AUSTRALIA
The West Australian
December 19, 2017
By Gemma Tognini
I was on the phone to a friend talking about a tricky dynamic she’d been trying to navigate between her and a colleague. My friend is strong, successful and capable.
She is generous and kind, bloody hilarious and great with people in general. Still, she’d been having problems with a particular chap and couldn’t nail down why.
She said part of it was his demeanour, the way he spoke to her, the way she felt belittled by him, but even that wasn’t enough to explain her overwhelming sense of paralysis and nausea.
Her need to run to the bathroom after each difficult interaction they had. In short, she felt incapable of navigating a situation she would normally have sailed through.
As I listened to her talk, it got quiet on the other end of the phone. Then I heard crying. A soft, heavy sobbing. In an instant, almost like the gentle cracking of an eggshell, it had dawned on her why she had reacted this way.
“He reminds me of the man who sexually abused me when I was a little girl,” she said.
I’m sharing this story with my friend’s permission, even though you’ll never know her name.
And I’m sharing this story because last week when the report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse was handed down, there was one response that sparked a flame of rage within me that I have been unable to extinguish.
The swiftness with which the Catholic Church defended what it calls the “seal of the confessional” stunned me, to be honest, though it shouldn’t have. It’s a response that was entirely on form.
Now, before I go on let me make a couple of things clear. I’m writing this as a Christian, a singularly dull fact in my view, but relevant in the context of this column. I’m not a church hater, an atheist, hater of any faith, let alone the Catholic faith.
I went to a Catholic school and had a terrific experience there. My own evolution of faith over the past 40-odd years took me from being a kid who had Catholicism chosen for her, to a person who, as a teenager found a home, if you like, in a contemporary Christian congregation.
What I’m saying is that I’m not taking aim from the sidelines as a spectator in this game. I am well and truly in the arena.
So, back to this confessional thing and let me recap and get straight to the point.
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