Does the church really repent?

We want a courageous acknowledgment of mistakes so that a healing can begin. We don’t want denial and denigration of our judicial system.

What stood out for me, before George Pell’s conviction became known, was the story that emerged out of Pennsylvania last year. Of the necklaces. The priests giving gold crosses to Catholic children in Pennsylvania, to secretly signal to other priests that these were the chosen ones. To be sexually abused. These were children who’d already been groomed. We’re not talking about a lone priest gone rogue here, but a collection of perverted, powerful men within a system that protected them. A grand jury report last August detailed the sexual abuse of about 1000 children by more than 300 Catholic priests over 70 years. “Priests were raping little boys and girls,” the legal document states, “and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

Can adults also be groomed? Of course. Groomed to doubt, to deny. Groomed to side with power. We saw it in Australia a few weeks ago when our nation was riven by the news of Cardinal Pell’s conviction. As my son said in bewilderment at the time, “Why all the outrage? It’s a convicted paedophile.” In his teenage mind it was clear-cut: a jury found him guilty on five counts, and it was unanimous. Why wasn’t the judicial process being respected?

And so to those priests whose demeanour seems grievously removed from the most beautiful teachings of Christ, homilies that shine with humility, tenderness, generosity and grace. Do those priests have any idea what image they are presenting to us? They are advertisements for their church, and they are grievously wounding it.

Over the years I’ve been bewildered by Pell’s callous attitude to victims of sexual abuse within the church. In his breathtakingly dismissive quote “it was of little interest to me” when questioned about paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale, in his decisions that protected the Church in ways that only increased the trauma to its victims. Deny, attack, diminish; Pell seemed like the church’s bull terrier par excellence. It felt, in his dismissal of the suffering of others, that the man was not fully formed as an empathetic, compassionate human being.

As a mother, I feel disgust. Revulsion. Fury. At the necklaces. The clubbishness. The lofty arrogance. At the disconnection with the most humane lessons of Christ. This crisis within Catholicism feels like a gross affront to the most beautiful of Jesus’s teachings. By their arrogance and weakness these men of the church are destroying their institution. Who would want to join the priesthood now? Celibacy perverts. And now we have rage, among so many of us. Rage not aimed at the many good, gentle-spirited people who are lay Catholics, but at the church hierarchy and its acolytes who’ve been so quick to shout their anti rule-of-law admonishments.

“I hear those voices that will not be drowned,” are the stirring words from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes. And hopefully the victims’ voices will not be drowned by the deniers, the confusers and the spinners among us, sowing their seeds of doubt following Pell’s conviction. Hopefully the barrage of institutional affront we’re witnessing will only encourage more victims to speak out. To wrest revolutionary change upon Catholicism, because it’s crying out for it. And I say this as someone educated at a Catholic convent high school. Get rid of the vow of celibacy, and bring women into the church hierarchy. For God’s sake.

This circling of the wagons over the Pell conviction is a PR catastrophe. Many Australians — most — don’t want denial and denigration of our judicial system, we want a courageous acknowledgment of mistakes so that a healing can begin. Yet what we got after the Pell bombshell was a slippery rewriting of fact combined with a denigration of our court system from people who weren’t in the courtroom. Smoke and mirrors. And it felt so very grubby. Sinister. Slick. Afraid.