AUSTRALIA
The Age
March 5, 2016
Martin Flanagan
Columnist for The Age
Two faces of Australian Catholicism were on display this week. One was Cardinal George Pell’s testimony before the royal commission on child sexual abuse.
Pell could have been discussing the internal workings of a department store. He had his job, others had theirs, he didn’t “indulge rumours” and had “no interest” in tracking those rumours down even though they concerned the welfare of the youngest and most vulnerable members of what once would have been called his flock. What his testimony lacked was moral imagination.
Patrick Dodson has moral imagination and courage to match.
I do not equate religion with spirituality, but it is genuinely spiritual people who make religion meaningful by investing it with humility and compassion. Without those qualities, religion is no more than a series of empty rituals encased, in the case of the Catholic Church, in a medieval pomp which is supposed to embody a Jewish rebel who sided with social outcasts and was openly contemptuous of the religious authorities of his day for their double standards.
Also this week, Patrick Dodson was named as Bill Shorten’s pick to replace WA Labor senator Joe Bullock. If there’s a person whose vision contrasts with Pell’s, it is Dodson.
Dodson was sent to Monivae College in Hamilton as an Aboriginal kid from the Northern Territory at a time when Aboriginal people were still not counted in the census. Within three years, he was school captain. That achievement alone marks him as an extraordinary person.
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