Church has a chance to show it’s changing

At its core, the major problem for the Catholic Church is its clerics are not willing to report to laypeople. They won’t share power.

Pope Francis prays during the opening of the Catholic Church’s global child protection summit at the Vatican. Picture: AFP

What a week of trouble has been delivered to us all, via the Cardinal Pell saga. The trouble-free are those, in my view, who choose not to dwell on some of the conundrums so evident in this case, emotionally and legally. Those voices have been loud and clear this week.

To be troubled is to allow doubts and confusion to enter one’s reflections, to ponder on the rampant emotions on display: to be uneasy. And as the week progressed, after those confronting days outside the court, those people quietly emerged too, pulling me over to share their disquiet at the turn of events.

Because this whole story ­requires exemplary discernment. It means trying to cope with the “mob” attitudes on display, yet ­incorporating the lessons of the royal commission into sexual abuse alongside my own knowledge of the Catholic Church. What would I have done as a juror? How do I feel as a Catholic?

For relief, I reverted to another conclusion altogether: might this usher in the revolution within the church, inviting into its governing ranks a whole new group, the laity, canvassed ever since Vatican II with its emphasis on a “pilgrim” church? Is this how new systems are born, I’ve been wondering: messily, anarchically, amid flinty-eyed certainties and wild, baying emotions, amid justice and injustice and accounts of tragedies?

Might the climactic events of this bewildering week be of such magnitude that they usher in more than mere deceptive shifts or slight reform inside the church that I value so much? And note I talked of “governing ranks”. Fear not: this is not a battle over who prays the Mass, no grab for liturgical power.

Excepting the smallish groups pushing for female ordination, laypeople are not pushing to take over the altar. The ordained boundaries are not really in dispute but they can see that bishops and priests are overwhelmed. The institution, with all its crucial community arms, is drifting badly.

Never waste a good crisis, the saying goes. So here’s a wild thought: Why not clearly change some office-bearers? Why not make prompt appointments of, say, two theologically deft nuns to senior positions inside the church? That is, women of appropriate skill and experience (earned within complex Catholic religious orders), assigning them positions in the governing hierarchy that would mean men must report to them.

Or, on an international scale, decide someone such as ex-Irish president and canon lawyer Mary McAleese could be safely given the job of heading up one of the central dicasteries, the key departments within the formidable but acutely stubborn Vatican civil service, the curia? She’d be holding the fate of clerics in her hands, among her other duties.

You can’t imagine it? Neither can I easily. But it is possible right now under canon law. It would likely trigger massive debate and pushback from traditionalists.

But, oh, would it signal, tangibly, that the church had grasped something profound from all this trauma: that a new world order was demanding, among other things, symbolic and actual personnel shifts of a significant ­nature, enough to be witnessed clearly? When you change the government, you change the community; remember Paul Keating’s verdict on the incoming Howard administration in 1996?

Pope Francis in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace last Sunday, the last day of the sex abuse summit.

Church governance structure was on full display this week at the Pope’s sex abuse summit, and it was a shock. Watching those serried ranks of men, many purple-robed, was startling. An unpre­cedented venture within the church, sparked by the shame of sexual abuse and clearly promising some progress, in other words hopeful, the optics nevertheless reminded viewers of this rather strange, all-male, unmarried tribe in our 21st-century midst.

These collective representatives all possessed one vital passport — a penis. Laypeople, including victims, surely needed to be observably sitting at these big meetings, and not just secular males but females. It would have been visible proof that those in charge have heard the fury of the community and decided disruption was upon them. Yes, it’s time. And it’s doable. Though, as many secular outlets have discovered in these turbulent times, it doesn’t unfold neatly, along time frames you can necessarily control.

Many of those robed men were, indeed, “princes of the church” — this phrase I’ve heard tossed around this week like a bit of colloquial confetti. It did amuse me, a Catholic from birth. Which modern Australian Catholic still regularly uses that moniker, for goodness sake? Yet it seemed to utterly captivate much of the press. I did wonder how much it played into stereotypical notions of mysterious power and influence, about a half century out of date.

Ha, I thought to myself, how little they clearly know of the ­demoralisation within the church, with so much pressure exerted on many good senior men, robbing them of pride in the fine work they do but so sidelined by this ­terrible crisis.

However, I don’t kid myself: the church is an absolute monarchy, with structures inappropriate to the modern world. Despite seeking to minister and to transmit its precious heritage, it is hamstrung by its form. Thus it is robbed of the very talents that could refresh it, from within the ranks of loyal ­Catholics, keen to ensure the church’s health and its vital service to the community.

So yes, the ancien regimeof central control needs to be tackled and genuinely reformed. Pope Francis seems to be trying exactly this. In fact, this process dubbed sub­sidiarity has been the subject of wide discussion within church circles for years. The centralising forces within the church for the past two centuries are under real challenge, again a direct legacy of Vatican II.

A veteran Australian Vatican-watcher told me recently that, stripped to its essence, the subterranean civil war within the Catholic Church right now amounts to an epic power struggle over who will report to whom, rather than fights over seriously big theological or liturgical questions, even though these do exist. At its core, most clerics still are not willing to report to laypeople, male or ­female: they are not willing to share power. This is a major problem, in our country and beyond.

Will these sorts of thoughts pass through the cardinal’s mind as he sits in prison? I don’t know. For me, this week was so dispiriting that I was forced to somehow attempt to transcend all the cross-currents on display about my church and my broader ­community.

Within its realm, I had a safe childhood, not necessarily an easy one. My parents were not the most compatible people and, as an only child, I deeply envied my friends and their intricate families. But yes, I was safe and never experienced any of the abuse that has so afflicted thousands of children.

One of my friends told me some years back that she’d been abused by a priest. I could see that it had made her bitter. It had definitely affected her a great deal.

She did go on to achieve a good life and we don’t dwell on those events. The challenge of not ­re-traumatising some victims by the current coverage is a real one.

A manifestly unjust if not downright wicked question, in my view, is that asked or implied by reporters: You’ll never recover from this, will you? Surely to ask how people have managed to move beyond the abuse in no way exonerates the original crime. Yet that seems to worry reporters, as if it makes them complicit.

There can hardly be a more complex brew of competing sensibilities right now. Maybe we need the playwright-artists David Hare or our own Joanna Murray-Smith to convert it all, like a modern-day Arthur Miller, into forms that offer our troubled minds (souls?) more settlement. It is but the end of the beginning, I suspect, with much to come.

Geraldine Doogue is a journalist and radio and television host. She hosted ABC TV’s Compass from 1998 to 2017