The Religion Report: Confronting Power and Sex in the Roman Catholic Church

Posted by Kendall Harmon

Today, an explosive book about the Catholic church, written by a retired Australian bishop that's already making international headlines. The Age newspaper has compared him with Martin Luther; he says he's calling for the most radical changes since Luther started the Protestant Reformation.

Retired Bishop, Geoffrey Robinson was Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney until his retirement three years ago, and he's one of the most intellectual and capable of all the Australian bishops. He lectured in canon law for many years; I'm told he's a fine classicist; he sat on the Marriage Tribunal of the Archdiocese of Sydney, which is one of those positions where you'd learn a lot about the real world; and he was regarded by many people as the logical successor to Cardinal Ted Clancy as Archbishop of Sydney.

In the 1990s he was given the terrible task of co-ordinating the church's national response to the clerical sexual abuse crisis, and he earned the deep respect of Australian Catholics for his integrity.

His new book, 'Confronting Sex and Power in the Catholic Church' says such a massive scandal demanded a serious response, but the leadership of the church has not been serious enough, choosing to manage the scandal in the hope it will go away, rather than confronting its deepest causes. That failure eventually caused Bishop Robinson to resign his post. 'I eventually came to the point', he says, 'where I felt that with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could not continue to be a bishop of a church about which I had such profound reservations.' He also tells us the scandal caused him for the first time in his life, to deal with sexual abuse he had suffered as a boy.

But the real power of this book lies in the way it raises so many fundamental issues for discussion. A bit like Martin Luther in the 95 Thesis. He says the Pope has too much power, in fact he wants a constitutional papacy with lots of checks and balances and even a regular performance appraisal. He says all the church's teachings on sex need to be revisited. He questions the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility and asks whether it was prudent of Pope Pius XII to formally declare, as a matter of faith in 1950 that the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven when she died. He even suggests a few phrases of the Nicene Creed might need to be reviewed.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

5 Comments
Posted September 1, 2007 at 3:11 pm [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Larry Morse wrote:

Dear me. Here we go again. Another voice telling us that the probelms of the RC church and sexual abuse has nothing to do with homosexuality, that the issues are quite separate. I really thought we had got past the particular piece of spin. The seminaries are, as he admits, full of homosexuals, the overwhelmning percentage of the abuse cases are priests with boys, both under and over puberty, and he thinks these are separate issues, as if seeking sex with a 12 year old boy is not homosexual contact, but is some other category quite unrelated. This is so absurd, it is hard to find the words to challenge this piece of unreality. LM

September 1, 5:11 pm | [comment link]
2. deaconjohn25 wrote:

Oh!  Puleeze! Just copy the Episcopal Church and everything will become hunky-dory. For we all know that the World has the best interests of Christianity at heart when it constantly propagandizes for the homosexualization of the Faith.

September 1, 5:44 pm | [comment link]
3. Words Matter wrote:

Having had something like a crisis of faith over bishops’ response to the sex scandals, I was initially sympathetic to the fellow. But then I hear we should be “confronting it’s deepest causes” and the antenna goes us. I always suspect that seeking “deepest causes” may well lead us away from presenting causes.  And so it is.

First, let’s strip the papacy of actual authority. Yeah, right. Since the papacy ought to be all-powerful and solve all problems, let’s make it something like the English monarch in vestments. Of course, then who would you blame for things going wrong. I’ve said this before, but the papacy is such a perfect scapegoat: if the pope acts, he’s a tyrant, if he doesn’t act, he’s negligent. Isn’t this cool: I am never to blame, it’s always the pope.  In a similar way, let’s ditch the Church’s 2000 year old teachings on sex and marraige. That’s working so well in western society, isn’t it.  And finally, he progresses from trashing Catholic moral theology to gutting Catholic ecclesiology to revising the Nicene Creed itself proving, once again, the intrinsic unity of Catholic doctrine. It’s a woven whole, seamless like the Robe of Christ. 

I’ve said it before: the sexual problems among Catholic clergy are no greater, and probably far less severe that among people in general. However, let’s acknowledge that Catholics will, in a hostile world, be held to a higher standard.  With that in mind, I turn to Fr. Richard Neuhaus, who accurately identified the deepest cause of the sex scandal, that being a failure of fidelity to our Catholic Faith. The answer is… fidelity.

September 1, 5:49 pm | [comment link]
4. Phil wrote:

I agree with Words Matter.  And, I’ll say this for Robinson - he had the integrity to resign once he realized he couldn’t believe or teach the Faith, unlike other bishops I know.

September 2, 6:46 am | [comment link]
5. Jennifer wrote:

Actually, Larry Morse, I believe the vast majority of victims(80%) were teenage boys over 12. (I found this in First Things magazine, FYI)

You’re right, it is absurd.

September 2, 9:00 am | [comment link]
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