Bishop calls for Catholic reform
Barney Zwartz August 25, 2007

THE Catholic Church is still not serious about confronting sexual abuse, only "managing" it, according to the Sydney bishop who headed Australian efforts to tackle abuse.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson says the Catholic Church needs to reverse 2000 years of teaching on sex and power as part of radical reforms from the Pope down.

While it refuses to look at some fundamental teachings — including sex outside marriage, women priests, homosexuality and papal power — the culture that produced and protected abusers will continue, he says.
These explosive claims — unprecedented for a bishop — are in a book to be launched tomorrow: Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church.
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A Sydney bishop who became an advocate for church sex abuse victims has revealed his own abuse by a stranger.
Linda Morris reports.August 25, 2007

During the darkest days of the priesthood, when the Australian church was wrestling with the scandal of sexual abuse, Sydney's Catholic auxiliary bishop, Geoffrey Robinson, was coming to terms with his own demons.

Only now, three years after his retirement, has Robinson has gone public with an extraordinary and personal disclosure: he was the victim of an abusive stranger. He had kept the secret hidden "in the attic of my mind" for 50 years until hearing the stories of victims began to stir "strong echoes within my own heart and mind".

But the church leader who could have become archbishop of Sydney did not reveal the abuse, and the indelible mark it left, to anyone outside a small circle of friends.

But this week Robinson, shy and guarded, broke his lifelong silence in an explosive critique of the church's use and misuse of power which outlines a radical vision for the church that questions the very nature of its power and sexual ethics and slays the sacred cow of papal infallibility.

Robinson, 70, was a teenager at the time of the abuse, the nature of which he does not fully disclose. The offender was neither a family member nor a priest.

Even now he finds it hard to tackle the topic and prefers his book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, to speak for him. "Neither in my age at the time it happened nor in the duration of the abuse was it as serious as much of the abuse I have encountered in others, and yet, if the man had been caught in any one of his acts against me, he would have been sent to prison," he writes in the book's introduction.

"It was never a repressed memory but for most of my life it was, as it were, placed in the attic of my mind. That is, I always knew it was there but I never took it down to look at it."

When he was appointed in 1994 to the church's national professional standards committee to help develop procedures to respond to sex abuse complaints he made a vow to himself to "never defend the indefensible". He strove to act as a "decent human being, a good Christian and caring priest" and listened to the complaints of as many victims as possible so he could to learn from their experiences.

"It was talking with victims and some of the things they said aroused feelings and memories in my own mind. With the help of counsellors, I became conscious of some of the effects it had had on me." The memories not only inform his compassionate response to fellow victims but have fed his growing disenchantment with church authorities.

Robinson has written two other books but neither is as close to his soul as the latest.

His book sets out fearlessly and with faith what others have thought for a long time: that instituting legal and pastoral procedures is not enough to beat the crisis of sexual abuse in the church. More fundamental changes are needed to make the church relevant and credible today and to re-establish the message of Jesus Christ at it core.

Robinson says his writing was in development for almost 50 years, from the age of 12, when he entered the rarefied atmosphere of a seminary.

In his description of seminaries and novitiates as unhealthy places to grow into maturity, there is a sense of the wounded boy. He laments the absence of parents and other nurturing figures, the lack of intimacy and the perception of women as threats to vocation rather than as a positive and essential influence.

"At the time I wouldn't have found seminary life impossibly difficult but looking back I observe absences," he says now.

"I never wish to see any boy taken into the seminary at that age again."

Even in retirement Robinson is a leading church figure, which is why his open questioning of papal authority, compulsory celibacy for priests and the Vatican's "extreme" position on sexual ethics is so startling and explosive. This is usually lonely territory trod by the likes of progressives such as the assistant Bishop of Canberra, Pat Power.

Papal power has gone too far and there are inadequate limits on that power, Robinson says, and bishops and the faithful have been marginalised. He calls for a new parliament, a new hierarchical system for the local church, even new attire for priests and bishops, and raises for discussion the church's prescriptive attitude towards committed couples having sex before marriage.

He was studying in Rome when the winds of change blew from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and he believes it has been unfairly blamed for all the church's ills; the hierarchy should look beyond St Peter's Square for explanations for the massive changes and upheavals which have marked the modern world, he says.

The mobile phone, television and car had robbed Catholic parishes of their role as a powerful social centre.

"This is a very unusual book," says the church historian Ed Campion. "Bishops normally keep dissident thoughts to themselves but Bishop Robinson has gone public with his disquiet about how church authorities responded to sexual abuse scandals. He calls for change at the highest levels of the church, including the papacy. His compassion for abused victims is remarkable and welcomed.

"This grew out of his hard years of caring for injured people. Beyond this, the book is a fresh look at the fundamentals of Christian faith. When a Catholic bishop does this he surprises many people. Others will be grateful that Bishop Robinson has now joined in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be a Christian today."

Father Michael Whelan, of the church reform group Catalyst for Renewal, says Robinson's lifetime of service in the Catholic Church, including 20 years as auxiliary bishop of Sydney, has been one of intelligence, fidelity and generous commitment.

"He is a man beyond reproach. He is also a man of considerable intellect and substantial scholarship. No one who knows him could doubt his love for the church. Indeed, those of us who knew something of his personal struggles with the Vatican in the late '90s will be always grateful for the faith-filled and humble manner in which he continued with his duties as a pastor during that time.

"This, above all else, has shown him to be a leader of the Catholic Church in Australia."

Robinson probably raises more questions than he answers, but he turns his searching gaze and reforming zeal to every corner of the church. His message of love to the church is that it must take its role to tackle sexual abuse more seriously, not simply manage the scandals.

Whelan says Robinson is urging all Catholics to dare to imagine a new way of being a church, a way that is more obviously rooted in the gospels and less obviously beholden to the Roman Empire and the historical circumstances of the fourth and fifth centuries. "Geoffrey Robinson has written a gracious book about a graced institution that too often forgets grace," he says.

"In its forgetfulness, that institution becomes prey to the 'absolutising instinct' and means become ends. Relative rules and relative teachings and relative roles and relative customs mysteriously become absolutes.

"Robinson asks us to remember the gospel and the reality of Jesus and common sense and humility.

If this book has one message for us Catholics - and it is addressed primarily to us - it is simply this: Remember who you are. Remember why you are church. Remember Him."

A fellow member of the national committee for professional standards, Sister Angela Ryan, remembers Robinson for being dogged in his pursuit of a just church response to abuse claims.
In Australia, a country of 5 million Catholics, a nationally binding response to sexual abuse required the unanimous consent of more than 160 people, including bishops and religious superiors. When Robinson had finished cajoling and crafting the document only two refused their consent.

As a result of Robinson's persistence, the Towards Healing protocols is a "standout document" that has no peer in any other Australian religious denomination, says Patrick Parkinson, a professor of law at the University of Sydney.

"The first version of Towards Healing was a victim-centric document. He was adamant that victims of abuse should hear the church cared for them, wanted to help the victims and that they would not tolerate the abuse in future, and Towards Healing was, and is, still full of that," he says.

Robinson concedes the document will never satisfy everyone but says it succeeds in encouraging priests to confess their misdeeds, sparing the victims more pain and adversarial criminal proceedings where convictions are rare.

But the Vatican has at times been far from impressed with Robinson's championing of victims' rights.

Robinson discloses that he was reprimanded by the Vatican bureaucracy after he told an abuse victim he was unhappy with Rome's response. The comment, a response to a question from the victim, was made at a public meeting, in front of several journalists.

He received an official letter expressing the "ongoing concern of the Congregation for Bishops" that his public position was "seriously critical of the magisterial teaching and discipline of the church".

Two months later he received a further letter, informing him that his case had been forwarded to the church's doctrinal watchdog, implying he was suspected of some form of heresy.

Robinson was hurt by the criticism. The church was not perfect, but sometimes there was "only a fine line between accepting that I must work within an imperfect church and becoming complicit in the harm that those imperfections are causing to people", he later wrote.

He felt let down: "Here was the perfect opportunity for the papacy to fulfil its most basic role of being the rock that holds the church together but this did not happen, and the church fractured. I found it impossible to accept that I must give submission of mind and will to most words written by a pope but a failure to give leadership in a crisis seemed to count for little."

Like every bishop, Robinson takes seriously his oath of fidelity to the Pope. Rebellion is like breaking an oath to God. He eventually resigned, and Pope John Paul II accepted his retirement in July 2004, due to ill health. It was true that Robinson was battling a coronary condition that brought on bouts of pneumonia.

Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church by Geoffrey Robinson (John Garratt Publishing, $34.95).

SERVING GOD
Career:

P Auxiliary Roman Catholic bishop of Sydney (retired) 1984-2004
P President, Canon Law Society Australia and New Zealand 1976-83 (secretary 1969-76)
P Director, Regional Tribunal Catholic Church NSW and ACT 1972-84
P Lecturer, Canon Law Catholic Institute Sydney 1967-83
P Assistant priest 1965-84
P Ordained priest 1960

EDUCATION
P Marist Bros School (NSW), St Columba's College (NSW), Pontifical Urban Uni (Rome)

PUBLICATIONS
P Marriage Divorce and Nullity 1984;
A Change of Mind and Heart 1994;
Travels in Sacred Places 1997