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Catholic History, Sex, and Cardinal Pell Part II

This is part two of a two part response to media articles (not in Australia, where the media are banned from reporting or commenting on this issue), Facebook and Twitter posts responding positively to the conviction of Cardinal George Pell on charges of child sex abuse. Part one discussed general issues about the history and credibility of the Catholic Church. This second part addresses the child sex abuse scandal, and the trials of Archbishop Wilson and Cardinal Pell.

Strangely, for one usually so sceptical and questioning, the alleged high rate of child abuse in the Catholic church was something I simply absorbed from the ether, or perhaps from the ABC, which, since I disagree with it about almost everything, is my primary news source. Looking back, I am still not sure why, while enthusiastically poking holes in most other ABC reporting, I was content to accept their claims about the church being the locus of most child abuse. I wasn’t a Catholic at the time. Perhaps it was simply comforting to be able to think of something so nasty as being nothing to do with anyone I knew, or any organisations I was involved in. Except it wasn’t true.

It is hard to know where to start with this, so I will make just a few key points, which you can follow up or check if you wish. During the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse, the ABC breathlessly reported that 60% of child abuse in a religious institution took place within the Catholic Church. Shocking! How disgusting! What a hive of degenerates! Except that by not telling the whole story, the ABC was saying something completely untrue. What was left out was that during the time under investigation, 80% of children who attended a religious school or were resident in a religious institution, were students in or resident in a Catholic institution. The twenty percent of students/residents in institutions run by other religious groups accounted for 40% of the total abuse reported. In other words, a student in a non-Catholic religious school was more than twice as likely to have been molested than a student in a Catholic school.

In fact, Catholic clergy have lower rates of abuse than clergy of other religions or denominations (some groups, for example the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have far higher reported rates of abuse than any mainstream denomination). In turn, clergy of other denominations have lower rates of abuse than occur in secular community and sports groups and public schools (the boy scouts in the US has just filed for bankruptcy because it cannot keep up with payouts for abuse claims). And abuse in any church, school or community group is far outstripped by abuse in the home. Bettina Arndt noted “It’s total hypocrisy. We jump up and down in the Royal Commission about abuse of people in institutions. We don’t give a stuff about the major risk for children which is, you know, children in single parent families being abused by boyfriends passing in and out of those families … There are a whole lot of areas [of sexual child abuse] we don’t discuss because they are not politically correct. Obviously, we’re trying to get the Catholic Church and attack churches.” Ninety percent of all child sexual abuse occurs within the child’s own home.

The Royal Commission noted that there had been 2504 incidents of alleged child sexual abuse in the Uniting Church between its inauguration in 1977 and 2017. This compares with 4445 claims of abuse in the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2015. Some parts of the media pounced on this figure as again proving the disproportionate amount of abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church. But two other factors need to be considered. The Commission did not consider any abuse claims made against the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches during the 27 year period from 1950 to 1977. Most abuse claims in the Catholic Church occurred in the 1970s. This may also have been the case in other denominations. But whether so or not, this is 27 years in which abuse in the Catholic Church was considered and counted, but not in other denominations. In addition, media reports generally failed to note that the Catholic Church has five times as many members as the Uniting Church. On the Commission’s figures, a child attending the Uniting Church was more than twice as likely to have been molested than a child attending the Catholic Church.

Another important fact that become clear in the cases reported to the Royal Commission is that almost all reported abuse in the Catholic Church occurred in the sixties, seventies and early eighties. Was it disgusting? Absolutely. Was it wrong? Absolutely. Should perpetrators be brought to justice? Absolutely. Is it still happening? No. Or hardly.

So what changed, that the rate of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, already lower than other denominations and community groups, was reduced dramatically even further? Part of the answer is that strong leaders like Phillip Wilson and George Pell were appointed to positions where they able to make a difference. It is no co-incidence that those two, who were most vigorous in setting up systems to support victims and to ensure that perpetrators were stopped, are also the men who have been targeted by the media and the courts.

At the time Archbishop Wilson was charged, I spoke to a senior priest, now a bishop. The charges seemed incomprehensible to me. On the evidence available it was not clear how any responsible prosecutorial team could reasonably expect a conviction. He agreed. “They don’t care,” he said. “They just want to get a senior Catholic.” Hard to believe, but if so, then the trials of Wilson and Pell are not so much trials of those two men, but a trial of Australia’s system of justice.

I wrote an article shortly after Archbishop Wilson’s conviction (that he had known of and failed to report abuse by priest James Fletcher) which was published in Quadrant Online. In it I argued that the malleability of memory is so well understood that a conviction could not possibly safely be based on two alleged conversations never noted or reported to anyone else until formal complaints were made over forty years later. I suggested that the presiding magistrate’s finding that the case against Archbishop Wilson was proven could only be understood in the light of the kind of media bias noted above, and predicted the verdict would be overturned on appeal.

It was. District Court Judge Roy Ellis offered similar reasons to set aside the conviction as I had suggested in my article. Some of the evidence considered at the original trial as contributing to a finding of guilt beyond reasonable doubt was even more ludicrous than I had first believed. One of the two conversations which contributed to the “proof” of later Archbishop Wilson’s alleged guilty knowledge of the sexual abuse perpetrated by James Fletcher took place in the confessional. The complainant acknowledged he could not see the priest was to whom he was speaking clearly, but thought he saw red lips, and said the priest had a deep voice, and on this basis came to the conclusion it was Fr Wilson, then a 25 year old parish priest. But Archbishop Wilson does not have red lips or a particularly deep voice. The original finding that Archbishop Wilson had known and deliberately covered up knowledge of the activities of James Fletcher, based on this and one other alleged conversation more than forty years earlier, was clearly and grievously wrong. Justice is not done, nor are victims helped, when innocent people are vilified and persecuted.

One of George Pell’s first actions on becoming Archbishop of Melbourne was to set up clear processes for dealing with complaints of sexual abuse. This was not in response to media alarm about child abuse. The Boston scandal, for example, was five years in the future. Nor was it an attempt to protect the reputation of the Church. Pell was one of the first in any organisation in the world to put protocols in place which protected victims, supported them through whatever processes they wanted to follow, including police action where appropriate, required any accused person to stand down during independent investigation, and which instituted a one strike you’re out policy.

It is hard to think of anyone in Australia who has done more to prevent child sexual abuse, to bring those responsible to justice, and to support victims and simplify processes for them.

However, it did not take long for The Guardian and the ABC to identify Archbishop, later Cardinal Pell, as an enemy, a prime target. He is on friendly terms with John Howard and Tony Abbott. He has publicly dismissed climate alarmism as a scam which, if policies based on it and urged by the UN and various celebrities were instituted, would cause serious harm to the world’s poorest people. He publicly described abortion as the worst possible child abuse. He declined to be sorry when some Catholic teachings, on the nature of marriage, for example, or the sinfulness of homosexual activity, were claimed to be offensive. He believes that Western culture is worth preserving, and that immigrants to Australia should enter the country legally, and apart from a carefully measured number of refugees, should be people who are willing and able to make a contribution. And perhaps worst of all, he noted that it is impossible to take proper action to correct a problem until the problem is correctly identified and therefore any proposed remedies to sex abuse in ecclesiastical settings needed to take account of the fact that while girls and young women are overwhelmingly the most common victims of sexual abuse, almost all of the child sex abuse that had taken place in the Church involved homosexual men and adolescent boys. Others who have pointed out this connection have been met with similar fury, most recently, German Cardinal Walter Brandmueller .

If you did not know Cardinal Pell, and you wanted to invent a perfect nemesis for Australia’s left-wing media, you could not do better than to come up with a an intelligent, energetic, tough-minded, rugby-playing, politically and religiously conservative straight white male.

The ABC’s almost psychotic obsession with finding something dreadful to report about Cardinal Pell was noted at least as long ago as 2015, when veteran Australian journalist Gerard Henderson suggested the mainstream media had the wrong target, and was focussing on Pell simply because he is a social conservative.

Then there are comments from left-wing media consumers. “He must have done something, they’re all at it.” (No, they’re not). “Even if he is not a pedophile himself, he protected them, moved them around.” (There is no evidence whatever this is the case.) “He had to know something.” (ABC journalist Paul Bongiorno, who shared a house with notorious pedophile Risdale says he didn’t, and never said anything. As soon as Pell was in a position to do something to stop child sex abuse happening and to support victims, he did). “Someone needs to be held accountable.” (Yes, the perpetrators and anyone who assisted or covered up for them. As I noted above, there is no correction to injustice in committing the further injustice of vilifying and convicting people who are innocent.)

But what of the specific charges against Cardinal Pell? They were that, while Archbishop of Melbourne, he found two choir boys drinking altar wine after Mass at the Cathedral, and demanded they give him oral sex. Shocking? Yes. Terrible? Yes. And ludicrous, as Andrew Bolt noted at the time this claim was first made public .

Firstly, despite the gruesome headlines, there was one complainant, not two. The second boy alleged to have been a victim denied he had ever been abused. The accuser only claimed the second boy had been involved fifteen years after the alleged event, and after that boy, then a young man, died of a drug overdose in 2014. So a single, uncorroborated complaint.

The accuser was not able to specify an exact time when the claimed abuse took place. Instead, he claimed it occurred on a Sunday some time between August and December 1996. St Patrick’s Cathedral was being renovated during much of this time, and Archbishop Pell celebrated Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral only twice during the accuser’s four month window. On both of those occasions, Pell remained at the door of the Cathedral after Mass, greeting and talking with parishioners and visitors before leaving for other engagements. On both of those occasions he was accompanied by another priest who gave evidence that he was with Pell, rarely at more than arm’s length distance, for the entire time he was at the Cathedral.

Other witnesses pointed out that on both of the occasions on which Archbishop Pell celebrated Mass between August and December 1996, choir practice was held immediately after Mass, and that the absence of two choirboys would have been noted immediately. Other witnesses gave evidence that the accuser’s description of finding and drinking altar wine in a back room was unlikely in the extreme, given that altar wine was kept in a vault and only brought out in required quantities before Mass.

The presiding judge instructed both defence and prosecution teams that they were not to question, or to bring into evidence anything that might call into question, the credibility of the accuser. This is a frankly astonishing instruction – the case against Pell rests entirely on the credibility of his single accuser. More than one of the choir members at the time has said that even if it had only been the accuser’s word against Cardinal Pell’s, given the personality and history of the accuser, there could be no confidence any such events ever took place.

But it was not merely the accuser’s word against Cardinal Pell’s. Journalists and members of the public present at the trial said it was “a slam dunk for the defence.” The defence evidence, some of which is summarised above, showed not only cause for reasonable doubt, not even that Cardinal Pell did not commit the alleged offences, but that it was not possible for him to have done so.

The verdict is not an indictment of Pell and the Catholic Church. It is an indictment of the media, whose vindictive witch hunt led to a public furore and frenzied demands that someone, anyone, be punished. It is also an indictment of police departments and court administrators who allowed themselves to be driven by that frenzy, and perhaps, of the running of the trial and instructions given by the trial judge to the jury. There is a long-standing principle of Western jurisprudence that if there is a reasonable explanation of the evidence which is consistent with the defendant’s innocence, a verdict of not guilty must be returned. At very least, that should have been reiterated to the jury, and evidence of the accuser’s personal and criminal history made available as bearing on the credibility of his accusations.

The verdict will be overturned on appeal, as was the equally egregious verdict against Archbishop Wilson. So no harm done.

But harm has been done. Firstly to Archbishop Wilson and Cardinal Pell, both faithful servants of the Church and the wider community. Secondly to the Church, which despite having lower rates of abuse than other bodies, has been, with a few appalling exceptions, open, forthright and pro-active in acknowledging abuse where it occurred, and putting processes in place to support victims. Many other institutions face a far larger public reckoning; there is filth lurking in places yet undreamed of. Thirdly to Wilson and Pell’s friends and families, who, like many other friends or family of alleged child abusers, have been subject to irrational hatred and slander, as well as unnecessary pain and doubt and confusion. Fourthly to genuine victims of child abuse, who, seeing these trials and their politically-driven outcomes, will wonder how they can rely on those whose duty it is to listen to them and protect them. And finally, following these debacles, harm has been done to Australia’s courts and police, whose credibility and independence is rightly called into question.

Catholic History, Sex, and Cardinal Pell Part I

There have been several media articles (not in Australia, where the media is banned from reporting the issue), posts on Facebook, and comments on Twitter over the last two weeks rejoicing in the conviction of Cardinal Pell on charges of child sex abuse.

That trial and its outcome are nothing to rejoice in.

I intended to respond to those posts and articles by addressing the trial and the evidence presented. But when I began, it became clear that I could not do so without first considering the context of some of the other reasons the Catholic Church is commonly held in contempt by Australia’s left-wing media and others.

Consequently my planned response is in two parts. This first part addresses some of the common misconceptions about the Catholic Church and its history. This is not a comprehensive discussion, but a brief summary. For anyone seeking more information, I recommend Diane Moczar’s Seven Lies About Catholic History, which is both well-research and documented, and easy to read.

The second part focusses specifically on the child sex abuse scandal, and the trials of Archbishop Wilson and Cardinal Pell.

I became a Catholic a few years ago because I was convinced that the faith taught by Jesus to the Apostles, and by the Apostles to those who came after them, was the same faith taught in the Catholic Church today.

Paul describes the Church (1 Tim 3:15) as the pillar and bulwark of the truth. Jesus (Mat 16:18) said the gates of hell would not prevail against it. But the entire edifice of Protestantism is built on the belief that between the 1st and 16th centuries the Church had fallen away from the truth, the gates of hell had prevailed against it, and there had been a great corruption of the faith, an apostasy so deep that remedying it required the formation of an entirely new church.

There is no evidence this large scale apostasy ever took place. Reading the early church fathers makes it clear that what the early church held and did and believed was the same Catholic faith as now.

For example, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (c 110 AD) bear witness to the structure of ministry (bishops, priests and deacons), the day of worship (Sunday), and the crucial role of the Eucharist, the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

Justin the Martyr (c 140 AD) writes of the incarnation, the trinity, Sunday worship as opposed to the Jews who worship on Saturday, grace and the call to love as the reason “God cancelled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, setting it aside and nailing it to the cross.” (Colossians 2:14) He writes of the Eucharist as the defining form of Christian worship, and the importance of careful and humble adherence both to revealed truth and to reason.

There is clear continuity from the Apostles into the early Church. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (in what is now Turkey), had been taught by the beloved Apostle, John. Amongst those taught by Polycarp was Irenaeus, who was born in Smyrna and later became a priest, then Bishop of Lyon in Gaul, now France. Amongst other things, Irenaeus (c 150 AD) bore witness to the importance of the church in Rome, stating that all churches everywhere must be in fellowship and agreement with that pre-eminent church. He talked about the importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her co-operation with the will of God. He talked about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and he identifies the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the only gospels to be given credence in their description of Jesus’ life and work.

Or read the history of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), where the generous and formidable Bishop Nicholas of Myra (better known to us as Santa Claus) slapped the heretical priest Arius across the face. Not because what Arius taught about the person of Jesus could not be taught from Scripture – both Arianism and Orthodox Christianity can be supported from Scripture – but because everyone knew, including Arius himself, as St Nicholas suspected, that Arianism was simply not what the Apostles had taught, was not the tradition in which St Paul had commanded the Thessalonians (2 Thessalonians 2:15) to stand firm and to which they were to hold fast.

These are just a few examples of hundreds of possibilities. “Sola Scriptura,” the idea that the Christian faith in its entirety can be formulated exactly from the Bible alone, is a late medieval invention, a nonsense. No text can be read without context, or outside of an interpretive community. Sola Scriptura leads to a never-ending splitting of the Church, and a never-ending parade of prophets and preachers who have at last discovered the real meaning of the Bible, or who have received some new revelation.

There were other issues I needed to consider. I already knew that the claimed opposition of the Church to science was nonsense. Science and the scientific method could only take hold in a world view that the material world is objectively real, not simply an illusion, that the material world is good – something worth investigating, not an evil to be escaped from, that the material world is ordered according to rules which can be investigated and understood, and not by the whim of inhabiting spirits or an god who rules by fiat, and that faith has nothing to fear from the truth. This is the standard Western understanding, so it seems difficult to many Westerners to imagine that people could think otherwise. But in reality this combination of beliefs is uniquely Judeo-Christian. This is why science, the systematic and objective study of reality for its own sake, has taken root and flourished in the West as nowhere else, which has in turn given the West enormous advances and advantages in science and technology. The Church has always been the patron and protector of science.

The usual response to this claim by detractors is: “But what about Galileo?” The fact that most people can think of only one possible counter-example in 2,000 years of Church history is itself telling. In reality, Galileo was never tortured, never imprisoned, and was always free to teach the Copernican theory as a theory, as was done in other Catholic universities throughout Europe. (Catholic universities is a tautology, by the way – every university was Catholic.)

The Church insisted that students be taught every reasonable alternative, with the evidence for and against, and allowed to make up their own minds. The problem the Church had with Galileo was that Galileo refused to teach anything except his own pet theories. In many of these, he was completely wrong. For example, as Einstein noted in 1953, his theories about tidal action were nonsense. Galileo believed the rings of Saturn were not rings but a large moon on either side. He was savage in his attacks on Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grazzi, who correctly described comets as small heavenly bodies, while Galileo insisted they were reflections shining on vapours rising from the earth, and refused to teach or consider any other possibility. As philosopher of science and Berkeley professor Paul Feyerabend noted, it was the Church, not Galileo, which was on the side of reason and science.

But what about the Crusades? Don’t they prove a violent and imperialistic tendency in the Church? Well, hardly. The Crusades were a limited response to nearly 400 years of Islamic aggression. The magnificent Christian civilisations of the Middle East and North Africa were crushed, millions tortured, raped, murdered, leaving a legacy of violence and poverty that remains to this day. Spain was invaded. The great centres of Rome and Constantinople were besieged. Nor was it only Christians who were affected. Zoroastrianism was virtually wiped out in Persia, and the invasion and destruction of the peaceful and creative Buddhist society of what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan was well advanced. The Crusades were not even an attempt to regain lost territory, but to stop the advance of terror any further into Europe, and to enable safe passage of pilgrims to the holy land.

But the inquisition – that was horrible and violent, and there can be no excuse for that, right? Well, again, no. Kings and queens from the earliest days of humanity until quite recently almost all held that uniformity of religion was vital to a unified and loyal state. Anyone who did not believe as the King did should be executed as a traitor, or at least exiled. At no time was this more clear than in Spain following the Reconquista in 1492. The Church stepped in and said, in effect “Wait. If anyone is going to decide who believes the right thing, that should be us.” During the entire period of the Spanish Inquisition, from 1480 to 1700, of 44, 674 cases heard, 826 people were handed back to civil authorities for execution – less than 2% of the total. What would have happened without the Inquisition? Without that brake on royal power, as many as 72,000 Lutherans, Catholics and other religious undesirables were executed by Henry VIII in the last 20 years of his reign. The Inquisition saved thousands of lives.

But what about child abuse? Surely a church whose leadership is so prone to child sexual abuse must be deeply corrupt? Part two of this article addresses that issue, and the cases against Archbishop Wilson and Cardinal Pell.

On the Christian Duty to Warn of Sin and Its Consequences

Do Christians have a duty to warn others of sins and their consequences?

Ezekiel 33:8.9 When I tell wicked people they will die because of their sins, you must warn them to turn from their sinful ways. If you refuse to warn them, you will be held accountable for their death. If you do warn them, and they keep sinning, they will die because of their sins, but you will be innocent of their death.

Leviticus 19:17 Do not hate your neighbours, but rebuke them frankly, so you do not share in their guilt.

Or in Glen Campbells’ paraphrase:
If you see your brother standing by the road
With a heavy load from the seeds he’s sowed
And if you see your sister falling by the way
Just stop and say, you’re going the wrong way

Well, that’s pretty clear. Christians have a duty to warn friends, neighbours, family, if they are on the wrong track.

On the wrong track means living in such a way that they will cause serious harm to themselves or to people near them. And the most serious harm is to live in a way that alienates them and those around them from the love of God, to act in ways that shut God’s grace out of one’s life. That is, to live in mortal sin, which denies a person the ability to know the depth of God’s love and purpose for his or her life here and now, and without repentance, shuts them away from experiencing God’s love forever, which is hell.

But how does this work in practice? Are Christians meant to go around telling all and sundry: “Stop doing that. It will ruin your life and you will go to hell?”

Probably not.

It is not any particular sin that alienates us from God, or even a besetting sin – a lingering temptation we cannot seem to shake, to the point where we feel it to be part of who we are – so much as Sin itself. Repenting of a particular sin does not make us right with God. An axe murderer who repents of his axe murders and decides to commit them no more is not thereby set right with God and destined for heaven.

What we aim to do is what Jesus aimed to do. To help people recognise that without God their lives are empty, and become emptier to the point that they narrow down into loneliness and darkness and resentment, till that resentment becomes spite, and gnaws away at us forever and there is no hope of redemption. And to know that by choosing to repent of sin and live for Jesus, they can replace that anguished darkness with light and hope and eternal life.

That does not mean they (and we) may not still sin, and make mistakes and bad choices, but that they are saved; they are on the road that leads to life, and the more they walk on that road, and the more they try to follow Jesus’ example, the more peaceful, joyful and purposeful their lives will become.

So what does this Christian duty of warning, leading, advising mean in practical terms?

Firstly, it is a very serious thing to pretend something God has said is a sin is not a sin. People cannot repent of a sin they do not believe is a sin. If we tell people it is fine for them to continue to behave in a way God has said is not OK, we will most certainly be held accountable for the harm that comes to them.

This is a bit like a parent who insists, against a toddler’s screams of outrage, that the toddler must not stick forks into electric sockets. A parent who did not do his or her best to stop this behaviour, especially if it was repeated, would be considered at fault if the child came to serious harm.

Secondly, any such warning must, like that of a parent for a child, spring from genuine love and compassion. It has been well said that people will not care what you say until they see that you care. If you do not have a history of practical care and friendship for a person, then warning them that a particular action will cause them harm and separate them from the love of God, is not likely to be heard as anything other than self-righteousness and judgmentalism.

However, Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, lest you be judged,” is often taken out of context. It most certainly does not mean that we cannot judge evil actions. We can and must, and so must any just and civilised society. Rape is not OK, theft is not OK, murder is not OK.

The judgement we are not to make is that others are less valuable to God than we are. No matter what they have done; murderer, child molester, bully, wife beater, etc, etc, – every single person who has ever lived is loved by God so dearly that He sent His only Son so that person could have life eternal, that is, be with Jesus as a beloved friend forever.

God does not write people off, so neither must we. We must endeavour to see and treat every person we encounter in the knowledge that that person is valued, treasured by God beyond any human measure. We must not use, abuse or dismiss others, we must not judge or belittle them.

This means, if anything, that our duty to warn is even greater, not less. But how to do this? Our example must be Jesus.

We certainly need to heed Jesus’ warning in Matthew 7:4,5 “How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Examine your own life first; the way you treat the members of your family, your language – even when alone, what you look at and let your eyes linger on, the little shortcuts you take in business, the shading of the truth, the failure to take responsibility, the over-eating, the laziness. Be a harsher critic of your own decisions and choices than you are of anyone else’s. The first soul you are responsible to God for is your own.

But don’t wait till you are perfect! You never will be, not in this life, anyway. And like a loving parent, the fact that you fail sometimes should not stop you trying to help and protect others.

Two examples from the life of Jesus:

Luke 19:1-10, the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector.

Tax collectors were despised not just because they were civil servants to the hated Roman occupiers, but because they abused and stole from the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, and because they frequently used violence to extort money where it was not owed. They were scum. Or that is how most of Jewish society saw them. Yet Jesus invites himself to dinner at the home of a tax collector.

Complaints ensued. Understandable complaints! Jesus was someone who had consistently spoken for the poor, who was one of the poor and lived among them. He had also spoken unmistakeably about the need to live justly before God. Zacchaeus knew this. Jesus showed him by his actions that he was loved by God. It was up to Zacchaeus to accept the offer of fellowship, not just a once-off over dinner, but to be Jesus’ friend for all eternity. Or to reject it, knowing that if accepted, it meant he needed to make a break with his past; not just to cease acting in the way he had, but to make what amends he could, and to try to live a life of integrity and generosity from then on. Salvation came to Zacchaeus not just when Jesus spoke to him, but when Zacchaeus responded with repentance.

Love, not abuse or lecturing or rejection, led to Zaccaheus’s seeing that he was loved by God, and could have a life in which he was loved and valued by others. Jesus did not accept or slide over his sins, which were many and grievous, but the most important thing was to let him know that in spite of everything, he was valued, and could have a life richer and deeper than the materially rich but horribly empty life he had led to that point.

John 8: 1-11, the story of the woman caught in adultery.

I was astonished to read on a website recently (I cannot now find the link, sadly) that Jesus was a leader in recognising and blessing the sex industry. The author’s argument was that Jesus had not condemned the woman, who was following her chosen career (according the article’s author), but rather, had condemned those who stood against her. Therefore Jesus recognised and accepted the dignity of sex work. But this is not how John describes what happened. Jesus does indeed ask the woman “Has no one condemned you?” and when she answers “No, lord,” He replies “Then neither do I condemn you.” But this is not an acceptance of her actions.

The crowd was about to stone her; a horrifying punishment that is still used in some Middle-eastern countries. What is meant is “Has no one thrown a stone? Has no one condemned you to death?” They had not, and neither would Jesus. But not condemning someone to death is not saying their actions were acceptable. Jesus makes it clear that she is acceptable, valued, and worthy of love, but that her actions are not. “Go then. And do not sin again.” According to some traditions, this was Mary of Magdala, who become one of Jesus’ followers, and was the first to bring the good news of His resurrection to His disciples.

It was the combination of unfailing genuine love and service to the person, unyielding, relentless, unconditional love and acceptance of them as a person, along with unyielding rejection of behaviour harmful to them and others, that brought both Zacchaeus and Mary Magdalene to repentance, into fellowship with Jesus, and into eternal life. This is the example we are to follow.

A last word. There is this: Proverbs 9:8 “Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.” Mockers are not people who mock you or your ideas, but those who mock the need for God, or faith in God. As I noted above, it is not repentance from any particular sin which saves us, but turning to Christ. It is in a relationship with Jesus that we are born again and find eternal life. Without that, turning from any individual sin is meaningless.

There is no point in suggesting to people who are not Christians that a particular behaviour is setting them on the wrong road or alienating them from God. Not only is there no point, but such suggestions are likely to reinforce the view that Christians are judgmental and uninterested in them as persons. This is what Paul meant when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 5:12 “I have no business judging those who are outside. It is those who are inside we are to judge.”

We are called to love others because God loves them. Even when they are rude, spiteful, dishonest, even when they reject us and use us and say unkind things about us, God loves them and gave His Son for them. We are called to do the same. People are not objects, or even projects. They are to be treasured for themselves, because God treasures them.

Of course we will sometimes get it wrong. We will lose our tempers, be selfish, harsh and thoughtless. That matters, but it is not the end of the story. Because just as all those around us are loved, so are we, and God our Father is relentlessly, unyieldingly forgiving and welcoming.

We are loved, and so we are called to love.

The Ridiculous Injustice of the Conviction of Archbishop Philip Wilson

In a case that hung entirely on circumstantial evidence and which saw the veracity of ancient recollections accepted by the bench,  Archbishop Philip Wilson was found guilty of covering up sexual abuse by a fellow priest. If Wilson isn’t planning an appeal, he should.

A New South Wales court on Tuesday found Roman Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson guilty of covering up sexual abuse of boys by a priest he knew forty years ago. It was alleged and accepted by the court he had been informed by two separate victims in the 1970s that parish priest James Fletcher had sexually assaulted them, and had failed to act on that information. At the time, Fr Wilson was a junior priest who shared a house with Fletcher. By failing to act at the time, and by failing to give evidence of the information he held at the time of Fletcher’s trial in 2004 and 2005, Wilson was found to have covered up Fletcher’s repeat sexual offences.

Magistrate Robert Stone said that he had been convinced by “the number of people who have complained, and weight and quality of these people”  and that “The whole of the evidence as to sexual abuse from all families provides material that a person would believe.”

Indeed. No one doubts that Fletcher abused the complainants, or that he was a deceptive and selfish individual who betrayed his church and vulnerable people in his care, and who caused great harm to his victims. Anyone with a heart could not help but be saddened by the harm he did, and supportive of his victims, who were entirely right to feel betrayed and angry.

But that was not the question.

The question was, when was Fr Philip Wilson made aware of the abuse committed by James Fletcher against Peter Creigh?  Creigh first told his family about the abuse he had suffered in 2009, more than thirty years after the abuse took place, five years after Fletcher’s trial for abuse of other boys at about the same time, and three years after Fletcher’s death. When asked why he not mentioned the abuse before, he asserted he told the priest who shared the house with Fletcher. That priest was Philip Wilson. When questioned later, a second victim, un-named at this stage, also claimed to have told Wilson about the abuse at the time it occurred in the mid-Seventies.

At this point it may be appropriate to note the vitriol directed at Archbishop Wilson because he said, again in response to questions, that he did not make assumptions about anyone’s guilt or innocence on the basis of accusations only, but preferred to wait until the matter had been proven in court. This is, of course, the position that any sensible person, including police, journalists, and the courts, should take. But Wilson has not only been abused for this in the popular media, but was also, bizarrely, reprimanded by the presiding Magistrate in his case. Reprimanded for taking a view which is exactly the objective and careful view a magistrate would take.

In 2009, Creigh told his family about the abuse. In 2010 he wrote to his local bishop. He and the bishop (not Wilson) then met, and the bishop subsequently wrote to Creigh outlining what support the diocese was able to offer. Two and half years later, in 2013, Creigh was interviewed by police, and alleged that he told Wilson about the abuse at the time. Another person known to Creigh was subsequently interviewed by police, and when questioned, made a similar claim. Since he was apprised of these claims in 2014, Archbishop’ Wilson’s position has been exactly the same: he insists he has no memory of those conversations ever having taken place.

What really happened? There are a number of possibilities.

First, the two boys, now men, have clear and accurate memories of conversations they had forty years ago with a priest whom they correctly identify as now-Archbishop Wilson. This is the position Magistrate Robert Stone says is proven.

At the other end of the scale, the two men are simply lying about having told Archbishop Wilson, possibly to get back at the church they believe failed them, or to enhance the size of any compensation payout they may receive.

Or they may not have told anyone at the time, but as they have gone over and over in their minds the events at that time, have genuinely come to believe they did do so. Or they may have told someone, but misidentified who that person was. Or they may genuinely remember having had conversations with a person who was indeed Fr Wilson, and later come to believe that they must have talked to him about the abuse that occurred around the same time.

Memory is a strange thing, and as cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated, the merest word or question or suggestion can create “memories” which the person holding them absolutely believes are the accurate recall of real events.

So again, what really happened? Further, was the court’s faith in memory misplaced? As the Sydney Morning Herald noted in reporting the guilty verdict against Wilson:

It was a circumstantial case and the prosecution had to overcome a number of significant hurdles in their bid to prove Archbishop Wilson concealed the sexual abuse allegations against Father Fletcher.

Not only did Crown prosecutor Gareth Harrison have to prove that Mr Creigh told Archbishop Wilson about the sexual abuse in 1976, but that Archbishop Wilson remembered it and had a belief that the allegations were true between 2004 and 2006, after Fletcher had been charged with child sex offences and before his death in jail.

They also had to prove that Archbishop Wilson knew or believed he had information which might be of assistance in securing the prosecution of Fletcher for the sexual abuse offences against Mr Creigh.

While I have a passing acquaintance with Archbishop Wilson, and acknowledging that my view is subjective, it is my belief that had he known of the alleged offences, he would have brought them to the attention of his bishop and not hesitated to come forward to give evidence later when Fletcher went to trial. Someone who knows the complainants may take the view that they are people of courage and integrity, and that they would not have made the claims they have unless they were sure they were true. It is entirely possible for both of these things to be correct.

What is not possible, as I see it, is to reach the conclusion that one option is proven beyond reasonable doubt. Yet that is exactly the opinion reached by Magistrate Stone. Many will look upon his decision not as an end in itself but as the basis for an appeal.

Pope Changes the Rules – Not

Oh my goodness, the legacy media really are a laugh a minute.

Three examples:

Pope changes view on condom use.  No he hasn’t.

Pope Agrees Condom Use Can Be Justified. That’s not what he said.

Pontiff Blesses Condom Use. Did you even read what he said?

OK, then, what did he say?

Basically, that in some circumstances, the use of a condom by a male prostitute might indicate an awakening of a moral sense, or at least a recognition that sexual pleasure is not the highest good.

So condoms are OK?

Hardly.

What Pope Benedict said was that, possibly, for a male prostitute to use one might be an indication of the beginning of a journey towards the development of some responsibility, of concern for others.

See the last paragraph in the excerpt below.

From Jimmy Akin’s blog at the National Catholic Register:

Seewald: . . . In Africa you stated that the Church’s traditional teaching has proven to be the only sure way to stop the spread of HIV. Critics, including critics from the Church’s own ranks, object that it is madness to forbid a high-risk population to use condoms.

Benedict: . . . In my remarks I was not making a general statement about the condom issue, but merely said, and this is what caused such great offense, that we cannot solve the problem by distributing condoms. Much more needs to be done. We must stand close to the people, we must guide and help them; and we must do this both before and after they contract the disease.

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.

Note that the Pope’s overall argument is that condoms will not solve the problem of AIDS. In support of this, he makes several arguments:

1) People can already get condoms, yet it clearly hasn’t solved the problem.

2) The secular realm has proposed the ABC program, where a condom is used only if the first two, truly effective procedures (abstinence and fidelity) have been rejected. Thus even the secular ABC proposal recognizes that condoms are not the unique solution. They don’t work as well as abstinence and fidelity. The first two are better.

3) The fixation on condom use represents a banalization (trivialization) of sexuality that turns the act from being one of love to one of selfishness. For sex to have the positive role it is meant to play, this trivialization of sex—and thus the fixation on condoms—needs to be resisted.

So that’s the background to the statement that the press seized on:

There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality. [EMPHASIS ADDED]

There are several things to note here: First, note that the Pope says that “there may be a basis in the case of some individuals,” not that there is a basis. This is the language of speculation. But what is the Pope speculating about? That condom use is morally justified? No, that’s not what he’s said: that there may be cases “where this [condom use] can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way to recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed.”

In other words, as Janet Smith puts it,

The Holy Father is simply observing that for some homosexual prostitutes the use of a condom may indicate an awakening of a moral sense; an awakening that sexual pleasure is not the highest value, but that we must take care that we harm no one with our choices.  He is not speaking to the morality of the use of a condom, but to something that may be true about the psychological state of those who use them.  If such individuals are using condoms to avoid harming another, they may eventually realize that sexual acts between members of the same sex are inherently harmful since they are not in accord with human nature.

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