David Penberthy: Arrogance of the Catholic Church has been laid bare
The entire focus of the Catholic Church in dealing with child abuse has been a wagon-circling exercise with nothing but meaningless ‘thoughts and prayers’ for victims. Shame on them, writes David Penberthy.
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There is an unpleasant parallel between the language used by President Donald Trump to feign empathy at gun violence and the weasel words used by the churches when confronted with ongoing evidence of systemic child abuse.
The key words here are “thoughts and prayers”.
As in, “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims”.
It is a struggle to find more insipid sentiments in the English language.
“Our thoughts are with you” is the sort of clichéd dross you would write on a bereavement card acknowledging the passing of a distant relative.
The offer of prayer — a practice shown by science to be useless, however soothing it may be for the practitioner — brings with it the added, insulting bonus of suggesting the issue at hand is somehow beyond human control.
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You offer thoughts and prayers to people who have died in a cyclone or tsunami.
You don’t offer thoughts and prayers to the victims of events that can be controlled or reduced, unless, of course, you are an insincere fraud who has no intention of embracing change.
Child abuse, like gun violence, is a man-made problem. It is a problem we are capable of tackling, if not erasing.
Yet this “thoughts and prayers” sentiment evasively suggests that it is beyond our control, and that there’s not much that can be done aside from a gentle there-there for the victims, and a quiet word before bedtime with the Almighty.
In light of the revelations of the guilty verdict against Cardinal George Pell, our peak Catholic cleric, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, issued the following short statement:
“The news of Cardinal George Pell’s conviction on historical child sexual abuse charges has shocked many across Australia and around the world, including the Catholic Bishops of Australia.
RELATED: Catholic Church must break confessional seal
“The Bishops agree that everyone should be equal under the law, and we respect the Australian legal system. The same legal system that delivered the verdict will consider the appeal that the Cardinal’s legal team has lodged. Our hope, at all times, is that through this process, justice will be served.
“In the meantime, we pray for all those who have been abused and their loved ones, and we commit ourselves anew to doing everything possible to ensure that the Church is a safe place for all, especially the young and the vulnerable.”
At least Archbishop Coleridge did better than Tony Abbott, who in his dreadful interview on 2GB on Wednesday said the Pell case was “a grim time”.
Even with some helpful coaching from interviewer Ben Fordham, the former PM identified this as a grim time for George Pell, his friends, and for people of the Catholic faith, fully excising the victims from the equation.
The one minor saving grace to the Archbishop’s vacuous statement is the suggestion in the last paragraph that things have changed. But that begs a fundamental and unanswered question — how have things changed?
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What is the Church doing, exactly, to make itself a safe place for the young and vulnerable?
The most withering attack on the church this week came from within via respected theologian Francis Sullivan, who until recently was CEO of the Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council.
Sullivan stated angrily there are meaningful proposals for improved child safety and clerical oversight within the Church that are gathering dust, effectively ignored by Australia’s senior clergy.
“It took little to see the Church out of the blocks when school funding was at risk, but there has been precious little done to launch new rigorous standards in child protection,” Sullivan said.
Say what you like about the banks, who like the churches have just endured their own withering ordeal by royal commission. But there have been signs from the banks during the past couple of months, with some high-profile dismissals and the embracing of some key commission recommendations, that they have finally if belatedly come to understand the public anger at their conduct. The same cannot be said of the Catholic Church.
The entire focus of the Catholic Church has seemed a highly legalistic wagon-circling exercise aimed at repudiating damaging testimony. Indeed it’s an approach that was perfected by none other than George Pell, with the so-called “Melbourne response” to abuse allegations.
The Church also remains almost uniformly hostile to embracing or even entertaining two changes that many believe would give added protections to children. These go to the vow of celibacy and the confession seal.
I have heard comments from some Catholics that it is wrong to point the finger at celibacy when the Royal Commission uncovered abuse in churches that allow priests to marry and in organisations such as the Scouts. But the higher number of abuse cases within the Catholic Church worldwide would suggest celibacy brings with it a unique set of challenges for many men entering the priesthood, in that it denies and distorts perfectly natural urges.
As for the confessional seal, the only argument the church has in its defence is the lamest of all, its medieval insistence on tradition. The idea that canon law trumps the law of the land should be a nonsense. In real terms all this secrecy within the Church about known wrongdoing has created an environment where evil has prospered. As things stand, it was harder for me to jump through the requisite hoops to coach my son’s primary school football team than it would have been for me to get a job teaching hymns to choirboys.
For now, in the absence of action, all the victims of abuse can comfort themselves with is the hollow offer of thoughts and prayers, from an organisation that is too busy barracking for a win in a higher court to implement meaningful change.
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