In two weeks' time the Australian bishops will meet in their biannual meeting. It is obvious the Royal Commission into sexual abuse will be a major topic. I respectfully suggest some matters for their attention.
I suggest they invite as many leaders of religious institutes as possible to be present and join in the discussion.
Individual bishops have already promised 'full cooperation' with the Commission, but the gathered bishops and religious need to have a serious discussion concerning exactly what 'full' cooperation will mean. It is vital that all agree in detail on this point.
I suggest that they invite a couple of experts to speak to them on what the Commission will probably require. For example, they might seek out some persons who were involved in the Wood Royal Commission in 1996. They then need to ensure that they are all on exactly the same page.
They need to be aware that one single bishop or religious leader adopting a different idea of what 'full' means can quickly discredit all bishops and religious.
It is obvious that, if a particular case is discussed in the media, the local bishop or religious leader may have to respond. On the national scene, however, there must be one or two bishops or religious leaders appointed as national spokespersons. It must be crystal clear who speaks in the name of all the bishops or religious, and equally clear who does not.
The appearance of Cardinal Pell at a media conference last Tuesday was a disaster for the Church. In saying that, I am referring partly to the words he chose, and partly to the non-verbal messages he poured out. I believe that, beneath the exterior, he is a man who knows compassion, and I know that he has acted decisively on many cases of abuse, but his compassion did not come through to viewers.
It is essential that any spokespersons chosen by the bishops and religious should radiate, by both verbal and non-verbal means, the three virtues of total honesty, sincere humility and profound compassion.
The bishops and religious leaders will need to set up structures through which they can ensure a coordinated response to the matters raised by the Commission. These structures will no doubt cost money. But it would be a tragedy for the Church if the perception were that the bishops and religious were willing to spend large sums of money on lawyers and others to protect them before the Commission, but were being less generous to victims.
This is as much a matter of perception as of reality, and the bishops and religious will need to be constantly aware of it, for they can be certain that the media will.
The Church can never be content with its response to victims and needs to continually revisit this question. I have been perturbed by images on television of several parents of victims who committed suicide saying that no one from the Church has ever visited them. I know the difficulties of following up on each family, but it seems to me that there should be some structures here too.
As a matter of attitude, victims and their families, no matter how angry, aggressive and difficult they may be, are never our enemies, but people who have been deeply wounded by our community.
Moving on to even more difficult territory, bishops and religious leaders need to grapple with the fact that to this day there has never been any serious enquiry into the factors within the Church that may have contributed to abuse. The John Jay study in the United States contained much good material, but it did not answer this need.
For example, there has been a bland assertion in places that obligatory celibacy has not in any way been a cause of abuse, but few people believe this assertion and, as a negative fact, it could never be proved.
Unless and until obligatory celibacy is put on the table for discussion, the question will not go away. The question is not whether it has been the total cause or even the major cause, but whether it has been a significant contributing factor. Personally I find it impossible to deny that it has been such a factor.
There are other factors: the absence of women from the priesthood or from any significant role in responding to abuse; the idea that every sexual sin is a mortal sin and the impossible scruples that this has led to; clericalism and the idea that priests are somehow 'taken up' above other human beings and are 'ontologically different' from them; the feeling of many priests and religious that they must be perfect or at least appear to be; the lack of a true professionalism among priests and religious.
Some of these matters could be dealt with by the Australian bishops and religious, e.g. professionalism, including such matters as better screening processes for candidates; more attention to human development in seminaries and novitiates; psychological assessments, periodic professional appraisals; the presence of a supervisor; obligatory in-service; codes of conduct and a means of dealing with those people who, after every effort, simply do not belong in the priesthood or religious life. Immediate attention could be given to these matters.
Most of these questions are beyond the competence of the Australian authorities, e.g. obligatory celibacy; sexual morality; the role of women and clericalism. Such matters could easily arise in the Royal Commission, and the bishops and religious leaders need to discuss how they are going to deal with them in a credible way.
Since I have been there among the bishops myself, I have much compassion for them and the religious leaders as they try to pick their way through a closely sown minefield. I do not envy them. They are in dire need of our prayers and whatever assistance we can give.
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson is former auxiliary bishop of Sydney and author of Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church.