at a COVID-19-stripped-down ceremony at St Francis Xavier Cathedral – may be something of an exception to that norm.
We are talking about one of those hot-topic Catholic issues. One that can fire up debate both within and without the church. Should Catholic priests be allowed to marry?
“There’s the old joke. Should priests get married? The answer is only if they love each other,’’ he says with a laugh.
It may be an old joke, and it’s not a bad one by any means, but it’s also an unexpected one coming from a soon-to-be-Archbishop.
This has to be a good thing, after all the travails of the Catholic Church in Adelaide and in Australia over recent years.
After all the focus on glowering, unsympathetic figures such as Cardinal George Pell, after all the darkness surrounding the Church’s response to the sexual abuse of children, and the litany of horror stories that emerged from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Sexual Abuse, there’s no doubt a fresh, more human approach is needed.
Not that O’Regan is a frivolous figure.
He believes Pell should “gracefully retire”, he’s well aware the Catholic Church has lost the trust of, not only many Catholics, but a large portion of the broader Australian community as well. And he wants to regain it.
“I do know it’s (trust) something that needs to be earned, in previous times it was demanded,’’ he says.
The Adelaide Archdiocese has had its own problems as well.
His predecessor Archbishop Philip Wilson was convicted of concealing child sexual abuse in New South Wales in the 1970s.
That conviction would be later overturned but a 2014 NSW Government special commission of inquiry into the cover-up of abuse in the Hunter Valley subsequently released a section of its report it had kept confidential because of the trials.
It found Wilson was “an unsatisfactory and unimpressive witness in various respects. Moreover, he gave certain evidence that the Commission considered to be untruthful’’.
Wilson resigned in July 2018 and Port Pirie bishop Greg O’Kelly has served as administrator of the diocese since.
O’Regan is coming to Adelaide to be its ninth Archbishop after being Bishop of Sale in Victoria since 2015.
He has little experience of South Australia, being here only a handful of times, and says he comes with no particular plan of action.
When we speak, it’s on Zoom and the 61-year-old O’Regan is still in isolation after crossing the border from Victoria.
He says he needs to speak to those who live here before deciding what needs to be done.
“When I say I don’t have plan, I haven’t been able to listen to people enough to get the story and say what does Adelaide need?’’ he says.
“I don’t have a list of riding instructions from GHQ saying ‘now when you get to Adelaide this is what you have go to do’.
“I have moved a lot and my experience is you get there and you have a look, you listen, you earn people’s trust and we work together.’’
What he wants though for the Church in Adelaide, and more broadly across the nation, is a fresh start.
While there have been some within the Church who questioned the value and findings of the Royal Commission, or who viewed it as a witch hunt against Catholics, O’Regan is not one of those.
Rather, he says, it gives Catholics the chance to pull the “barnacles’’ off the Church to “find a beauty and a strength’’. The implication being that, in some ways, the Church had lost its way.
“I think what the Royal Commission has taught us to do is, whatever people thought they were believing in, it was limited,’’ he says.
“Let’s get back to this basic kind of thing, our relationship with God, our relationship with one another in the Church. I think it’s been helpful because it has allowed us to rediscover something that had been forgotten.’’
The word Adelaide’s new Archbishop uses is “purify’’. And he uses it more than once. Again, the implication being that the Church had drifted from its true purpose.
O’Regan says he even likes to talk to his friends who are atheists about these kind of things. That they help keep him on the straight and narrow.
“I always love having conversations with atheists,’’ he says. “We always have a good discussion, partly because, part of their role is to help purify all that we do and make sure as much as possible we’re not acting with mixed motivations.’’
Which is why he thinks Pell should step aside. Pell was convicted of child sexual abuse before the High Court found there was “a significant possibility that an innocent person has been convicted because the evidence did not establish guilt to the requisite standard of proof’’.
Shortly after, the Royal Commission released part of its report that had been held back because of Pell’s legal battles. The Commission found that Pell had covered up the activities of paedophile priests and as a result many children had suffered horrendous abuse.
Pell said the Commission’s finding were “not supported by evidence’’.
When I put it to the Bishop that Pell’s response lacked grace and compassion and could only further damage the Church, O’Regan agrees.
He expresses some frustration that there are five million Catholics in Australia, yet one of them attracts so much attention.
“I think he should just gracefully retire, yes,’’ he says.
O’Regan says the Church has done much to ensure the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated, but also says it took him some time to understand the lifelong wounds childhood sexual abuse can inflict on a person.
“Some of my best and most difficult days have been sitting down with survivors, victims and their families of abuse. Because I am left with no words about why this should happen,’’ he says.
“I guess that is one of the things I hadn’t realised before. This is something that effects people deep in the spirit and their psyche and is with them forever.’’
Francis Sullivan is a leading Catholic figure who was chief executive of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which co-ordinated the Church’s response to the Royal Commission. He says many Catholics have stopped going to church because of the abuse scandal.
Sullivan says the Catholic Church, like many religious institutions, is losing relevance to everyday Australians.
“Part of that is to do with its social teachings that are too conservative, not in touch with contemporary Australian life. Its structures are very medieval and male dominated and particularly clerically dominated when decision making comes to the fore,’’ Sullivan says.
“There has been a tendency in recent times, over the last 20 odd years, where the Catholic Church has got caught up in the culture wars of society and seen itself much more as bastion of social conservatism rather than being a movement of faith inspired by the Gospel. The Church has been far too arrogant in its approach for too long and it costs it community trust and even emotional support.’’
Sullivan, who has high hopes for O’Regan, believes the Church hasn’t done enough to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission and part of the reason for that slowness is that the institution is largely still run by clerics.
“When you have clerics overseeing the behaviour of clerics then you’ve got a problem. The Church really has to open itself up to competent lay people to administer in this area.’’
O’Regan says he wants more involvement from lay people in the church, acknowledging Adelaide has a history of being a trailblazer in the area. He stops short of saying how he will do this, but says it will be need some form of definite structure so that it becomes more than “window dressing’’.
“They (parishioners) have got to have teeth, they have got to have the ability to make a difference and that comes back to the question of trust.’’
He recalls a meeting last year with Pope Francis in Rome. He was there with 40 other Australian bishops for a gathering that happens every five years.
“I remember one of the comments that he made – ‘always remember that people are your biggest asset... and your biggest headache, but invest in them’.”
The need for increasing the number and influence of lay people is also evident to anyone who has attended Church in recent times. Most of South Australia’s priests are beyond 60 and with few in the seminary these days, the problem of regeneration will become increasingly urgent.
Which is why the question of whether the Church should admit married priests came up. Beyond the “old joke’’, O’Regan seems to have no philosophical or theological objection to the notion.
“The first 1000 years of the Church’s history we had married priests, so there is nothing technically. It’s a man-made law, if you like, in that sense,’’ he says.
But he also says that it needs to be part of a bigger solution.
“I wouldn’t like to think the only people doing ministry are priests, (though) they have a vital and important role.
“I assume it’s the case here, as in other places, that there are so many generous hearts in the community keeping the show on the road.’’
Meetings with the Pope show how far the boy from a small town outside Bathurst in NSW has come in recent years. He says he was surprised when he was made Bishop of Sale in 2015.
“I’m still unclear about the process,’’ he says. “I was happily minding my own business until I got a call from the Apostolic Nuncio (the Pope’s ambassador in Australia) asking me to pop down to Canberra for a spot of lunch. He was an Englishman, so it was all very proper.’’
Then he was told, not asked, he was to be Bishop of Sale.
“I am not sure whether I was more surprised by him saying the Holy Father has appointed you Bishop of Sale, whether it was Bishop or Sale.’’
He had never been to Sale.
“Obviously there is some process that I don’t quite understand,’’ he says. “When you get the tap on the shoulder, there is a not a lot of initiation into the whole show, ‘you’re a Bishop now, thanks, all the best’.’’
Up until then, O’Regan had spent the majority of his life around Bathurst and western NSW. He was born in a small village called Perthville, 10km south of Bathurst. His family had been in the area since 1842 after emigrating from Ireland.
One of four children, his family ran the local petrol station and shop and he says one of the benefits of growing up in such a small place was it imparted a sense of community and service. Of how, in times of emergency such as floods or bushfires, everyone would pitch in.
“I saw the example of service in the family to the wider community and how they got involved in everything from the local bushfire brigade to tennis tournaments. It was all about community and the good of the community.’’
Perthville was also home to a convent and a school established by Australia’s first saint Mary MacKillop and O’Regan attended St Joseph’s primary before going to St Stanislaus College in Bathurst.
It was after he finished school he decided to act on this “little idea that was pecking at me and I thought I will give it a go’’.
O’Regan headed to the seminary at Springwood in the Blue Mountains, thinking he would give it a year and see how it went.
“It was a wonderful experience, it gave me a sense of what it was about,’’ he says.
But even so, he says it was still a year-by-year decision to keep going. It takes seven years of training before you are ordained as a priest.
“I guess I knew somehow, or it had been drummed into me, this was an evolving decision. It was one decision to go the seminary but then to move through the system rather than have the system move you through.’’
The seminary had also exposed him to parish life. And he liked that. The interaction with what he describes as the “sheer goodness of people’’.
His first parish as a newbie 25-year-old priest was in Lithgow, a tough coal mining town, on the western edge of the Blue Mountains, 140km from the city of Sydney.
“There is a real sense of solidarity in places like that,’’ he says. “They are less class orientated. Didn’t matter whether you are the mayor or the poorest person in town, there was a real sense of a fair go and a solidarity.’’
O’Regan would work in parishes in Orange, Cowra and Bathurst. He took extra studies in liturgy and the sacraments in Paris, before eventually the call came to head to Sale.
He says it takes a while to discover how to be a Bishop.
“I think for the first five years you are trying to work out where you are and what role you have. There is not something you take off the shelf which says ‘this is how to be a Bishop’.”
And he concedes he will have to learn it all over again, because the requirements of shepherding the flock in Adelaide will be vastly different to what was needed in Sale.
“Not that I am tentative about it but I think it would be a bit rich to comment too much because I don’t know,’’ he says. “I look forward to listening to that story and discovering it because I think that’s an important part of it and then put my shoulder into that direction as we go along.’’
But O’Regan says, in some of the initial conversations, he detects an optimism about the future.
“I do know there is a real sense of hope around in the limited number of people I have been able to talk to. Not because I am coming but just about the whole show in general.’’
Many Catholics and others will be watching O’Regan closely. Some will note something as basic as where he decides to live. Whether it’s the grand Archbishop’s House on West Terrace or something more humble. O’Regan says he has made no decision on that yet.
Above all he stresses, as he starts the job, that he wants to listen to the people he will serve. That he doesn’t want to live in an echo chamber where he is told only what people think he wants to hear.
“I don’t operate on fear, but if I had a concern in this role is that you can easily get into a bubble.’’
And he wants to live up to one derivation of the word Bishop, which is traced to being a builder of bridges.
“In lots of ways I see part of my role as being a bridge builder between faith and culture, faith and life because it’s too easy to build walls, too hard to take them down, but it’s much more fun building bridges.’’