No means no: Brisbane Archbishop Catholic sacraments non-negotiable
AS Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge weighs up public concern over the Catholic Church’s handling of child sex abuse, he says there’s one secret seal of the faith that will remain non-negotiable.
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SEX and secrets – two obsessions the Australian media has with the Catholic Church
The secret seal of the confessional, that ancient code of trust between the priest and the penitent whose origins possibly go back even further than the Great Council of the Lateran in 1213, is a supernatural contract between God and the confessor and, to Coleridge, a non-negotiable aspect of the Catholic faith.
As we speak in His Grace’s offices in Charlotte St, just a few steps from the old stone church where Saint Mary MacKillop once attended Sunday mass after rowing over from Kangaroo Point, Coleridge is displaying traits that echo those of the Scottish/Australian nun whose stubborn streak saw her briefly excommunicated from Rome in 1871.
The State Government, in the wake of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, may be (even as we speak) drafting laws effectively dispatching with more than 1000 years of tradition, forcing Queensland priests to disclose information they hear in the confessional that may help identify pedophiles.
Coleridge has just made a surprise admission about his views on another centuries-old tradition that bans sex for Catholic priests, suggesting the matter of clerical celibacy might be up for negotiation. Yet on the seal of the confessional, the Archbishop remains utterly immovable.
The Church respects the rule of law, he insists, but if this ancient cord of trust between God and the sinner is severed, the dynamics of one of the Church’s seven sacraments alters dramatically. And, according to Coleridge, those seven sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance [or confession], Anointing the Sick, Matrimony, and Holy Orders) are never going to be up for negotiation.
Coleridge explains the Church’s belief that, when the penitent enters the confessional, they approach the priest not as one might approach a doctor or a psychiatrist, but as one might approach Almighty God himself. With both hands spread before him, sweeping majestically from his lower right (where the confessor apparently resides) towards the far reaches of his upper left (where God is apparently domiciled) Coleridge dismisses the priest as a mere intermediary, vaguely situated somewhere in the middle.
“The priest is only a witness to this most sacred encounter between the individual sinner and the God, who is all mercy,” Coleridge explains, his hands oscillating between the lowly depths of sin and the higher realms, where God and mercy reside.
“The priest is a conduit. The sorrow of the sinner moves through the priest to God – not to the priest but through the priest.
“And the mercy of God moves through the priest to the penitent – not from the priest but through the priest.
“So when the priest announces absolution – ‘I absolve you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ – he does not absolve you in his own name.”
That sacred seal, Coleridge says, enables human beings “to stand absolutely open and naked before God”.
“Remove the seal, and you remove that … you change the character of the encounter between the sinner and God.”
In his 44 years of hearing confessions, Coleridge has never once heard a penitent confess to molesting a child.
Many have confessed to breaking the sixth commandment (adultery), but that could mean a range of sins, and a seasoned priest knows not to begin an interrogation.
“I am not going to turn the blowtorch on them and play the grand inquisitor and say, ‘What do you mean?’
“I have no right to cross-examine the penitent.”
Even if he had heard someone directly confess to harming a child, the confessor behind the curtain would almost certainly be anonymous.
“Am I supposed to go to the police and say, ‘Someone confessed to abusing a child but I do not know who the person was, and I do not know who the victim was?’.”
The proposed law, in Coleridge’s view, has the whiff of totalitarianism about it, though he stresses he does not view the Queensland Government itself as totalitarian. But he is uncomfortably aware that Eastern European regimes once made the seal of the confessional a prime target.
“They wanted the clergy to be agents of the state – we are not agents of the state!
“We don’t wish in any way to be arrogant – God knows we are in no position to be arrogant – but we have fundamental tenets of the faith at stake here. We will have to hold our ground.”
Coleridge is a mixture of corporate chief executive, spiritual leader, parish priest and, by necessity, occasional politician.
The state’s leading Catholic prelate who presides over 141 schools, 15,000 employees and 97 parishes in Queensland was born in Melbourne in 1948, and was once headed for a career in the diplomatic corps after majoring in English and French at university.
But then he heard the call of God, who appears to have assisted him in carving out a glittering clerical career.
Ordained a priest in 1974, he was soon in Rome where he pursued doctrinal studies before becoming Master of the Catholic Theological College back home in Melbourne.
By 1997 he was back in Rome working inside the powerful Vatican Secretariat of State, the 500-year-old church governing bureaucracy, before again returning home as Melbourne Auxiliary Bishop at the start of the 21st century.
In April 2012 he was named Archbishop of Brisbane after a six-year stint as Archbishop of the Canberra and Goulburn Archdiocese.
Erudite and cultivated, capable of the odd lapse into Latin to clarify Church jargon, Coleridge has the whiff of the stern old priest/headmaster readily identifiable to those who attended a Catholic school, but he’s also capable of much warmth and humour.
In the midst of his explanation on the spiritual dynamics of the confessional, he pauses to offer the qualification that a higher being must exist for the exchange to succeed.
“You can’t exclude God from this equation,” he says, with just the hint of a smile.
Yet that ironic aside contains an uncomfortable truth. Coleridge is the first to acknowledge that, ever since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species hit the bookshelves in 1859, belief in God across the Western world has been in steady decline.
A dead God (or, at the very least, a God in palliative care) robs the Church not merely of a defence of the confessional seal, but of its entire raison d’être.
Yet God’s demise is not the primary reason the Church faces pressure to abandon tradition and break the confessional seal.
Many educated and influential voices, widely disseminated by social and mainstream media, readily give deference to expressions of the metaphysical among Native Americans or Australian Aborigines yet, simultaneously, become sneeringly dismissive of the Catholic version of the transcendental and its role in sacraments such as Penance.
And that hostility is now rationalised and excused not so much on the basis of theological intangibles as it is on criminal realities – namely, child sexual abuse.
The Catholic Church’s ancient mission statement – to care for the sick and aged, to give a voice to the poor, to defend the persecuted, to assist minorities – should make it one of the Western world’s more fashionable agencies if the daily stream of pieties expressed on social media is genuine.
Yet, as Coleridge agrees, that enormous body of good works that stem back to European settlement in this country and encompass the labours of the (now officially) saintly Mary MacKillop are all gone with the wind of the child sexual abuse scandal, which began rocking the Church globally in the 1980s.
“The Church is leading the way in caring for victims of the thrown-away culture,” Coleridge says.
“And that is just a fact – I am not blowing my own trumpet or the Church’s trumpet; this is not triumphalism. It’s just a fact.”
Yet Coleridge agrees the Church has lost the moral high ground and can’t expect a pat on the back for its endeavours.
“We have shot ourselves in the foot hugely. We have betrayed hosts of people and in a sense we have betrayed the Australian people more generally.
“We just have to accept that and eat humble pie, and get on with the good work the Gospel has always promoted.”
That course of “humble pie” may be served in just over one year as the Church begins what could be a national Act of Contrition by embarking on a massive cultural change.
Coleridge is a key player in one of the most important Catholic conferences of the past century, which will get under way in 2020.
The Plenary Council is just one step below a universal council (such as Vatican II, 1962-65) and will bring together every Australian Catholic bishop for a root and branch renewal of Australian Catholicism. To Coleridge, it is a gift from God, literally.
Coleridge believes the Plenary Council, the first to be held in Australia since 1937 and approved by His Holiness Pope Francis in March, will prove a pivot for the Catholic Church in Australia, allowing it to redeem itself after the nightmare of sexual abuse, and both recalibrate and reaffirm its place in the nation’s spiritual life.
It will be inside the Plenary Council that the issue of the sexual life of the Catholic priest could be up for spirited debate.
The celibacy of priests, described by Pope Paul VI as a “brilliant jewel” in the Church’s history, was last reaffirmed in 1563 at the Council of Trent.
The Catholics, in a bolshie mood as the Protestant Reformation took hold of Europe, were in no mood to negotiate with the reformers who approved of married clerics, and dug in deeply over the celibacy issues.
But 455 years on, Coleridge appears ready for a second round of debate.
“I would not exclude that,” he says, referring to the celibacy of priests.
“I won’t predict what will be on the agenda or what will be decided by the Preliminary Council.
“I would rather allow that to emerge from the grassroots consultation.
“But that is certainly possible – the ordination of tried and true married men (religious married men of proven character), for instance.
“That is not to be excluded, but I would say the question of what type of leadership we would require in the future, that will certainly be on the agenda.”
Coleridge is willing to question a whole range of traditions if the Plenary Council is open to the debates, including whether only ordained priests should occupy key leadership positions in the church, and broader matters related to inclusiveness, accountability and transparency.
What Coleridge is certain of is that the Catholic Church he grew up with in the 1950s is gone.
That powerful Irish Catholic influence that dominated in the 20th century, nurtured by towering “tribal chieftains” such as Archbishop Daniel Mannix in Melbourne and Cardinal Norman Thomas Gilroy in Sydney, has given way to a far more multicultural institution encompassing parishioners who are as likely to come from India, Asia, Africa, South America and continental Europe as Ireland.
Coleridge sees a far more inclusive church in the decades ahead.
Women, who were excluded from the last Plenary Council in 1937, will be included in the 2020 event, and the Asian, African and South American influences that have been “orbiting satellites” in Australian Catholicism will begin to take their place at its nucleus.
Coleridge is an optimist, both in his personal outlook and in his hope and aspirations for a faith with origins sweeping back 2000 years, to an obscure Nazarene carpenter.
He turned 70 last month, and has reflected on his own website that his priestly life “turned out better than it would have, had I planned it myself”.
“Jesus often surprises,” Coleridge says, “but he never disappoints.”
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