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	Retired Bishop Who Broke Ranks to Speak Tonight He Has Challenged Church on Celibacy By Onell R. Soto Union-Tribune June 10, 2008 http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20080610-9999-1m10bishop.html LA JOLLA – A retired Roman Catholic bishop who questions whether the church's celibacy rules have played a role in sexual abuse by priests will speak in San Diego, defying church leaders. Retired Bishop Geoffrey Robinson of Sydney, Australia, was asked by San Diego Bishop Robert Brom and several other U.S. bishops – and Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony – to stay away. He is banned from speaking on church property in several dioceses while on a tour sponsored by a lay Catholic group, Voice of the Faithful. At 6:30 tonight, he will speak at the Faculty Club at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla. His talk is not sponsored by the university. Robinson, who was a victim of sexual abuse as a child, was a lawyer in church courts and co-chairman of a committee investigating abuse of children by Australian clergy in the 1990s. Then he broke ranks, retired and wrote a book taking on the church's response to the crisis. "Sexual abuse is about power and sex," he said in an interview yesterday. "To respond to it, we have to investigate those two issues, power and sex, and follow the argument wherever it leads." In his book, Robinson questions obligatory celibacy, criticizes the leadership of Popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II and says the church hasn't faced up to the sex-abuse scandal and its causes. Robinson wrote in the book "Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus" that the abuse – and church efforts to cover it up – are "one of the ugliest stories ever" in church history. "It is hard to imagine a more total contradiction of everything Jesus Christ stood for, and it would be difficult to overestimate the pervasive and lasting harm it has done to the Church," he wrote. The book's questions led the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to chastise him. "After correspondence and conversation with Bishop Robinson, it is clear that doctrinal difficulties remain," the bishops wrote. "Central to these is a questioning of the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively." Obligatory celibacy by clergy, Robinson said, can lead to unhealthy psychology, ideas and living conditions. It can lead to depression, hatred of women, loneliness and lack of support. "It must at the very least be put on the table for discussion," he said, and he's hopeful it will. In three weeks of talks from Boston to Ohio to Seattle, he has drawn crowds in the hundreds who tell him he's saying what they've been thinking. Robinson's positions aren't new, but the fact that a bishop is saying it is what draws crowds, said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. "He's kind of broken ranks from the other bishops and is saying things about celibacy and sexual morality that bishops don't say," he said. Onell Soto: (619) 593-4958; onell.soto@uniontrib.com
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