AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
March 5, 2016
John Elder
Pope Francis has talked about the Church as a field hospital for the wounded. It’s a message with conflicting and complex resonance, not only in this time of reckoning in the paedophilia scandals – during which the clerical collar and lighted candle has become a staple of TV parody – but for an institution that has suffered through many a dark history.
Throughout that history, there have been the good priests, and the people who love them. The idea of the field hospital, says Father Michael Casey, 72, is a fitting way to describe parish life. “We have to expect the unexpected; the doorbell, the phone call, it can come at any time,” he says.
Father Michael has been the parish priest at St Ambrose in Brunswick since 1997. He was ordained at 25. Years ago, to maintain a personal prayer life among the demands of running outreach programs, saying mass, attending to all manner of crises, baptisms, marriages and funerals – plus endless book work – he decided to start each day 5.45am, just to fit it all in. Three years away from official retirement age – although the option to keep going may be afforded him – Casey finds that 9.30pm is when his energy runs out, when he hopes to knock off if possible.
And yet he’s busier than ever. There’s the food bank, the soup kitchen, the Iranian asylum seekers with whom he shares his home, and the female asylum seekers living in a parish home. And never too far away, somebody in acute pain. Just this week, two victims of child sexual abuse came to talk. And last Sunday, well aware that his parishioners are suffering with the shame and sadness of so many children being abused by so many priests, Casey spoke at Mass. “I talked about having to face our wounded past and hopefully we will grow through the pain that we are all feeling.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.