The crimes of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and in other institutions, have generated a wide literature. It encompasses the experience of victims, the institutional causes of clerical abuse and the steps needed to do justice to its victims and to ensure it does not happen again.
Other writing offers help to victims to deal with their experience. An impressive example of this last category points to a wider challenge to our society. Jane Dowling's Child Arise! The Courage to Stand. A spiritual handbook for survivors of sexual abuse — which last month was named the Australian Christian Book of the Year — is addressed to Christians who have suffered abuse within the Church and whose faith is still central to them. Many, of course, have understandably abandoned it.
Dowling, who herself was a victim of clerical abuse, offers a program of reflections that bring together scriptural themes and the effects of sexual abuse by church representatives. Most striking in her book is the extraordinary labour required to purify the language of a tradition that has become polluted.
Christian prayer to God as Father, for example, will necessarily evoke images of abuse by reverend fathers who have abused, refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for the crime and have blamed the victim. From her own experience Dowling insists on the need to feel the full weight of fear, anger and betrayal associated with the image before seeking the richer possibilities in the scriptural tradition.
This process of resting with the associations of abuse attached to Christian words and images and slowly recovering their humane depths needs to be repeated again and again before the tradition can become life-giving.
This laborious and exacting process suggests that purifying the wells of a polluted tradition depends on a very slow reading that only experience can enable. It must be undertaken by those who have suffered from the pollution and not by those who have shaped, controlled and opened the language to poisoning.
Furthermore this purification of language is vital to churches not simply as a therapeutic exercise for victims but as a condition for their renewal and reconciliation.
These reflections may also be pertinent to the wider society. Brexit and the Trump phenomenon have been characterised by a coarsening of public language. It has been displayed in brutal partisanship, the reduction of complex argument to single slogans and the refusal to take responsibility.
"Public support for a royal commission acknowledges that the language has been poisoned and that the process of purification cannot begin in the banks, but only an open enquiry in which their victims have a voice."
In Australia the language used to describe national purpose and wellbeing has also been polluted. It has long been spoken of in economic terms, with the assumption that economic growth based on free and competitive markets would ipso facto benefit all Australians. But it has been increasingly evident that this economic language has been coopted to enrich the few. It cannot now cogently be used with ethical weight in public discourse because it is simply not trusted.
This can be seen institutionally in the lack of credibility enjoyed by any claims to act in the public interest made by banks or by business associations. The claims of banks to act in the interests of their clients and to contribute to the welfare of Australia have been shredded by the leaked crude conversations between their employees rigging the interbank rates, the use of customers as pawns in the making of profit, and the failure of the banks to take responsibility for their actions.
Public support for a royal commission acknowledges that the language has been poisoned and that the process of purification cannot begin in the banks, but only an open enquiry in which their victims have a voice and the mechanisms of self-enrichment are made bare.
This may also be true of business which has always spoken of its service to the community and its commitment to the welfare of its workers. The unrelenting flow of stories suggests that, although some businesses are beyond reproach, this language has also been poisoned.
In the last week's news we can read of the behaviour of the 7-Eleven franchise whose professions of ethical rectitude sit uneasily with a business model that almost demands that franchisees underpay their vulnerable workers. We can also read of mining companies bribing foreign officials to gain contracts, the lack of responsibility to the local community shown by Rio Tinto in walking away from the Ok Tedi mine, or of coal miners in promoting the denial of climate change and spruiking the benefits of coal export to the poor in developing nations. We read with incredulity the protestations of good corporate citizenship.
Few people now trust that the unrestrained competitive pursuit of profit by banks and businesses will benefit the public interest. Nor will they trust that lowering the deficit by further disadvantaging the most vulnerable is a moral imperative, still less that it will make a society fit for our descendants.
The language common to government, banks and business has been poisoned. No more than church language can be purified by bishops and priests can this public language be purified by ministers, directors and chairs of boards. The purification will be a slow process that must begin by listening to and learning from the victims of corporate self-interest.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.