AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times
December 22, 2012
Richard Wynne
A FRIEND came to my office unannounced recently. He is someone I see infrequently, although our work, political and social lives intersect. He arrived with a two-page, tightly written letter that was shocking and distressing. It was a chronology of the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church, things he had not spoken about or acknowledged for more than 40 years.
To understand the insidious nature of systemic abuse, in all its forms, we need to acknowledge the power the Catholic Church exerted over its congregations. My experience and that of my friend, growing up in poor Catholic families, was that the church was inviolate. The ancient rituals of the Latin Mass (such a foreign and inaccessible ceremony); our duty to attend every Sunday; the annual St Patrick’s Day parade through the city, marching like a battalion in school uniform behind the open-top Rolls-Royce of Archbishop Mannix; and locally the unquestioned authority vested in the parish priest – all symbols of the church’s power and control over our daily lives.
It was simply inconceivable that you would complain or seek redress, let alone question what was occurring, particularly if you were a child. The church was all-pervasive, prepared to intervene in our communities’ spiritual and political life without invitation or accountability. I well recall heated arguments in my home between my father and his brother over the Labor Party split, a political divide that lives on today between me and my cousin.
I was the victim of systematic physical beatings at the hands of the Christian Brothers. I was violently strapped so many times I could not hold a pen for days. These actions went unchallenged.
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