MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA)
The New Daily
July 9, 2019
By Garry Linnell
We went because of the kid. He’s only 11 years old, this godson of ours, still in the last days of innocence, that wonderful time before voices break and pimples erupt with the fury of Mount Vesuvius to herald entry into a harsher, more complicated world.
His mother is a lapsed churchgoer. No longer believes in the Old Man upstairs.
But she wanted her son confirmed as a Catholic in an understandable nod to family tradition and, more importantly, to ensure he remains in the warm bosom of a heavily subsidised private school.
So there we were, hundreds crammed into an old church, gulping fumes of sickly sweet incense while a two-hour Mass celebrated the confirmation of dozens of young boys and girls.
As it finally drew to a close, a familiar sound woke many of us from our Sunday afternoon stupor. It wasn’t the angelic voices of the choir. Not even a few Latin sentences mumbled by a tuneless bishop.
Nay, it was the sound of cash registers.
It was time for the collection plates to do the rounds. Except these were no ordinary plates. These had nets attached, some so large they must have been borrowed from passing fishing trawlers.
Been a while since the old church had enjoyed a full house like this and despite having staged Mass at least twice that day, this was an opportunity too good to pass up.
But as the day’s catch of coins and notes began to grow, I sat firmly on my wallet. I don’t mind giving. But handing over cash to a tax-exempt organisation with an estimated $30 billion Australian property portfolio?
Blindly donating to an institution that provides little transparency on how it spends the dough?
Problem is, I’ve seen where some of it goes.
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