The letter from a reader that made me gasp

After attending the local Catholic Church, a reader sat down to read my column in The Weekend Australian Magazine. They were in for a shock.

After attending the local Catholic Church, a reader sat down to read my column in The Weekend Australian Magazine. They were in for a shock.

I don’t often gasp over a reader’s letter, but I did with the following.

Recently I wrote of the grace in sacrifice, in response to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny – a man who’d returned home, and subsequently died, in an extraordinary act of love for his people. Shortly after this column appeared a reader contacted me.

“I’ve got something to share with you that I need to ‘get off my chest’ ... your column last week about selfless heroes was stolen, and used by the priest in his homily at the Catholic Church in my town … I wanted to go up to him and ask why he did not acknowledge that his homily content was yours, not his; a.k.a. intellectual property theft.”

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Picture: AFP

The homily had been delivered, then the reader sat down with this magazine. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading; your column as I had heard verbatim.” They continued, “As much as I want to confront him, I won’t. I wanted to say sorry to you for not defending you and your written word, but this community is small and my daily peace must outweigh this intellectual crime … you can ‘defend’ yourself via your pen.”

I take up the challenge and the sword, jabbing away at the intellectual smallness of the act. A man of the church passes off my words as his very own and wields so much power that a parishioner who recognises the theft is too afraid to call him out. So I will. Call out the graceless thieving, and from a man of the bible no less (though shalt not steal, sir).

The issue, on a deeper level, is about a ripping away of the veil – that careful, elaborate, mysterious and traditionally very beautiful enveloping within a liturgy. Most specifically, its sermon or homily; the weekly conversation embedded in the ritual. The priest’s actions draw attention to this moment as smoke and mirrors; that his words are not his, from his heart. This at a time when authority is being questioned with a forensic energy and fury the like of which has never before been witnessed.

To wit, the royal catastrophe around the manipulated Mother’s Day photo from Kensington Palace. Power is called to account by the keyboard masses – and it’s not so easy to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes anymore. Aided by rabid home screen detectives, we’re all more alert to spin, cheating, lies. Trust is eroded, everything is raucously called out. Traditional agreements between public and power are shifting, whether that be in political, royal or religious spheres.

A liturgical historian of the Catholic Church, Father Josef Jungmann, wrote of the homily’s sacred power: “The homily was the living word of the Church taken up into the liturgy as proof of the higher world in which it lives, and into which it enters after being renewed by the sacred mysteries.”

The Australian priest, in this tiny instance, made it easy for his parishioner to doubt the grandeur as the veil was swept away.

And so to another column our priest may like to pass off as his own. This one, about theft. Have you ever had anything stolen? If so, you’llunderstand how the victim feels in the aftermath: shocked, violated.

This is a column about moral puniness. About having the courage to do the right thing as opposed to the easiest. Moral courage is rare, and hard. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”

Moral integrity links the human to the divine; moral puniness severs that perception. It’s easy to talk about being ethical, much harder to act on it. What moral courage are you avoiding today? A question for all us, but in particular, for the priest reading this column. Where does grace lie in a man?