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	Power Trip Leaves the Faithful in Distress By Juliette Hughes The Age May 17, 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/power-trip-leaves-the-faithful-in-distress/2008/05/16/1210765169675.html IT'S not a good time to be a woman in the Catholic Church right now. When I read Barney Zwartz's piece last week on how the Australian Catholic bishops had put out a statement dissociating themselves from one of their most enlightened and compassionate members, I felt sick, then angry, really angry. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, now retired from Sydney's Catholic archdiocese, published a book last year, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church. It's one of the most hopeful, honest and responsible pieces of writing ever to come out of the church. But the other bishops are running away from its wisdom, too scared to withstand pressure coming from a Vatican whose reaction was predictable, given the dismal track record of the latest two popes. As a woman and as a lay person I've been doubly disqualified from having any say in the leadership of my church; it's a galling place for a feminist to be. A quarter century of the misogynist John Paul II made it very hard for me to be proud of being Catholic: it's been like belonging to a dysfunctional family. Knowing a vast number of good and decent Catholic clerics has helped. We were all in it together, hanging on, waiting for sanity to prevail. So by the time John Paul's main enforcer got himself "voted" to the papacy by a group of electors hand-picked for being traditionalist and male, most Catholics were just getting on with living and loving, trying to discern how to live ethically. But when the church's bureaucrats starting obfuscating about the part the church's authorities played in covering up abuse, we needed to hear that some people in our church were actually doing the right thing. Bishop Robinson's response gave a lot of people hope that the church would start doing the right thing. He wrote the book after having been given the task of listening to the church's many victims of sexual abuse in 1994. As he listened, he did something that the other bishops can't seem to do: he felt for them, and opted to be on their side. He became, he says, increasingly disillusioned by the reactions of the church hierarchy to the terrible situation that was unfolding. Too often the reaction from high up has been to "manage" the scandal, to try to preserve the fiction of the church's good name, to smother the victims' cries for help. Why? Why do men who claim to love God and goodness actively stand in the way of justice and healing? I found two websites offered telling insights into this, (one of them quite unintentionally). The first, the Australian Catholic bishops' website, shows the hubris that continues to wound ordinary Catholics. Its homepage announces triumphantly that 25% of Australians are Catholic, consisting of "bishops, priests, men and women religious and lay people". (Well, hello there from the afterthought at the end of the list. As one of the 99% of Catholics who aren't in the vainglorious first four categories, I dissociate myself from your statement dissociating yourselves from Bishop Robinson's book.) The other website is Broken Rites, where the stories of the victims are told; where you see the sheer incontinent evil of the wretched depravities that the Vatican and bishops want to "manage", to sweep under the dusty carpets of their authority. The victims, so ineffectually protected and so inadequately compensated, will haunt the church forever until it confronts its own role in the culture that allowed the abuse to flourish unchallenged. Most know that sexual abuse isn't confined to Catholic priests, that it's universal and systemic wherever there are children and dysfunctional power relationships. What angers me as a Catholic woman and a mother is not just the obscenity and betrayal of the abuse, but that the church has made its top priority not the healing of the victims but the preservation of its power. The lack of real shame expressed by the church hierarchy horrifies me. These confidently self-proclaimed leaders should have worked on healing the victims, treating them with remorseful respect. They chose instead to protect their power and their money from victims' needs. It's a tough call, being asked to review your way of life and see whether there needs to be deep, transformative change. It's something that's expected of all Christians, but these old guys in frocks don't seem to have the balls to do it. I reckon it's time they stepped down and let the women run it. We could hardly make a bigger hash of it than they have.
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