Attadale parish priest and Notre Dame University lecturer Fr Sean Fernandez has a burning desire to unearth in Catholics a stronger sense of the awesome faith traditions they have at their disposal. In this the Year for Priests, he begins a series exclusively for The Record.
I would like to take you for a brief ramble through the thickets of my mind. Two issues in the news recently struck me and led my mind to wander hither and thither.
The first was the release of the Murphy report out of Ireland which detailed grave failures on the part of the Archdiocese of Dublin in dealing with issues of child sexual abuse.
The second was what seems to be a commonplace of Australian politics: that Tony Abbott’s Catholic faith would be detrimental to his electability. The two stories are not related except for their fortuitous (in the strict sense of the word) appearance in the national press.
That terrible things happened and there was institutional failure in Dublin cannot be disputed.
Cardinal Brady of Armagh and Archbishop Martin of Dublin have admitted as much. It seems to me that most Australian dioceses have faced these issues and adopted frameworks which are transparent and emphasise the protection of the vulnerable.
Yet I could not but feel disheartened and ashamed at the Church’s failure to live up to its own standards.
The Murphy report makes for interesting reading on this very point. It states that if the Church leadership had actually applied Church law, offenders would have been dealt with more effectively.
There is Church documentation going back to the second century (AD 153 to be more precise) condemning predatory behaviour against children (see 1.18 of the Murphy Report).
The Church from its earliest days rejected the notion that children were merely the property of adults. This was a novel attitude toward the young and weak.
It was accepted practice in the Roman world for unwanted babies to be exposed to the elements and so killed. The head of the family – paterfamilias – pretty much held power of life and death over those in his family.
The practice of the members of the Christian community was very different; all life was precious.
We are the inheritors of this radical legacy – a legacy which has been undermined in modern times. We must ensure that we do not betray that tradition protecting the vulnerable both within and without the Church.
Now about my second thought, one not changed in the slightest by Tony Abbott’s being elected leader of the Federal Liberal Party. The media take it for granted that the majority of people are wary of Catholicism. And there seems to be a great deal of effort put into denigrating the Church.
It is common wisdom that the Catholic Church is stuck in the ‘Dark Ages’ while the world has moved on. Society has become the more enlightened, knowledgeable and humane as it has left behind its Christian past; the Church was the great obstacle to progress, especially in the sciences.
This attitude is not new – there was a peculiarly English-Protestant historical interpretation which took this for granted. In this view the Middle Ages was a period of stagnation in which human society was Church-ridden. I shall make three points regarding the distorted picture of history which still prevails, but which recent historical research has shown to be false.
Firstly, the ‘Dark Ages’ were not so dark; the Middle Ages do not represent a pause in human progress.
The flowering of thought which the Gospel brought about continued through the Mediaeval period.
Charitable institutions continued to be built; learning continued, great universities were founded.
Historians like Eamon Duffy have shown that pre-Reformation English Catholicism, far from being oppressive and lifeless, was vibrant and life-affirming (my word).
Secondly, the Church has not stood in the way of scientific discovery. Martin Rudwick offers a corrective to the distorted view of the relationship between Church and science in his history of geology. History shows that Church leaders and institutions have been intimately involved in scientific endeavour throughout Western history. One could well argue that scientific methodologies could only arise within a view which saw the world as a unity and as reasonable – Christian worldviews in other words.
And finally, so-called humanistic values like compassion are part of our everyday language because of Christianity.
Philosophers like Charles Taylor have shown that the contemporary humanistic values have complicated origins, but one can discern their roots in Christian beliefs. René Girard, the man of letters and member of the Académie Française, concludes that we, as a society, are only concerned for the weak and the victims because of the Gospel and the innocent victim crucified.
However, all this research seems not to have had its impact on the popular press; old bigotries thrive and are propagated.
The pre-Christian world was a harsh and cruel place where the weak were given no quarter. We forget this. Christianity introduced new values.
There is a danger that as these values become detached from the roots which gave them birth and sustained them, they will be emptied of meaning. There are already clear signs of this – the acceptance of abortion is one such sign. Why should the unborn be cherished? And today there are moral philosophers – occupying respected positions in academia – who argue that parents should be able to leave their newborn to die.
The vision which gave birth to Western society is fading.
That is not to say that there was some golden age when everything was rosy, but for a time the imagination of the West was caught by the Good News that God became man in Jesus Christ and this gave birth to a new vision of the human.
As this vision has faded, the ultimate value has become the free, unconstrained exercise of choice and power.
Yet, as Pope Benedict said in Sydney, ‘experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair’.
A society that is not nourished by Christian faith may well become progressively harsher and more inhuman. We need to find ways of helping people realise that the Gospel is true freedom.
I have touched all too briefly on various topics. And I have made very bold (and sweeping) statements.
I hope in the future to show that these are not my imaginings, but are based on solid historical research. Bernard of Chartres wrote that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.
I feel myself not to be on the shoulders of giants, but in a baby carrier glimpsing a little of the vistas around me.
I shall in the future give you sources and resources so that you may stand on the shoulders of true giants.
Fr Sean Fernandez is parish priest of Attadale and Senior Lecturer in the College of Philosophy and Theology, Notre Dame Australia. He took his Bachelor of Theology at the Flinders University of South Australia in 1994. In 2001 he completed his Licence in Sacred Theology (Fundamental Theology) at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome
and in 2006 gained a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Gregorian. His thesis, written while he was resident at the Irish College, Rome, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, was on the Trinity. He taught theology at the Gregorian and his first published writing was an article in According to Your Word, a book of essays in honour of Desmond Cardinal Connell.