Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson
John Garratt Publishing
Bishop Robinson was interviewed by Terry Monagle
This book is a scathing critique of the current management of the Catholic Church. Never before has such an analysis come from such figure of authority in the Church, an Australian Catholic Bishop. Never before has a bishop announced that his resignation from his particular Episcopal role is because he could not live with what was going on. ‘I eventually came to the point where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could not continue to be a bishop of a church about which I had such profound reservations.’
There is a personal element to this story. As the quotation below indicates, the bishop, Geoffrey Robinson was sexually abused as a young person. He hastens to add it was not by someone he knew nor by someone in the church.
It wasn’t until 1994, when he was given a responsibility for managing the church’s response to the epidemic of abuse cases that the seriousness of his own abuse galvanized his thinking and feeling about the issue.
By 1996 he had made a comment which could be taken to indicate a belief that Rome had not been of much assistance in the handling of this plague. He received, what for him was very hurtful and robust response from Rome. He was told that the Pope was displeased with him and that he had been reported to the then Congregation of the Faith.
Despite this rebuke he persevered, after 45 years of priesthood, in working within the church structure, till 2004.
The Bishop’s analysis does not just rest on sexual abuse. He works his way what he sees a series of linked moral and managerial issues. He raises questions about birth control, divorce, celibacy, conscience, the role of women and laity. Here is the full liberal or progressive Catholic agenda being given heavy momentum by a bishop.
The book is erudite, speaks comprehensively about all these issues and more, drawing upon a lifetime of serious scholarship, scriptural, theological and philosophical.
Having been born in 1937, he was a student in Rome during the first three sessions of the Vatican Council. He was inspired by John 23rd, and the ideas of the Council. He has always been a Vatican 2 man.
He spent his first years at Richmond in New South Wales, where his father was in the air force, and moved from there to Sydney and was taught by the Marist brothers. He did service in the Sydney Archdiocese teaching in the seminary, in parishes and in the marriage tribunal.
He says ‘although there were many compromises and ambiguities written into the Council documents there was a vision, people went back on it, and we have lost a considerable amount of it.’
He says in one way the book has been coming for 50 years, but was certainly stimulated by sitting with victims of abuse and being moved by their stories.
He says the crucial thing in examining any religion is to see what sort of God it has. Both his personal faith and that of the church conservatives is to be found in the sort of God each has.
He is ‘not holding his breath’, in expectation the conversion of the church authorities to the agenda he sets out. He says ‘there’ll be people who’ll be angry with this book. How others react is up to them. If there are to be consequences, so be it.’
‘Abuse and the reaction of the church to it is a very complex matter. One of the pieces of context was that clergy had started thinking of themselves as taken up and out of this world, and parish priests as dictators in their parish. He says that the attitudes to power in the church is part of a large explanation for the church’s inadequate response.
The bishop believes that the reverberations within the church caused by the sexual abuse will continue unless profoundly and radically addressed.
This book, could potentially, be a milestone in the history of Catholicism in Australia. It comes at a time, and calls for a profound self examination, when the organisation is gearing up for World Youth Day, and it can be seen as a full broadside at that such a branding and triumphalist exercise.
Quotations from the Book
‘I have a serious fear that many church leaders are now feeling that the worst of the problem is behind them that is(sic) has been successfully, ‘managed’, and hence that they not need to look at deeper issues. This attitude grossly under-estimates
the negative effects the scandal has had and involves wishful thinking
for the future. Yes, inroads have been made into the backlog of cases that had built up over several decades and some offenders have been deterred, if not by any moral reasons, then by the sheer terror of an of fence being disclosed. But if we remain silent and hope the problem will go away, abuse will continue to occur. One day, sooner or later, the
whole problem must be confronted. Granted the present structures of the church, what we must cry out for is a pope who will say publicly, 'Yes, I am genuinely serious about confronting both abuse and the response to abuse, and I will ruthlessly change whatever needs to be changed in order to overcome both of these problems. Please help me to identify all contributing causes.'
A PERSONAL HISTORY
Before beginning the wider study, I must confess that I am not a purely objective student of this matter.
The years I spent working in the field of sexual abuse had such a profound effect on me because I had myself been sexually abused when I was young. The offender was not a priest or religious, nor any one within the Catholic Church, nor was he a relative. I belonged to that five percent of cases where the offender was a stranger. Neither in my age at the time it happened nor in the duration of the abuse was it as serious as much of the abuse I have encountered in others, and yet, if the man had been caught in anyone of his acts against me, he would have been sent to prison. It was never a repressed memory, but for most of my life it was, as it were, placed in the attic of my mind, that is, I always knew it was there, but I never took it down to look at it.
When, in 1994, I was appointed to an official position in the church's response to abuse, I passed through three stages. In the first stage I tried to act as a good human being, a good Christian, a good priest. I soon realised that this was not enough, so I quickly moved to a second stage of listening to as many victims as I could in order to learn from them. Somewhere in this process I moved to the third stage where what they were feeling and saying stirred strong echoes within my own mind and heart. It was only then, some two years after I had been appointed, and some half a century after it had happened, that I finally took my own history down out of the attic, looked at it again and, for the first time in my life, named it as sexual abuse. With the help of counsellors, I became conscious of some of the effects it had had on me.
Flowing from all of this, my problems with the church's response to the revelations of sexual abuse ran deep and reached up to the high est levels of the church, for I was one of many people crying out for strong and compassionate leadership on this matter and trying to do my best without the support of that leadership. I felt that here was the perfect opportunity for the papacy to fulfill its most basic role of being the rock that holds the church together, but this did not happen, and the church fractured. I found it impossible to accept that I must give 'submission of mind and will' to most words written by a pope, but a failure to give leadership in a crisis seemed to count for little. I felt that the demand was being made that I give my submission to the silence as well as to the words, and I could not do this.
When, in front of several journalists at a public meeting, I an swered a victim's question by saying that I was not happy with the level ofsupport we were receiving from 'Rome', I received an official letter (7 August 1996) expressing 'the ongoing concern of the Congrega tion for Bishops that you have in recent months expressed views that are seriously critical of the magisterial teaching and discipline of the Church.' I was told that 'in a recent audience, the Holy Father has been fully apprised of your public position on these issues and He has shown 'serious preoccupation in your regard.' Two months later (16 October 1996) I received a further letter informing me that 'The rel evant documentation will be forwarded, for its information and review, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith', implying that I was suspected of some form of heresy.
I admit that I felt personally hurt by this criticism of the only truthful reply I could have given to a room full of victims, but it also led me to the conclusion that an authority that had to be defended in a manner as heavy as this must have had serious doubts about its own response to abuse.
There has never been a perfect church and there never will be. I must always work within an imperfect church, and must never forget that I am myself an imperfect member of that imperfect church, contributing my problems and failures as well as my assistance. Some times, however, circumstances can arise where there is only a fine line between accepting that I must work within an imperfect church and becoming complicit in the harm that those imperfections are causing to people.
I eventually came to the point where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could not continue to be a bishop of a church about which I had such profound reservations. I resigned my office as Auxiliary Bishop in Sydney and began to write this book about the very foundations of power and sex within the church.
I believe that in this book I describe a better church, a church that is not contrary to the mind of Jesus Christ. How others will react to the book is up to them, but the case for reform must be most seriously considered, for we must confront all factors that have in any way contributed either to abuse or to the inadequate response to abuse.
THANKS
I acknowledge the assistance of a number of people who have read all or part of a draft of this book and offered valuable comments that saved me from errors and gave greater depth to the book. It says much about the need for change that, in the atmosphere that prevails within the church, I would be creating difficulties for them if I gave their names. They know who I mean, and to each one of them I offer my sincere thanks for their comments and support.’
Click here to order Confronting Power and Sex In the Catholic Church
The Bishops' comment at the BOOK LAUNCH 26thAugust 2007
The Cardinal Secretary of State at the Vatican is usually thought to hold the second highest office in the Catholic Church. The present Secretary, Cardinal Bertone, was a personal appointment by the pope. So it was disheartening when, on a recent visit to the United States, he was asked about sexual abuse and first blamed the media, then greedy lawyers, then said that the Church had “faced this trial with great dignity and courage” and hoped that “other institutions and social agencies will face the same problem with their members with an equal degree of courage and realism as the Catholic Church has done.” I believe that most of the Australian bishops had moved beyond this point more than a decade ago, so it is discouraging to hear that it still prevails at the highest levels. It is a typical example of seeking to manage rather than confront a problem.
At long as the church seeks to manage rather than confront, the devastating effect the scandal has had on the church will continue and will cripple other activities. Of what use is it to proclaim a “new evangelization” to others if we are not seen to have confronted the suppurating ulcer on our body? In all our preaching to others, we would lack credibility. Cardinal Bertone does not seem to realize just how much credibility the church has lost over the last twenty years and how seriously we must act in order to regain it.
Over that time most of the blame has been poured onto the bishops. I am not simply seeking to divert this blame, far less to defend every action of every bishop, if I say that it is important to understand that, within the present structures of the church, the pope alone has the power to confront this problem in its deepest sources.
One must ask, “Where is the papal statement addressed directly to victims, with the word ‘sorry’ proclaimed clearly? Where is the papal promise to investigate every possible source of abuse and ruthlessly to eradicate it? Where is the request to those institutes especially set up to treat offending priests to present their findings on the causes? Where is the request to the bishops to coordinate the studies in their territory and report to Rome? Where is the document placing everything on the table for discussion, including such things as obligatory celibacy and the selection and training of candidates? With power go responsibilities. The pope has many times claimed the power and must accept the corresponding responsibilities.
If you go to Italy, you will not be there long before you meet the two phrases “far bella figura” and “far brutta figura”. Literally they mean “to make a beautiful figure” and “to make an ugly figure”, but are better translated as “keeping up appearances”. In other words, when something is badly wrong, you still present a beautiful exterior, a beautiful figure to outsiders. This mentality goes all the way back to ancient Rome, so it is deeply entrenched, and it is small wonder that it has been present in a church that has its centre in Rome. When one adds to this the rise of papal power in the second millennium, culminating in papal infallibility, with its idea that the pope and the church he rules can never really be wrong, one begins to understand why someone like Cardinal Bertone could still speak in the way he did. The response to abuse was at least as great a scandal as the abuse itself. If we are to overcome it, we must be prepared to put up with a temporary and very brutta figura so that we may eventually create a genuine bella figura.
The danger for bishops today is that they can think that they have done everything that is within their personal power and that the rest is up to the pope, over whom they have no control, so they can and must just get on with their job. It seems to me that bishops and, indeed, all members of the church, still have the most unpleasant, most difficult and most unwelcome task of trying to insist that the pope be the rock a pope is supposed to be in holding the church together. They have to use whatever means they can to convince him that there is a scandal that will cripple all the church’s activities unless and until it is confronted.
This has been the first and major basis for the book that is being launched today, but as I wrote it I realized that there was a second basis.
Protestant churches have always had the weakness that, when controversies arise, there is no authority to hold them together, so they have divided into dozens of churches and literally thousands of sects. Within the Catholic Church, on the other hand, the power of the rock, the pope, has held the church together. Its weakness, however, is that all the divisions do not go away, but are contained within the church. Outsiders frequently have the idea of a monolithic church, with everyone meekly obeying the pope, and they can fail completely to understand just how diverse the church is, just motley a group of people Catholics really are, and how fierce are the divisions and the struggles for power within the church.
I believe that the major division is between the proclaimers of certainties and the seekers after truth.
Of course we need certainties and of course we need a search for truth, but it is possible to put too heavy an accent on either of these elements. Today the proclaimers of certainties seem to be in the favoured position and to hold the reins of power. This has left many people feeling a sense of alienation, of being marginalized, of no longer quite belonging to the church that had given them much of their sense of belonging, meaning and direction throughout their lives. This feeling has strengthened sense of needing to search for truth.
In writing the book I became aware that I was writing a book for these people, that I was trying to tell them that there is a church for them and that it is fully in accord with the mind of Jesus. I was telling them that there are basic certainties, but there is also abundant room for search, for taking personal responsibility and growing through that process to become all we are capable of being, all God wants us to be.
I became aware that it was important for many people that there should be a bishop saying these things. At moments I felt that the needs of these many people were so great that it is perhaps true that I have never been more of a shepherd, I have never been more justified in carrying around a pastoral staff, than I have in this. If the book carries an important message to these people, then I shall be delighted.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as this, for I feel that the major differences between the proclaimers of certainties and the seekers after truth are not religious or theological, but psychological. For reasons in their background and upbringing or within their personality, many people need certainties. In a world in which, as Alvin Toffler still teaches us, change is the only constant, this need can be profound. I may argue with a person’s theology, but I cannot argue with their psychological needs.
Surely the answer has to lie in dialogue and mutual respect, and we have a long way to go. We must get away from the idea that the side with which I disagree must do all the changing and come to me, and see instead that both sides need to reach out. I hope that I have given some indications of the lines the dialogue might follow.
I express my sincere thanks to those people who read either the whole or different parts of drafts of the book and offered me their comments. They greatly helped me to avoid some basic errors and to have greater consistency in the book. I would love to name them, but the unfortunate reality is that that might not help them.
I thank Garry Eastman for the risk he took when overseas publishers would not take up the book. I thank him for his support for me and the wholehearted manner in which he has sought to promote the book. I thank Cathy Oliver, the editor, who was patient with me and helped my writings to look more like a consistent book. In the last two weeks I thank Debbie McInnes for her expertise in guiding me through my dealings with the media. I thank Michael Whelan, Catalyst for Renewal and the Aquinas Academy for hosting this gathering. I thank my brothers and sisters and my many friends for their support for me, whatever the circumstances.
I thank all of you for coming here this afternoon and supporting me by your presence. I hope that the book in some manner speaks to your own needs and longings, both psychological and spiritual.
Career of Bishop Geoffrey Robinson according to the Diocesan Website
Auxiliary Bishop 1984-2004
Geoff Robinson was born on 10 August 1937 in Richmond, the son of Alexander and Kathleen Robinson. He was educated at St Joseph’s College, Hunters Hill and Marist Brothers, Hunters Hill. He studied at St Columba’s College, Springwood and Urbaniana University, Rome (DCL), and was ordained to the Priesthood on 21 December 1960. Fr Robinson served as an assistant priest in the parishes of Croydon, Lindfield and Northbridge, and on the staff of the Catholic Institute of Sydney as a lecturer in Canon Law from 1967-1983. He also served on the Archdiocesan Marriage Tribunal and was secretary (1969-1976) and President (1976-1983) of the Canon Law Society. He was Consecrated Titular Bishop of Rusuca and Auxiliary Bishop to Archbishop of Sydney on 8 March 1984 at St Mary’s Cathedral. He published Marriage, Divorce & Nullity: A Guide to the Annulment Process in the Catholic Church in 1984. He enjoys listening to classical music.
By taking a proactive role in devising processes within the Church for the prevention of sexual abuse, he has made an enormous contribution world-wide towards raising the consciousness of Church leaders to their responsibilities in this very difficult and sensitive area, and to developing appropriate and compassionate pastoral responses to those who have been hurt. He is the foundation chair of Encompass Australasia, a psychosexual programme established in 1997 jointly by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes for Church personnel who were guilty of offences against children or of adult boundary violations. He has overseen the development of Encompass to provide specialist psychological services for people in helping professions struggling with psychological issues or wanting to enhance their ability to live life with vitality.
As chair of the Sydney Archdiocesan Catholic Schools Board, a position he has held since 1986, Bishop Robinson has taken a vitally active interest in the ongoing education of teachers in Catholic Schools, particularly in the field of Sacred Scripture. Consciously setting out to promote among teachers a level of Biblical literacy equal to their literacy in other areas of their lives, he presented a series of lectures on St Mark’s Gospel. These were so well received that he expanded on them and made them accessible to a wider audience through a book called: A Change of Mind and Heart: The Good News According to Mark. The book has been acclaimed for its fresh and imaginative approach to the study of this Gospel. A later book, Travels in Sacred Places published in 1997 explores questions about religious experiences in our lives that are often taken for granted, such as: What sort of God do we believe in? What sense are we to make of good and evil? How do we respond to God in our day-to-day lives?
He has served for many years as the Chairman of the Catholic Education Commission, NSW and has worked extensively in the fields of Catholic Education, Ecumenism, Canon Law and professional standards in ministry. He was instrumental in organising the highly acclaimed Confirmation 2000 and Confirmation 2005 events. In March 2004, the Australian Catholic University awarded him with an honorary Doctor of the University in recognition of his work in the Towards Healing process.
The Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, accepted Bishop Robinson's retirement on 15 July 2004, due to ill-health.