AUSTRALIA
The Age
June 1
[Bishop Robinson’s petition site]
Barney Zwartz
The bishop who designed Australia’s Catholic clergy sex abuse response wants a ”Catholic spring”, a people-power movement to force the Vatican to tackle the abuse crisis at its source.
Retired Sydney bishop Geoffrey Robinson has launched a petition for ordinary Catholics to seek another global church council like the 1960s reforming Vatican II council. But at ”Vatican III”, he says, there must be as many lay people as bishops to make sure the hard questions get asked.
He believes that only a ”Catholic spring” like the revolutions that ended the Marcos regime in the Philippines, totalitarian governments in the Arab world and communism in eastern Europe will move the Vatican to make the changes that are needed.
Bishop Robinson, 75, was the architect of the Towards Healing protocol introduced in every diocese except Melbourne in 1996. Abused as a child, he headed the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference professional standards committee for a decade until he retired in 2004 because he was so disillusioned.
On Tuesday, his new book For Christ’s Sake: End Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church … for Good, will be launched in an inner-Sydney church. The petition, at www.change.org/forchristssake, was opened in Australia a fortnight ago without any publicity, and already has more than 10,000 signatures. Backed by two other progressive Australian bishops, the recently retired Pat Power of Canberra and Bill Morris of Toowoomba, it will be launched in Europe and the US soon.
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