StemCell Therapy

Somewhere in an album at Mum's place there's a photo of me kneeling in front of George Pell as I'm confirmed an adult in the Catholic Church.

It was taken in 1994, when I was 11 years old.Pell was the local regional bishop, based in Mentone.I remember him speaking to the class beforehand about footy and the Richmond Tigers, about which I knew and cared little.

My real interests were in history and politics.The intersection of those topics with religion is what continued to fascinate me well into adulthood, even as my Mass-going waned.

I was fascinated by stories of the ALP Split, of Bob Santamaria and the Movement (some of whose principal figures lined up in the same parish each week to take communion).

I ended up writing a PhD thesis on a voluntary association of clergy known as the National Council of Priests, which sprang up in Australia in the aftermath of Vatican II and associated events such as the moratorium movement.The NCP is a moderately conservative group of men and it comprises about half of all the Catholic priests in Australia, including bishops.

It's had two principal aims during its nearly 50 years of existence: first, to unite the clergy during a period of rapid change and, second, to Australianise Catholicism to make it a religion of this land and its people, more so than a Roman branch office or, in Patrick White's words, an Ireland of the South Pacific.

Borrowing from CJ Dennis, I called that thesis The Sacramental Bloke.

Get the latest news and updates emailed straight to your inbox.

In researching the story of the NCP, it became evident that there were strong subterranean movements taking place within the church during the 1970s, eighties and nineties.

At one level, this coincided with broader changes in Australia that included women's liberation, gay lib, state aid for Catholic schools, no-fault divorce, decriminalised abortion, legislation for women's equal pay, the AIDS crisis and so on.

Pell is part of a movement within the church that views some of these developments as expressions of "modernism", which it regards with extreme suspicion.

That faction within the church has its roots in the 1940s and fifties, when Australia was in the midst of the Cold War and the great fight that was taking place in domestic politics was between Communists and anti-Communists for control of the ALP.

Such was the acrimony created by this movement that the Vatican intervened to sort out the situation in 1957, declaring that the church had no place in officially involving itself in electoral politics.

But significantly for this story, that movement never went away.

It just went underground, transmuting itself through various guises such as the National Civic Council, the Australian Family Association and the opinion pages of The Daily Telegraph.

For Catholics within those groups, and those who supported them, such as George Pell, the great test to be applied to any co-religionist during the 1980s and 1990s was fidelity to Rome.

At a time during which non-traditional practices of sex and gender had become visible and their supporters loud, the test for theological conservatives within the church was about how strongly one supported and promoted the Roman line: no to contraceptives in marriage, no to homosexuals in the priesthood and no to married clergy or women priests.

The great irony here is that facilitating a wider discussion of human sexuality in all its forms would have allowed for homosexuals and celibates (including priests) to raise their voices and to be seen as leading legitimate lives of their own choosing.

Instead, just as the first clerics were being charged with sexual abuse offences, Melbourne Catholics were dished up documents by Pell such as "Why Can't Catholic Women be Priests?" (1993).

At the time, a sympathetic bishop advised members of the NCP to refrain from responding to Pell's publication "as Bishop Pell does have a certain following".

In seemingly keeping a lid on any real discussion of sexuality in the church, it became easy for those of a traditionalist bent to associatehomosexuality with paedophilia, just as the rest of society started to associated celibacy with sexual abuse.

The net effect was to make all clergy seem aberrant and potentially dangerous.

There is a real danger here that if we remain ignorant of the way that Pell and his supporters responded to broader changes in church and society, we can become too smug about the position he now finds himself in.

We can continue to buy into the cheap notion that the church is some sort of evil institution staffed by a quackish bunch of freaks and weirdos.

Or we can start to have an open discussion about sexuality, gender and the abuses that humans continue to perpetrate on one another well beyond institutional settings.

We owe that to the many victims out there who do not have a royal commission on their side, whose attackers are going about their business as respectable citizens today, safe in the knowledge that they will probably never be brought to justice.

Dr Damien Williams is an adjunct research fellow at the Centre for Religious Studies at Monash University.

Originally posted here:
Denialism and blindness en masse - The Sydney Morning Herald

This entry was posted on June 30, 2017 at 12:44 am and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |