Reshaping the Church with Bishop Robinson and Pope Francis

By Andrew Hamilton
Eureka Street
July 24, 2013

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=36877#.Ue_B341M-Sp

Culture has become a popular word to analyse organisations whose members do bad things: football clubs whose players dismantle bars and their patrons; political parties whose members are paraded before courts; and churches in which sexual abuse has been rife.

The culture of an organisation comprises the shared attitudes, values, patterns of relationship and practices that make it more likely that members will act in particular ways. In an army unit where there is a culture of binge drinking and contempt for women, more incidents of sexual assault may well occur than in other units where these features are absent.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson's recent book on the culture of the Catholic Church carries on his critique of the factors that have contributed to clerical sexual abuse of children and to denial and concealment of it. The aspects of Catholic culture that he believes conducive to it include: a relationship with God dominated by fear; immaturity; compulsory clerical celibacy, an exclusively male caste standing over the church; a lonely way of life; a cult of privacy and secrecy; a compulsive need to defend the actions and attitudes of the Pope.

Together these things made it more likely that priests will be tempted to abuse children, will have the opportunity to do so, will abuse with impunity, and have their actions denied and covered up by others.

If this is the culture, how can it be changed? Robinson's answer is to call for a new Church council that includes an equal number of laypeople, with women proportionately represented. Its one topic would be to identify the aspects of the Catholic culture that encouraged sexual abuse and to make the changes necessary. He together with Bishops Pat Power and Bill Morris have initiated a petition endorsing this proposal.

Robinson's analysis of harmful aspects of Catholic culture and endorsement of a Church council as the remedy are persuasive. He has the personal authority that comes from himself having been abused, and from giving many years to persuading Catholics to attend to the harm done to the victims of sexual abuse, to recognise their responsibility to them, and to begin to institute effective safeguards.

A Church council could lead Catholics to address the harm done to people by the sexual abuse of children and to endorse structural changes. It may be a necessary condition for addressing the evil of clerical sexual abuse.

But a council focused on sexual abuse may not alone be sufficient to deal with the issues Robinson raises. It would assess the contribution made to sexual abuse by the aspects of Church culture identified by Robinson and by other participants, and make the institutional changes it believes necessary. But if it decided that some of the aspects of Church culture indicted by Robinson were not material to sexual abuse, they may be inconsistent with the Gospel. They would still need to be addressed.

Institutional changes, too, are insufficient unless relationships and attitudes change. Australians infatuated with cricket will recognise the truth of this in the contrast between the measures introduced by the Argus report and the performance of the national team. Medieval reformers certainly recognised it when they described the church as always needing reform in head and members. They insisted on the importance of good preaching, particularly embodied in the person and words of the pope, to make central what the Church is about.

From this perspective there is a happy conjunction between Robinson's project and the way of proceeding of Pope Francis. He has put his authority behind the deconstruction of a clerical culture built on the power and incontestability of the papacy. He has done so in in the name of the deeper Gospel values that the church serves.

His constant description of himself as the Bishop of Rome rather than as Pope, his preference for simplicity of life, dress and liturgy, his immediate contact with ordinary people as human beings and not simply as members of a religious or ethnic group, his concern for the poor, his conversational forms of teaching and listening and his focus on the example of Christ are the antithesis of churchiness and of clericalism. They also enable people to imagine a Church culture more deeply grounded in the Gospel than that criticised by Robinson.

Institutional reform of the Church and imaginative leadership are complementary. To shape a church which reaches out effectively to victims of sexual abuse, in which sexual abuse is seen as abhorrent, and in which appropriate structures discourage it, is essential. This can happen only if Catholics' imagination is captured by something freshly discovered as well as by something abhorred. That is where radical leadership comes in.