Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church

Saturday August 16, 2008

On “Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church—Reclaimng the Spirit of Jesus” By Bishop Geoffrey Robinson. The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN 2008.

As many of you know, Bishop Robinson,retired Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Australia, spoke to about 250 members of the North Jerscy Chapter of the Voice of the Faithful in Morristown on May 21, 2008.

At the risk of succumbing to the ‘name-dropping’ syndrome, I had the honor and pleasure to spend some informal time with Bishop Robinson at the home of my good friends, Anthony and Theresa Padovano on the morning following his outstanding presentation.

However, I think it is important that I present a portrait of this extraordinarily brave bishop of the Roman Catholic Church before reviewing his courageous book.

What struck me during his presentation and during our extensive visit the next morning over tea was his reserved demeanor. His gentlemanly qualities and above all, his deep humility belied any image of celebrity that often accompanies an ecclesiastical figure in the ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He is a man of deep simplicity and obvious spiritual fervor. It is not his interest to make a name for himself but to engage the church in conversation at whatever level possible. He constantly states that almost incessantly: “I’m not here to challenge church authorities but to engaged my brothers and sisters in conversation about matters that are important to the whole Church.” These is my interpretation of his words spoken during his verbal presentation on the 21st.

When asked over and over about specific changes that should be implemented as part of Church reform, such as a married clergy including women’s ordination, he responded gently that although he had no objection to either, it was his intent to ask for conversation about these and other issues at a mature spiritual level so that the Church could indeed arrive at a new truth that may indeed include an expanded view on these and other issues.

His main point, however, based on his experience in dealing with clergy abuse in Australia (that he noted was not as numerous as in the United States for not other reason than the fact that the U.S. Catholic population is so much higher) the underlying cause is not sex but the abuse of power. This is not to minimize the terrible damage that unbridled sexual abuse has caused but to emphasize that the misuse of Church authority has resulted in the distortion of the role of sex in world, in the church and in the human psyche.

Readers may find Robinson’s book tedious in spots but readers should persevere. It is a book that must be read by every serious Catholic who is committed to the survival of the Church.

Because others have done a magnificent job in presented a more detailed review of “Confronting Power and Sex in the Roman Catholic Church—Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus,” I will defer to these reviewers by posting them below.

Father Lasch

The first review comes from the Los Angeles Times, dated June 27, 2008:

Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church
Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus
By Bishop Geoffrey Robinson
Liturgical Press: 308 pp., $24.95 paper

A retired prelate tackles the underlying causes of the clergy sexual-abuse scandal.

Reviewed by William Lobdell, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 27, 2008

It was easy to let my imagination run wild about “Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus,” written by retired prelate Geoffrey Robinson, auxiliary Catholic bishop of Sydney, Australia, for two decades.

The book has generated swift reaction and harsh words from leaders in the Roman Catholic Church. Robinson’s fellow bishops in Australia labeled his positions problematic, claiming that his views question “the authority of the Catholic Church to teach the truth definitively.”

And the Vatican and a dozen American bishops — including Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, Tod Brown of Orange and Robert Brom of San Diego — recently asked him not to speak out on his book tour lest he “be a source of disunity and cause of confusion among the faithful,” in Brown’s words. (He ignored their wishes.)

With that dramatic buildup, reading the first few chapters of Robinson’s book was like watching a horror movie where the spooky music swells as someone slowly opens a closet door, only to find no monster there.

It’s a little disappointing, because the boogeyman created by church leaders turns out to be a thoughtful, gentle, humble theologian and canon lawyer with a deep love and respect for the church. His scary ideas that caused so much consternation within the Vatican and among fellow bishops can be boiled down to one premise: The church needs to understand and address the root causes of the clergy sexual abuse scandal in order to heal itself.

The only scary part of the story is that Robinson, himself a victim of sexual abuse as a child (not by a cleric), stands virtually alone among the world’s Roman Catholic bishops in openly questioning a system that has resulted in thousands of children being molested and raped and the crimes of the perpetrator priests being covered up by church leaders.

Under an avalanche of lawsuits and media coverage, Robinson’s colleagues (surrounded by a battery of attorneys and public relations specialists) were forced to enact reforms such as not allowing priests who had molested to serve in ministry. But the underlying causes have, for the most part, not been addressed.

In “Confronting Power,” Robinson explores how the church could get it so wrong.

As the title suggests, Robinson believes the molestation scandal was the result of an abuse of power and sex. He argues that the church over the centuries has concentrated too much authority within the clergy and especially within the papacy — leaving no room for debate on church teachings that, in theory, could be changed.

He says Catholics suffer from the doctrine of “creeping infallibility,” where declarations by the pope are thought of as infallible — and therefore not open to discussion — though they don’t officially carry the label of “papal infallibility.” (The concept of papal infallibility wasn’t introduced until 1870, and the only infallible statement issued by a pope was in 1950 when Pius XII declared that Mary, upon her death, was assumed bodily into heaven.)

Robinson, who handled sexual abuse claims in Australia from 1994 to 2004, said creeping infallibility effectively stops even a discussion on issues that may have caused the sexual abuse scandal, including mandatory celibacy and an all-male priesthood.

Reliance on direction from the pope is so strong, Robinson argues, that when Pope John Paul II was silent on the emerging sexual abuse scandal, his bishops and priests believed the church wanted them to continue to manage the problem as they had been.

Robinson writes: “I am convinced that if the pope had spoken clearly at the beginning of the revelations, inviting victims to come forward so that the whole truth, however terrible, might be known and confronted, and firmly directing that all members of the church should respond with openness, humility, honesty and compassion, consistently putting victims before the good name of the church, the entire response of the church would have been far better.”

A multitiered system of checks and balances that includes the pope, bishops, priests and the laity would allow the church to escape its self-built “prison of the past,” Robinson writes, and face the idea that it may be time to revise certain church teachings, including on aspects of sexuality and a celibate priesthood.

“Far too often the Catholic Church has believed that it had such a level of divine guidance that it did not need the right to be wrong,” Robinson writes.

“As a result, both theologically and psychologically it can be bound to decisions of the past.”

Overall, Robinson’s book reads like a paper written by a Catholic policy wonk rather than 95 theses nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany.

He’s careful to build his case, giving historical context that may be too basic for many Catholics. He also lays out his vision of a reformed church in so much detail that it tends to read like the first draft of a memo.

Many critics will label Robinson a liberal, and that’s fair enough. But he’s not a heretic. He doesn’t challenge church doctrine deemed immutable (such as the statements of faith contained in the Nicene Creed).

Many of his ideas call for a return to earlier days when the power in the church was less centralized. In that way, he could be considered a conservative.

What makes Robinson’s book such a threat to the church’s hierarchy is that it contains a historically sound, common-sense approach to reforming the church by reducing and checking the power and authority of the papacy and priesthood and allowing the laity to be part of the decision-making process.

It will be surprising to many readers that this modest book from an obscure publisher has generated such a disproportionate response from the Catholic hierarchy.

But then again, a call for openness, debate and sharing of authority can be very dangerous to those in power.

William Lobdell spent eight years on the religion beat for The Times. His memoir, “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Covering Religion in America,” will be published in February.

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What follows is a very insightful commentary by noted U.S. canonist, Rev. Thomas Doyle, O.P., It specifies for Americans the nuances that are particular to this country. Tom is colleague and personal friend to me and to numerous victims struggling to become survivors. His comments are extensive and more will be posted on this website on other pages.

GATHERING WITH BISHOP GEOFF ROBINSON Monday, June 9, 2008 in La Jolla, California

Reflections – Thomas P Doyle, O.P., J.C.D., C.A.D.C.

1. Geoff Robinson’s US speaking tour presented an opportunity for a meeting with some of the attorneys who have been deeply involved in the clergy sex abuse crisis in the U.S. as well as some of the experts who have be part of the overall response to this crisis.

Some of us originally hoped that we would be able to provide Geoff with significant factual information on the U.S. bishops’ response to the crisis. We hoped he might be able to take this information and share it with higher ranking officials in the Vatican curia. This hope was born from our realization that the Vatican’s information sources are limited for the most part to bishops whose reports are understandably subjective and inaccurate.

We began with this hope, however our expectations were changed once we had conversed with Geoff and had realized that he is clearly not an “insider” in the hierarchy and certainly not the Vatican. The U.S. papal nuncio had asked Geoff to cancel his tour. The prefect of the Congregation for the Bishops, Cardinal Giovanni Re, had initiated the move to try to convince Geoff not to speak. The archbishops and bishops of every diocese where Geoff was scheduled to speak sent letters which were made public. These letters were consistent in saying the same thing: a) Geoff was not allowed to speak in any Catholic building in the diocese, b) He should cancel his entire speaking tour, c) His book is causing confusion among the laity and disunity.

Geoff did not cancel his tour. He maintained the original speaking schedule with the talks being given in venues that were not controlled by the Catholic Church. In the west the secular press provided excellent coverage however their primary interest was the “dispute” as they saw it, between Bishop Robinson and Cardinal Mahony. Geoff took the “high road” and did not respond directly to any invitations by media to escalate the “dispute.” Geoff expressed it thus: he is here to speak about clerical sexual abuse and the need to explore two areas of systemic causality: the exercise of power by Church authorities and the official teaching on sex and sexuality. He was not here to engage in a dispute with Cardinal Mahony or any other hierarch. Throughout his visit to the U.S. his conversations with the media were consistently dignified, insightful and forthright.

In his public talks and in his remarks at the meeting with the attorneys and experts he repeated that Pope John Paul II had not shown adequate leadership in the sex abuse crisis. This assessment was a refreshingly honest affirmation for those of us who have believed that the late pope not only showed inadequate leadership, but no leadership at all. He also shared some of his personal experiences in getting to know victims and their families in Australia which led him to put the welfare of the victims above the image of the Church. He repeated this sentiment in his public talk by stating that he chose to stand with the victims and not with the image of the institutional church. He also revealed much of his own personal story and provided a great deal of detailed information about how the Australian Church has responded to the sexual abuse problem.

2. There are significant differences between the Australian and U.S. experience. The variance in numbers of Catholics, bishops and priests is itself impressive. Geoff said there are 42 active bishops in Australia and he believed he could speak with and communicate with 30 of them. The comparison between the two countries is striking:

AustraliaU.S.A.

Dioceses32194
Total priests 311544,000
Total bishops55486
Cardinals117

% of total population 27%23%

N.B. The listing of bishops includes retired bishops and auxiliary bishops. Presently Australia has 6 active auxiliary bishops and a total of 19 retired bishops. 3. The attorneys and experts shared their experiences in dealing with bishops and superiors of religious orders in the United States. There is a common element that is obvious from the remarks of all: the U.S. bishops appear to be working in concert to resist any and all attempts at monetary settlements arrived at through the civil court system. The bishops do not seem to have developed any appreciable degree of pastoral sensitivity towards the victims or towards their families and loved ones. There are numerous examples of how bishops and their attorneys have lied, manipulated the civil law system, savaged victims, their witnesses and their attorneys and mislead the public through their public statements though which they try to appear contrite, concerned and sympathetic. In stark contrast to the image the church’s public relations people are spinning, there is the harsh reality of an institution that continues to use its power and resources to thwart justice, devalue and even destroy victims and to snuff out any attempt by priests or even bishops to call for justice and pastoral sensitivity. The civil processes have been drawn out and very costly because of the commitment of the church’s attorneys to use every possible tactic to resist disclosure of pertinent documents. In the course of these processes the victims were generally treated as the enemies of the Church. In a number of cases the victims’ (plaintiffs’) attorneys have been subjected to both public and private slanderous attacks by Church officials and/or their attorneys. The bishops have also resorted to the use of various means of character assassination of plaintiff attorneys and witnesses. They have also tried to stir up animosity toward victims who have received settlements by insinuating or saying outright that church closures, budget cutbacks and other financial problems are due to forced payments.

4. Some of the attorneys and experts are baptized Catholics who had been involved in varying degrees with the life of the Catholic Church. The involvement with victims and the direct experiences with the institutional church have left deep spiritual scars for many. The experience of the attorneys present reflects that of many attorneys who were not present: representing victims of sexual abuse and seeing first-hand the response of bishops and cardinals has caused a serious crisis of belief. Many have simply abandoned any involvement with the institutional Church in their private lives and some have gone even further and have seriously questioned the validity of most or all of the teachings of the institutional Church. Some have also radically altered their belief in God. The spiritual devastation has extended far beyond that of the victims. It has touched persons who have had no firsthand experience with clergy sexual abuse and has certainly impacted many who have been directly involved, even if for a short time.

5. There was a general opinion among all that it is hopeless to expect the bishops to change their approach. A few bishops have met with victims and a few of the diocesan review boards have left positive impressions on victims. In general however the experience in speaking with bishops, with diocesan review boards or with victim outreach coordinators has not been positive. In a significant number of cases the victims and their attorneys have been savaged by the Church authorities and by the church lawyers.

6. The Vatican officials do not have an accurate understanding of the nature of clergy sexual abuse and the impact on victims and their families. They do not comprehend how extensive abuse is throughout the U.S. The Bishops’ Conference (USCCB) has concentrated on self-protection. It has issued reports and created certain administrative structures such as the National Review Board and Office of Child Protection. These do not report to the Catholic people in general but to the bishops. It appears that their primary focus is enabling the bishops in maintaining their image.

7. Bishop Robinson shared in some detail his own experiences with victims. He was selected by the Australian Bishops to be their representative to the victims. He has met with and spent significant time with hundreds of victims and with their families. These experiences caused him to come to grips with his own experience of sexual abuse as a young boy. As he listened more and more and probed into the meaning of sexual abuse he concluded that the systemic causes required an honest and fearless look at the use of power in the Church as well as the approach to human sexuality. He is well aware that his statements have caused concern on the part of Vatican officials. He stated privately and publicly that he believes we must address the problem honestly and follow the arguments wherever they may go.

8. The discussion centered on our shared experiences with clergy sex abuse victims. We also discussed some of the financial mismanagement and duplicity perpetrated by Church officials. Bishop Robinson expressed his surprise at the extent of financial impropriety. He also admitted that he was quite surprised at the consistent problems we have encountered with U.S. bishops and their response to clergy abuse. Bishop Robinson admitted that he found it difficult to believe that the U.S. bishops have acted as they have. We assured him that we respected and understood his feelings but admitted that we found it equally difficult to believe that a group of bishops, in this case the Australians, had not acted irresponsibly and even maliciously in their response to the crisis. Our collective experiences have been quite different from his experiences in Australia. He made it clear to us that he did not disbelieve anything he had heard but was finding it difficult to assimilate it all.

9. Bishop Robinson does not believe that the Vatican will ever respond as they should. In spite of the pope’s words and gestures on his recent (April) visit to the U.S., it is highly unlikely that Benedict XVI will take any action against any bishop who had either been an abuser himself or had intentionally enabled cleric-abusers. We shared in the conviction that the Vatican and the pope will never take the action that is needed. Some of us may have found the pope’s recent words and gestures somewhat responsive but the real proof will be in the follow-up actions and not the words. Thus far there has been no evidence that the U.S bishops have taken to heart the pope’s admonition that the bishops do everything possible to help the victims. There also has been no evidence that the pope has taken any decisive actions to see that his words are followed by the bishops.

10. We concluded by sharing the hope that our mutual support and collaboration will serve to help us protect children and vulnerable adults from abuse in the future. We also shared the hope that our mutual support will provide some degree of hope for those who have worked long and hard for justice for victims and accountability by the bishops.

11. Bishop Robinson spoke to a full house at the University of California in San Diego Faculty Club on Tuesday, June 10. His talk was forthright, refreshing and inspiring. I had heard him in Washington D.C. at the beginning of his tour and it was obvious that he was re-shaping his remarks to reflect what he was learning along the way. He clearly repeated that he believed Pope John Paul II had not provided leadership and cited the cases of Maciel Degollado and Cardinal Groer as examples of inaction. He also clearly supported the elimination of Statues of Limitation. He is not picking fights with anyone in the U.S. hierarchy or in the Vatican because that is not his purpose. Rather, he is committed to charity and justice for the victims of clergy sex abuse and has the wisdom to realize that the root causes are systemic and the courage to stand tall in the face of Vatican and U.S. hierarchical opposition and call for the search for truth wherever that search may take us.

12. Without wanting to sound arrogant or smug, I believe that those of us who have been on the inside of the clerical world have a more painful appreciation of Geoff Robinson’s witness to the victims, their supporters, Catholics and the public in general. He had been in the seminary system and therefore the clerical world since age 12. He spent over a decade of his life studying in Rome without the opportunity to return to visit his homeland. He was named a bishop in 1984 and at that time entered the inner circle of the clerical-hierarchical elite. Nearly all of his years as a bishop have been during the pontificate of John Paul II who insisted on total personal loyalty from bishops and unquestioning assent to his version of orthodoxy. Truly, the clerical world has been Geoff Robinson’s past, present and future. It was profoundly instrumental in forging his identity and value system. With this contextual background his public witness is nothing short of amazing and even shocking. While many bishops have agreed with him and have privately criticized the Church’s and the Vatican’s response to the abuse crisis, only two have publicly spoken out clearly and unequivocally, Tom Gumbleton and Geoff Robinson. Both have incurred an official rebuke from the Vatican and both have been left to stand alone by their “brother” bishops. Geoff (and Tom as well) has stood strong in spite of the public opposition of the bishops of Australia, the U.S. and the Vatican. He has not only publicly sided with the victims but he has called into question two of the pillars that support the hierarchical world of image and control: the exercise of power and the traditional understanding of human sexuality.

13. To fully appreciate Geoff’s challenge one must understand that the hierarchical governmental system with its monarchical style and appended aristocracy is officially taught to be of divine origin. In plain English this means that the Higher Power, the creator and sustainer of the universe, had decided about 2000 years ago that “He” would communicate with humankind through a male and celibate dominated power structure that would be essentially stratified but also contradictory to the words and actions of the embodiment of this Higher Power in human history, namely Jesus Christ. Christ, on the one hand made it quite clear that he had no use for arrogant churchmen and that his Father’s love extended equally to the marginalized and disenfranchised as well as to the privileged. Yet the institutional Church wishes us to believe that on the other hand Jesus decided to start up a church that would be run like monarchy with people whom God loved more in leadership positions over those whom He loved a little less, namely the “lower” clergy and the laity.

14. By calling into question the Church’s use of power Geoff has challenged not only the political structure of the Church but the very belief that this structure was founded by God and therefore must be retained without question.

15. The institutional Church has consistently resisted any questioning of its interpretation of the meaning of human sexuality. There are two kinds of sex: procreational sexual intercourse by married people which is acceptable, though virginity is better, and every other conceivable kind of sexual expression, gesture or thought which is gravely sinful. The Church’s sexual teaching has been controlled by male celibate clerics who are forbidden to have any experience with it yet who believe have the God-given calling to dictate to everyone else, including married people, the when, how and why of sex. With the Church’s history of a distorted and misshapen philosophy of human sexuality as a backdrop, Geoff’s challenge is nothing short of an astounding prophetic gesture.

16. I have found it difficult if not impossible to conceive of the office of bishop as being divinely inspired and created and equally impossible to believe that individual bishops are selected through some arcane action of the Holy Spirit of the Higher Power. I have not had an experience of bishops as pastors living and acting in the image of Christ the Good Shepherd. Yet Tom Gumbleton and Geoff Robinson have given me hope that the compassionate and courageous spirit of Jesus Christ, infused in the Church’s official leaders, is not mere myth. Their witness to Christ, though they are only two, goes a long way to overcome the constant spectacle we have been subjected to in America of clerics concerned only with their image and their power and with no remote conception of the devastation caused by the clergy sexual and spiritual abuse debacle.

17. Cardinal Re and the various U.S. bishops who wrote letters to Geoff all parroted the same baseless concern: his words were causing confusion and sowing disunity. It is is clear that none of these men have had the experience Geoff has had in ministering to the victims of the Church’s dysfunctional clerical system. In all probability none have taken the time to read his book. Their concerns illustrate just how far out of touch the Vatican and most of the U.S. bishops are from the faithful, whom they claim they are trying to protect and whose support they need to sustain their lifestyles. If anything, the confusion has been caused by the bishops’ and the Vatican’s self-serving response to the plight of people savaged by sexual abuse. Geoff may be a sign of disunity with the bishops but for many he is a sign of hope because while he may be at variance with the bishops he certainly is one with the victims of the Church’s sexual and spiritual abuse. To get the point, one need only ask that simple question: What would Jesus do? It would seem that Geoff Robinson asked himself that question…and had the courage to live out the answer.

THOMAS P DOYLE, O.P., J.C.D, C.A.D.C.

And finally:

The comments of C.J. Madden, Jr. of Philadelphia:

Comments on the Recent U.S. Visit by Bishop Geoffrey Robinson

Background

In response to the harm being done by many in the leadership of the church in dealing with the problem of clerical sexual abuse, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson of Sydney, Australia, has undertaken to confront this leadership with its sins. Bishop Robinson, with degrees in Philosophy and Theology and a Doctorate in Canon Law and for many years a lecturer in Canon Law at the Catholic Institute in Sydney, last year published a book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus that The Tablet called a “devastating critique of the Catholic church in Australia.”

The decision to write this book came from Bishop Robinson’s experience in the years 1994 to 2003 when, at the request of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference, he coordinated the church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis in Australia. This required him to meet with and assist many victims, and it had a profound effect on him. It caused him to examine the problem in terms of the possible root causes that stem from church policies and attitudes. He was particularly disappointed in what he saw on the part of the church leadership as a process of trying to manage the problem, rather than confronting it directly and openly so as to prevent such things from ever happening again.

After nine years of pain and frustration with the lack of leadership, especially at the Vatican, Bishop Robinson retired from his position as auxiliary bishop in Sidney, because, he said, he needed full time to write his book, a book that would help bring the system to the point of reforming itself.

The Invitations to Speak in the U.S.

The book was published in Australia in August of 2007, and its initial printing of 2000 copies sold out in four days. Shortly after that, the structural-change committee of the Voice of the Faithful affiliate of Greater Philadelphia invited Bishop Robinson to come to Philadelphia and speak at a conference that was being organized on the subject of needed structural change in the church. Bishop Robinson accepted that invitation and stipulated that he would finance his own travel to the US and that he would receive no honorarium.

When the word got out that Bishop Robinson was coming to Philadelphia, other VOTF affiliates contacted the organizer and requested that Robinson visit them as well. Over several months’ time a tour materialized that would include the Washington DC area, northern New Jersey, New York City, Long Island, Fairfield CT, and Boston.

Some time after that, the Liturgical Press took on the US publication of the book, and its director of sales and marketing became involved in making travel arrangements for additional visits as requests came in. None of these visits was solicited; they all came from spontaneous requests from VOTF and Call-To-Action affiliates in the various cities. Thus, his trip did not start out as a book tour. It only became a speaking tour when people who had heard about the book (or had actually read it in its earlier Australian and Irish editions) clamored to see him and hear him.

The Reaction of the Rest of the Hierarchy

As he was preparing to embark for the US, Bishop Robinson wrote to the bishop of each diocese where he had agreed to speak, not asking for permission to speak, but rather as a simple courtesy. This generated a series of attempts to prevent his trip. It started with word from the papal nuncio in Australia that he was going to receive a letter from Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops in the Roman Curia, telling him to cancel his trip. He departed five days later without having received such a letter. The day before his departure on May 9, the Australian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an unsigned statement taking issue with what it called the Bishop’s “questioning of the authority of the church.” Stating that ”...the church’s Magisterium teaches the truth authoritatively in the name of Christ” and that “The book casts doubt upon these teachings.” This statement came nine months after the publication of the book in Australia.

In a letter dated May 9 and addressed to him in Sydney, which arrived after his departure, Cardinal Roger Mahony requested that he cancel his visit and declared, “I hereby deny you permission to speak in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.” He further urged that Bishop Robinson “cancel the entire speaking tour and to work closely with your own Bishop’s Conference” and said “I would surely expect you to follow exactly their recommendations in this matter.” When he returned home from the trip, he found letters from thirteen bishops of the other dioceses in which he was scheduled to speak. They all quoted from the statement of the Australian bishops in an obviously orchestrated campaign directed from Rome. By this time. Bishop Robinson had made commitments to people in a total of 15 cities in the US. He felt obligated under Article 215 of canon law (which deals with the rights of the faithful to assemble freely and invite experts of their own choosing to speak at those assemblies) to carry out his commitments, despite last-minute attempts to prevent them.

The Progress on the Journey

Bishop Robinson had initially been invited to deliver a keynote address to the Friday, May 16, symposium in Philadelphia on Rebuilding the Catholic Church. The symposium was held at Temple University after the Archdiocese refused to sanction holding it at a Catholic university. The attendance was approximately 170, and there was a lively discussion after the talk. The event included the presentation of the Hans Küng Award to Bishop Robinson by the Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church. He also took part in the final panel discussion following the talks on the following day.

On the following Monday, he and I, his Philadelphia host, drove to the Washington, DC, area, where Bishop Robinson gave a lecture at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center in Chevy Chase that was sponsored by the local VOTF affiliates. Attendance was between 150 and 200.

On the next day we headed back north to Brooklyn, NY, where he spoke that evening at St Francis College to a weather-deterred audience of about 80. Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio deserves special recognition for not trying to prevent Bishop Robinson for speaking at the College. We were hosted in Brooklyn Heights that evening by Ed and Anne Wilson.

On Wednesday we drove over to the Morristown, NJ, area where Bishop Robinson gave a lecture sponsored by the Northern New Jersey VOTF at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Morristown. Attendance was approximately 140. Our hosts that evening were Theresa and Anthony Padovano. Theresa lamented the fact that Bishop Robinson was not getting more support from his brother bishops. He is too intelligent, humble, fearless, and open, she said, for them to deal with.

On Thursday, May 22, we traveled to Manhasset, Long Island, and were hosted by Mario and Pat Paone. Bishop Robinson spoke at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Manhasset, who provided the space without charge to the Long Island VOTF as a charitable contribution to an “oppressed minority.” Attendance was approximately 275 people, including people not previously affiliated with LI-VOTF and who later expressed interest in attending future meetings.

The following day, Bishop Robinson traveled to the ABC studios in Manhattan where he was interviewed on the program “Faith Matters” by Father Edward Beck, with some counterpoint from Richard Gaillardetz, the Catholic theologian from the University of Toledo. After that we drove to Fairfield, CT, where Robinson spoke the next morning at Fairfield University to an audience of 117 people. The lecture was sponsored by the Bridgeport VOTF and Fairfield University.

After a few days’ visit with family members in New Bedford, MA, Bishop Robinson made two appearances in the Boston area. The first was on Wednesday, May 28, at the Paulist Center in Boston, where 110 people attended. The second was the next evening at Saint Susanna parish in Dedham. Here 550 people attended, including some from Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. As reported in a May 31 article in the Boston Globe, one group from New Hampshire arrived in Dedham three hours early to be sure of getting a seat. The audience included survivors of abuse, as well as priests and women religious. There was no apparent effort on the part of the Archdiocese of Boston to interfere with Bishop Robinson’s visit.

On Sunday, June 1, Bishop Robinson spoke at Emmanuel College, the United Church member school of the Toronto School of Theology at an event sponsored by New Catholic Times, Sensus Fidelium, an online Canadian, Catholic independent magazine. There were 130 people in attendance. Prior to the event a very positive piece was published in the Toronto Star.

On the evening of Thursday, June 5, 330 people, including many priests and one retired bishop, heard Bishop Robinson speak in Cleveland, Ohio, at a meeting sponsored by Future Church and supported by the local affiliate of VOTF. After his talk, he received a lengthy standing ovation. He was hosted at the home of Future Church members.

On the evening of Saturday, June 7, Bishop Robinson spoke in Seattle at the Performing Arts Center of Roosevelt High School. The visit was sponsored by Call To Action of Western Washington, and it was the subject of a news article that morning in the Seattle Times. The attendance was about 325 people, including at least two very enthusiastic priests from the Archdiocese of Seattle and one retired priest who drove six hours from Spokane to hear the man who “wrote the book I had intended to write in retirement.” The Seattle Archbishop, Alex Brunett, was one of those who wrote asking the bishop not to come, and he turned down a request from CTA to meet with the bishop, saying that it would not be beneficial for either of them to meet. The archdiocesan newspaper refused to run an ad for the event because there was no church agency that sponsored the event. The Archdiocesan spokesman, Greg Magnoni, explained that Bishop Robinson has “assumed positions that are problematic” because they are not in keeping with the church. While in Seattle, Bishop Robinson was hosted by Pat and Julie Callahan.

On Tuesday evening, June 10, Bishop Robinson spoke at the Faculty Club of the University of California, San Diego, at an event sponsored by the local affiliates of CTA, VOTF, Dignity, and SNAP before an overflow crowd of more than 200. On the preceding night, he met with a group that included 12 prominent lawyers from 7 states, several authors noted for their writings on the clergy sex abuse crisis, and others who have been active in supporting victims and preserving documentation about the abuse crisis. In a report of that meeting, Fr. Tom Doyle, wrote the following: “The discussion centered on our shared experiences with clergy sex abuse victims. We also discussed some of the financial mismanagement and duplicity perpetrated by Church officials. Bishop Robinson expressed his surprise at the extent of financial impropriety. He also admitted that he was quite surprised at the consistent problems we have encountered with U.S. bishops and their response to clergy abuse. We expressed … our own surprise that he could say, based on his experience, that… the bishops in his country were not acting maliciously. Our collective experiences have been quite different from his in Australia. He made it clear to us that he did not disbelieve anything he had heard but was finding it difficult to assimilate it all.”

An overflow crowd of more than 150 heard Bishop Robinson speak on Wednesday, June 11, at the Costa Mesa Neighborhood Center in Orange County, California. The visit was sponsored by the Orange County affiliate of VOTF. The organizer of the event, Steve Dzida, made the point that the US bishops who tried to prevent Bishop Robinson from speaking in their dioceses owe their people an explanation for their actions. Absent such explanations, their motivations will appear to be highly suspect.

On Thursday evening, June 12, Bishop Robinson spoke to about 300 people in the Los Angeles/Culver City area at an event sponsored by VOTF, CTA, IHM, and Dignity. The venue had been changed from the Holy Spirit Retreat Center to a Sheraton Hotel in Culver City, this after Cardinal Mahony sent a letter to the director of the Retreat Center demanding that they withdraw from the event. At the talk, there were many survivors in the room, and several stood to express deep pain and anger at their treatment by the church. Bishop Robinson was hosted at the home of Tom and Jan Honore.

On Friday, June 13, Bishop Robinson gave his final lecture at the Lone Mountain campus of the University of San Francisco. It was sponsored by the San Francisco VOTF, and Bob Rowden was his host. The University withdrew as a co-sponsor after the letter from Cardinal Mahony. The attendance was between 150 and 200, and he received a standing ovation at the conclusion of his talk. The next day he flew back to Los Angeles to catch his return to Sydney on June 15.

The Message Delivered

In his basic talk, honed a bit as he made his way across the continent, he called for a careful study of all institutional factors in the Church that may have contributed to the abuse crisis, in particular problems of unhealthy psychology, unhealthy ideas concerning both power and sex, and unhealthy living conditions. In addition, he said we must examine the institutional factors that produced the poor response to the problem and that we must be free to ask questions about institutional thinking and practice with regard to power and sex.

With regard to power, he saw two problem areas that have to be addressed. The first is the idea that priests and religious are elevated above the rest of the human race. He traced this idea to St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Greek word meaning “chosen” in the Letter to the Hebrews using the word assumptus, “taken up,” which resulted in priests’ being placed on a pedestal. The second problem flows from the teaching that ex cathedra proclamations are infallible. This has resulted in the extension of the cloak of infallibility to cover whatever is necessary to protect papal authority. This has actually had the opposite effect of undermining papal authority when non-infallible teachings are widely rejected, as has been the case with the teaching of Humanae vitae. Other areas in which church positions are unavoidably open to question and challenge have to do with the questions of ordination of women and compulsory celibacy for priests.

The problem imposed on bishops by the special oath of loyalty to the Pope that they are required to take is that they generally feel compelled to protect all levels of papal authority in order to maintain his bella figura, his image of inerrancy. This has precluded open discussion of some delicate issues – for example, the institutional causes sexual abuse – something the official church hasn’t wanted to touch. This had led directly to Robinson’s very personal conflict between his loyalty to the Pope and his loyalty to the victims of abuse – to the conflict between being a “Pope’s man” and a “victims’ man.” The absence of any real leadership in relation to abuse and the failure of the Pope to act in the two cases at his own doorstep (the Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna and the founder of the Legionaries of Christ) finally compelled Robinson to make the choice in the favor of the victims.

With regard to sex, he spoke of the movement of the early church away from the ancient teachings about the wife as the property of the husband and the notion that many things and actions were ritually unclean, toward the idea that morality must be based on what is “natural.” This came to mean that every “natural” act of sexual intercourse had to contain both the unitive and procreative elements. Any “unnatural” sexual activities, even thoughts, came to be considered as direct sins against God, and therefore mortal. This included the sexual abuse of minors, so that such acts were treated like other sexual sins, rather than as offenses against other persons. He considers this thinking as being partly responsible for the way the church has dealt with the abuse crisis. He stated that, “In relation to sex I believe that the first question we need to be asking is not whether it is harming some natural order determined by God, but whether it is in any way harming either another person, or the community, or oneself.” He would like to see the teaching on sex be based on the teaching of Jesus to love one another, that is, to be based on persons and relationships, which is the message to be found in the gospels. He said that on this topic it is all too easy for him to be misunderstood, and he asked that people read carefully the whole of chapter ten of his book before drawing conclusions about his position on this.

In addressing the problem of bringing about change, he pointed out that this requires the change of a culture, which is always difficult. In view of the present imbalance of power between the papacy and the bishops, he emphasized repeatedly that it is necessary to work with the bishops, rather than against them. He called for conversation, not confrontation. It is the issues that need to be confronted, not the bishops.

On a note of hope, he pointed out that the issue of sexual abuse is the one issue that has enough energy behind it to overcome the resistance to change in a culture. As he said, “All church leaders have at the very least been through a profound humiliation and embarrassment over this issue, and deep within them they know that on this issue the popes have not given the courageous leadership the church needed. However much they might pretend to the opposite, all leaders also know that we still have much room here for fruitful dialogue. Parents have an obvious concern for the protection of their children, and no sincere leader should refuse to discuss this issue with them.”

He proceeded to give examples of the kinds of arguments that parents could make in discussions with their bishops while calling for the re-examination of church positions and policies. In each of his talks, he closed by emphasizing that his book is not an attack on the church or a desire to cause it harm, but rather it comes from an intense desire to see a better church “in which everything that is humanly possible has been done to abolish all forms of abuse, a church that encourages growth through freedom, a church in which there is conversation rather than confrontation, a church in which all, women as much as men, laity as much as clergy, share equally in the full life of the church and can grow to become all they are capable of being.”

Some Personal Reflections on the Bishop’s Journey

The criticism of Bishop Robinson by the Vatican, the Australian Council of Catholic Bishops, and the US bishops is based on the position that teachings of the church, broadly defined, are not to be subjected to questioning or challenge. This idea is put forward in spite of an obvious logical inconsistency. Such a position could only make sense if it could be shown that the church has never taught something that was later determined to be invalid. If evidence of any previous teaching that was later rejected can be shown, then it destroys the rationale that all present teaching must be accepted without question. This is so trivially obvious that failure to recognize it opens a critic to the charge of intellectual dishonesty.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of the church knows that there is a long list of rejected teachings, some of them having had catastrophic consequences. Here the term “teachings” must include actions as well as words. As some of the most well known of these rejected teachings, we can cite the following:

The condoning of slavery and the failure to define it as intrinsically evil until the twentieth century.

The two-millennia-long collective condemnation of the Jews as Christ-killers.

The use of torture and execution against people defined as heretics.

The teaching that the earth is the center of the universe (i.e., solar system), which almost cost Galileo his life and resulted in his life-long imprisonment for heresy.

The teaching that lending money for interest is morally wrong.

The teaching by Pope Pius IX, as part of his 1864 encyclical Quanta cura, that it is an error, for example, to believe that:

“The church ought to be separated from the State, and the State from the church.”

“In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship.”

“Hence it has been wisely decided by law, in some Catholic countries, that persons coming to reside therein shall enjoy the public exercise of their own peculiar worship.”

Thus, to treat all current church teaching as effectively infallible is to engage in blatant self-deception. Church teachings are essentially opinions that are based on the present knowledge and understanding of the teacher. As with court opinions, they deserve serious attention and consideration. However, to believe that they are eternally immutable is to ignore the lessons of history.

None of this should be used to deny the teaching authority of the church. However, authority to teach does not imply infallibility. All faculty members of teaching institutions, for example, have authority to teach, by virtue of their appointments. However, any serious student realizes that any such teaching has always to remain open to question and challenge. Only the most simple minded would be willing to hold it as eternal truth.

C. J. McMahon, Jr.
Philadelphia
July 25, 2008

_Be sure to check Father Doyles’ ‘monogram’ entitled: Survival. Click ‘Notes, Quotes & Comments’ on sidebar links.

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