The Moment I Gave up on the Catholic Church
Daily Telegraph
Sounds a bit bah-humbug, doesn’t it? Stick with me for a sec. I love Midnight Mass, although I’m not a Catholic, and I’ve been going along for about 20 years at Christmas, although I always have to go by myself because nobody in the family will come. For me, it’s not Christmas till I’ve sung Silent Night by candlelight. The Catholics do it better than anyone. In my 20 years of solo Christmas Eve action, I’ve attended all kinds of denominations and churches for Christmas Eve services, and I must admit: there’s nothing like the Catholic St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney City for incense and Latin and blokes shuffling round in frocks — all the essential ingredients for a real feeling of festivity. I love the little families; Italians and Croats and Filipinos and Vietnamese, all crowded in to St Mary’s, getting hotter and hotter as the evening progresses. I love the sleepy babies and the toddlers, wriggling and itching in their starchy new Christmas outfits. In the time I’ve been visiting, the Church has seen an incredible revival. 20 years ago, I could always find a seat. Now, it’s standing room only, with crowds spilling out onto College Street, from an hour before kick-off. George Pell did that. Something about the Cardinal’s American Eagle properness and insistence on the pillars of conservative Catholic thought resonated with people in this, our tolerant, egalitarian city. I guess, like me, enough of them liked the incense and Latin. Maybe they thought Pell’s certain conservatism was reassuring in an uncertain world. Maybe they believed, unlike his many detractors, that Pell was a fundamentally decent man who has been courageous in speaking up for the poor and the needy. Maybe they thought all the drama of Mass was OK as a symbol of the Church’s greatest qualities: charity, mercy, humanity. Anyway, on this particular evening a few years ago, the Mass had been rumbling along for an hour or so when it came time for Pell and the other priests to make a grand procession of sorts up the aisle. They were carrying jewelled crosses, swinging clouds of smoke from their censers, holding bibles. And then came one priest carrying, with great reverence and solemnity, a glittering pillow upon which wobbled a doll with rosy cheeks. It was supposed to be the baby Jesus. The baby doll looked like plaster, and it looked like it had been sprayed with gold paint. It was wearing some kind of loincloth, presumably also made of plaster. It was absolutely ridiculous. Suddenly, they all looked ludicrous, from Pell down. It was an Emperor’s New Clothes moment. Here they were, a bunch of adult men standing six foot (or more, in Pell’s case), commanding the captivated attention of a thousand beautiful (real) children and their patient parents, eager to hear the transformative and magical message of Jesus Christ’s birth for the salvation of all mankind — and these blokes were parading a toy on a cushion. I got up and walked out. And I was struck by a feeling I’ve never been able to shake: this is the Catholic hierarchy’s great limitation. It is carrying on with the same arrogance it’s been enjoying since the Middle Ages, when all the pomp was designed to terrify the paupers into behaving. For a thousand years, nobody dared to say: “Mate, you look stupid carrying that dolly around.” Now plenty of people are saying it. They’re demanding to know why the Church isn’t a proper legal entity that can be sued for the horrific wrongs some of its officials inflicted on innocent children. They want to know what’s happened to those messages of peace, kindness and charity when the Church is flapping around, wasting precious time trying to stop women being ordained, or gay people marrying. They want to know why it’s apparently so quick to betray the principles Jesus taught us when it comes to confronting the hard truth about its own failings. I want to know all that too. But most of all I want to know this: if Cardinal Pell claims to be so willing to co-operate with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, why wasn’t he on the first plane home from Rome to show the Commission and the victims some real respect? How could he think a statement could possibly suffice? Why, given he finds the abuse of children so abhorrent, wasn’t he doing something about it in the 1980s? Why hasn’t he vowed to hunt down paedophiles wherever they lurk and expel them from the Church? Why is he still allowing the good works of Catholics to be besmirched by criminal rock-spiders? Because I, for one, can only cop the baby-doll antics if they really symbolise something meaningful: something I can really put my faith in.
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