AUSTRALIA
Financial Review
Gerard Windsor
The royal commission into child abuse will investigate the failure of all institutions. At the beginning of last week this was far from clear; on ABC TV’s 7.30 Leigh Sales pugnaciously (or was she just throwing a well-disguised Dorothy Dixer?) asked Labor senator Chris Evans, “Why shouldn’t the Royal Commission be restricted to the Catholic Church?” Certainly it was the crimes of Catholics that brought the commission into being, and at least one priest has claimed that his church has been the main offender.
That, of course, remains to be seen. There is a suspicion that this grim honour might go to indigenous communities. Possibly the commission will not go there; if it does it will be treading on eggshells.
For the moment Catholics are the main persons of interest. If the commission is to be not merely retributive, its shaking up and improvement of Australian society will also have to make Catholicism a better institution. At the time of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, a buzz phrase to describe what was happening was ecclesia semper reformanda – the church always in need of reform.
In the intervening years the phrase has rather fallen into disuse. But it has now punched its way back with a disconcerting new twist to its meaning. A church in need of reform, not just self-administered, but reform forced on it from outside.
Catholicism’s wrongdoing has been twofold – the sexual abuse itself and then the failure to deal with it justly and effectively. Each of these failures is intricately tangled up with defining characteristics of Catholic culture. Perhaps there’s some visibility through the murk if we understand these contexts. The first is the Church’s attitude to sexuality. All human beings can be presumed to have problems with sex, but Catholicism’s are particularly knotty. For two millenniums the model has been virginity, whereas sexuality and its expression is a degradation of the human ideal. If you can emancipate yourself from sex, the thinking goes, you’ve distanced yourself from the animals, and you’ve moved that much closer to the angels, a superior species. This is not hyperbole. The evidence stretches all the way back to Paul’s Epistles, and a rethinking of the theology of it all would require a massive shift.
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