SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
Sydney Morning Herald
March 9, 2019
By Anne O’Donovan
As a cradle Catholic, and as a mother and a grandmother, my response to the Cardinal Pell conviction is, as for others like me, deeply complex.
For weeks I have been unable to bring myself to attend Sunday Mass.
Almost daily I wake to a deadening of the heart as yet another story of abuse of children by Catholic clergy emerges, here and internationally. Catholics like me are in grief.
Cardinal Pell is an unsympathetic character, described as having a pathological lack of empathy, and emblematic of a church that is out of touch with its people. And yet he is a prince of the church: the only ranking higher is that of the Pope. How unthinkable that he has been convicted of abusing children.
I see myself as a liberal Catholic – loosely connected to St Carthage’s parish at Melbourne University, where the much-loved Father Michael Elligate ministers to a flock from every corner of Melbourne. When I go to Michael’s Mass, I come away with a thought about how to live my life – an opportunity for meditation on the deeper things.
I abhor the arrogant male exclusivity of elements of the church and long ago relinquished any regard for the dogmatic pronouncements from the Control Tower. And yet, and yet … something keeps me connected.
For me, it is a love of the ritual, something deep in my racial memory, and it’s the goodness of so many clergy and religious, the 93 per cent who are not abusers. Perhaps it’s also the debt we owe to generations of nuns, priests and brothers who gave us a start on what became fulfilling lives as successful professionals. Many in public life operate from principles of social justice imbibed in this system.
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