NEW ZEALAND
NZ Catholic
by ROWENA OREJANA
AUCKLAND — Clericalism is at the heart of the sexual abuse issue that has plagued the Catholic Church in Australia.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge told more than 100 priests of Auckland diocese that there is a “whirlpool effect” in the Australian Catholic Church, and the two powerful cross-currents at work are: the Royal Commission, and Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation,Evangelii Gaudium.
“A strange point of convergence [between the two cross-currents] is … what is often called clericalism. [Clericalism] is somehow central to the cultural difficulties, or the cultural
phenomena that enabled abuse to happen,” he said. “Somehow, we thought the law doesn’t apply to us.”
In the priests’ reflection of what clericalism is, Fr Anthony Malone provided a definition that his group, which included Auckland Bishop Patrick Dunn, came up with.
“We said it is focused on status, the misuse of power, and it’s allowing people to make others elite and allowing those people to see themselves as elite. They are aloof and non-available, and the opposite of that is total service,” explained Fr Malone.
Archbishop Coleridge agreed. “The power is certainly entrusted to the ordained. But how do you use the power: to create or to destroy? That’s when power is dangerous, and religious
power can be particularly dangerous. That is one of the things that emerges very clearly in these cases of sexual abuse,” he said.
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