UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Tom Roberts | Mar. 17, 2014

MELBOURNE AND SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA More than a hundred people turned out on a Sunday afternoon in late November to the crypt of historic St. Patrick’s Church in Sydney for a presentation by a forensic psychologist on the sex abuse scandal jarring the Catholic community in Australia.

During a question-and-answer session, a woman in the audience made a sarcastic reference to priests once thinking they were “ontologically different.” The phrase provoked an immediate howl of laughter, as if she’d delivered a punch line of a joke.

This over-50 (and probably well over-60) crowd, the equivalent of a Call to Action gathering in the United States, represents the very generation raised on such notions of clerical superiority and priestly otherness. It is the same generation that, in terms of numbers of priests, nuns and people in the pews, had brought…