Trust at Stake in Toowoomba, by Andrew Hamilton, Eureka Street, May 15, 2011

Trust at Stake in Toowoomba

By Andrew Hamilton
Eureka Street
May 15, 2011

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=26322

The Australian Bishops' response to the forced retirement of Bishop Bill Morris was as good as could have been hoped. It affirmed the Pope's right to dismiss bishops, affirmed the personal and pastoral qualities of Bishop Morris, simply reported the situation that led to the dismissal, and promised to take up the question of the process with the Pope.

The kindly tone of the letter offers good hope that the bishops will maintain the personal links with Bishop Morris that matter more than words.

It may be helpful to look at what happened in Toowoomba against the much larger question of trust in governance. Significant cultural changes have affected all institutions, including national governments as well as churches.

All governance relies on a passive trust on the part of the people if it is to function well. If trust is not given, laws will not be obeyed. When trust is withdrawn, societies stagnate because they lack any sense of the common good. They become polarised, and governments often rule by repression. The officials responsible for day to day governance become demoralised and unenthusiastic.

In Eastern Europe, and now in the Middle East, apparently impregnable regimes can be brought down because trust is lacking.

Traditionally, institutions have encouraged trust by depicting their rulers as strong and benign and as guided by the best of values. But these images, and the trust they engender, have been put under pressure by the development of communication technologies and the lack of control over them. Images have become personalised.

Leaders of institutions must use sophisticated means of communication to project their own image and the values they represent. Their personalities become the face of the institution and the guarantee of good governance.

But the inability of institutions to control communication leaves them vulnerable. The link between the projected image and values and the reality is constantly tested by a stream of information and of critical judgments. The strong leader is shown to bow to pressure groups; the defender of family values is revealed to be a philanderer; the exact administrator is shown to run a shambles.

This erosion of trust results in a general public disillusionment with leaders and their professed programs. It also encourages the political paralysis visible in Australia, Europe and the United States.

We might expect to see two responses to this challenge. The first will be to look for substance rather than style in leadership, and to ensure that the fit between the image of leaders, their stated values and their governance is so adamantine that exposure will not corrode the image. The second is to control the image by controlling communications, marginalising critics and criminalising leaks. This hard choice underlies the anxieties revealed by the debate over Wikileaks.

The retirement of Bishop Morris is illuminated when seen against this broad context. The Catholic Church has also been affected by the changes in communication. Particularly during the pontificate of John Paul II, whose travels were carefully choreographed, it has promoted the image of the Pope and the values he professes by focusing on his personality.

This focus also inevitably leads to speculation about the match between the image of the Pope and bishops and the reality of their commitment to the values of the Gospel they profess. The image becomes uncontrollable.

The catalyst for a widespread perception that in the Catholic Church image and reality do not match has been the publicity given by the media to widespread incidence of sexual abuse in the Church and to its mishandling by bishops, including by Pope John Paul II. It seemed that human beings mattered less than the institutional interests of the Church.

The treatment of Bishop Bill Morris risks further blurring the image of the Catholic Church. The story told of a good man who encouraged his church, who was resolute in dealing with sexual abuse, but was removed in an untransparent process, will confirm many in their distrust of the Catholic Church. They wlll conclude that it has taken the authoritarian option.

We may ask, of course, whether this matters.Such judgments can be represented as simply a matter of public relations, without anything to do with truth and reality.

This argument has some weight. For most Catholics, bishops and popes are not central in their faith. They remain committed to churches because they find God within face to face connection with other Christians. They presume that their bishops and the Vatican will tend to the good of the Church, but are not much interested in their interrelationships.

But for many people, especially those living in Bishop Morris' own church and those who are well-read, it will erode trust in Pope and bishops.

Pope and bishops are images of the Church and of its commitment to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It matters that the values of the Gospel and the best values of our society are reflected in the way in which they act. It is a condition of commending the Gospel and its values within a sceptical society.