Church Blame in the Frame

By Frank Brennan
Eureka Street
February 28, 2013

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=35212

Last night I attended the opening night of the Big Picture Film Festival in Sydney. The festival is the brainchild of the Reverend Bill Crews who sees a place for film enhancing the community's commitment to social justice.

On the very eve of Pope Benedict's last day in office, the program included the Australian premiere of the American documentary about clerical sexual abuse Silence in the House of God: Mea Maxima Culpa followed by a panel discussion with Tom Keneally, Geraldine Doogue and myself. It was a very confronting and draining night, particularly for me, the one Catholic priest in the audience.

Crews introduced the festival declaring that the common theme of all films chosen for the week was 'Hope'. For the next 90 minutes the audience took in the relentless and overwhelming portrayal of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church presented by producer Alex Gibney, focusing on the horrendous case of Fr Lawrence Murphy, who abused up to 200 children at a school for the deaf in Milwaukee.

Gibney then moves the camera to Ireland before returning to Boston and then zeroing in on the Vatican with with horrific case of Fr Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ.

At the end of such a cascade of abuse and cover up, what could one usefully say? We panellists identified four reservoirs of hope in the midst of all this putrid activity.

First was the dignity and persistence of the four deaf victims who persevered against the odds in outing Fr Murphy. They sought justice, compassion, transparency and safety for children in the future.

Second was the one priest who visited the home for the deaf decades ago, heard the children, and tried to blow the whistle on Fr Murphy.

Third was the realisation that everyone in the cinema had a heightened awareness of child sexual abuse. A generation ago, the community lack of awareness allowed abuse and cover ups to continue.

Fourth was the understanding that we are individuals with a plurality of associations. Some of us are members of a hierarchical, undemocratic Church, but at the same time we are members of a robust pluralist democratic society and citizens of a State which is founded on the rule of law.

We Australian Catholics know that our Church needs help from the State to ensure that the processes and structures are in place to arrest the incidence of child sexual abuse within our Church.

Moving from the screen to the Australian reality, the recent Whitlam Report into the case of Fr F and his two identified victims provides pointers for the work ahead for the Royal Commission.

In the movie, the Milwaukee police turned the victims away; the District Attorney's Office turned them away. That would be unlikely to happen today. In the case of Fr F, retired Justice Whitlam found the bishop of the day derelict in his pastoral duties. He also found that the magistrate was reckless, the prosecuting authorities too laidback, the police dilatory and the consulting psychologist out of his depth.

In the movie, the viewer is left uneasy and even outraged about the role of Church leaders all the way to the top when it comes to the case of Fr Maciel. It appears that even Pope John Paul II was at least negligent in failing to pursue the many allegations about Maciel. On the death of John Paul, the Vatican immediately ramped up the inquiries into Maciel. While Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, knew the problem, John Paul looked away.

Just a week ago, Geraldine Doogue and I appeared on a TV program with Archibishop Mark Coleridge who made the point that he was working closely with John Paul at the time the Maciel allegations first came to light and that it was clear that there was abuse to be investigated but that the Pope had thought the allegations simply reminiscent of the Communist smear campaigns he had experienced in Poland.

While the world waits for the election of the new pope to put the Church in order complying with the requirements of justice, compassion, transparency and safety for children, some of our most informed bishops like Coleridge and Cardinal Pell have belled the cat and told the media that government and governance of the Church have been wanting during the papacy of Benedict.

The temptation is to see notions such as justice, compassion and transparency as the preserve or obsessive concern of western liberals who don't go to Church anyway. These notions are much more universal than that; they are the contemporary, institutional rendition of gospel values.

The unaccountable hiddenness of Vatican clericalism has reached its use-by date. The God of the scriptures looks first to those deaf victims and decries the silence in the house of God.

Lets hope the Royal Commission can help us hear the voices that need to be heard for the good of us all, and for the good of the Church. And let's hope our cardinals elect someone who can insist on justice, compassion, transparency and due process within his own Curia.

Meanwhile we would all be well advised to take more seriously the notions of good and evil, grace and sin, repentance and forgiveness, individual complicity and sinful structures. Whatever our language or theological matrix, we need to own collectively what we could have prevented institutionally. We have a responsibility to call everyone including the pope to account, and not just after they resign.