Australia's Challenge: Addressing the Evil Within

By Fr Peter Day
The Tablet
January 30, 2013

www.thetablet.co.uk/blogs/452/17

With the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse upon us, society at large, and especially the Catholic Church, is set for a distressing time; one in which we will be asked to further confront the reality that evil, both individual and institutional, is closer to home than we like to think, or want to acknowledge.

We like to think that evil is what others do in other places and in other times. But what about my trusted priest and church, my trusted teacher and school? My God, what about my parents, my siblings, my uncle, my home?

Thus, after decades of broken trust, shameful tales, jailed clergy, and persistent calls for a broader inquiry, on Friday 11 January 2013, Quentin Bryce, Governor-General of Australia, appointed a six-member Royal Commission to investigate the scourge of child abuse within institutions.

Meanwhile, the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference has established a lay-led Truth, Justice, and Healing Council to coordinate the Church's response and advise its leaders.

These are the best of times, the worst of times - the best because truth is having its 'day in court'; the worst because of what this truth will reveal.

Indeed, since my ordination to the priesthood 12 years ago, the millstone of these sexually based crimes has weighed heavily. Such is the extent of the crisis, that in some circles priest and paedophile have become interchangeable words. It is as if we have moved from an unhealthy, 'A priest would never do that', to a just as unhealthy, 'He's a priest, so he probably did do that.'

I can't help thinking of a wonderful family friend, Fr Gerry Cudmore (a military chaplain, now deceased), who spent many hours with us during our ‘growing-up' years in Australia and overseas. He was the first priest I met. He was an honourable man, a man who laughed and joked and teased with us. We trusted him. We loved him, and our affection was well placed. It was all so healthy and natural and innocent. My God, isn't that how it should always be?

I know that if he were alive today he would weep and rage against the betrayal and criminality perpetrated against the young by his peers.

I am reminded of how the actor, Sir Alec Guinness became a Catholic. Guinness, an Anglican, was playing the lead role of Fr Brown, the endearing Catholic priest and detective created by G K Chesterton. The film was being shot in a remote French village in 1954 - the actor was 40. At the end of each day's filming Guinness, dressed in clerical garb, would walk back to his lodgings. One evening as he walked back he met a stranger who changed his life. He wrote in his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise (Hamish Hamilton, 1985):

I heard scampering footsteps and a piping voice calling, ‘Mon père!' My hand was seized by a boy of seven or eight, who clutched it tightly, swung it and kept up a non-stop prattle. He was full of excitement, hops, skips and jumps, but never let go of me. I didn't dare speak in case my excruciating French should scare him. Although I was a total stranger he obviously took me for a priest and so to be trusted. Suddenly with a ‘Bonsoir, mon père', and a hurried sideways sort of bow, he disappeared through a hole in a hedge. Continuing my walk I reflected that a church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming and creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudices.

What an irony: that Guinness's long-held prejudices against Catholicism, its 'creepy and scheming' ways, were overcome by the trust and hand of a child.

Now, six decades later, we find ourselves at the centre of a Royal Commission that is tasked with bringing to light and to justice the 'creepy and scheming' within our midst.

And while the Commission will have its flaws and limitations, it might prompt the Church to look deeply and humbly within itself in order to address the culture that allowed such criminality - a dirty culture overseen by good men, in which careerists and powerbrokers placed personal gain and reputation ahead of everything else, even the very lives of the young.

Oh for that day when a child can walk and chat and skip alongside an unknown priest again with well-placed trust that the priest holds as sacred the child's innocence.