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Next week Parliament reconvenes; meanwhile the boats keep coming. Chris Bowen will be armed with a report from an expert panel that has been hearing from the community. We're still awaiting an answer on unaccompanied minors under the Malaysia solution. Until one is provided no one in good conscience can give it the tick.
I've come to believe that the world beyond the institutional Church is kinder, gentler, full of more conscientious ethics, values and care for others; that the secular world in which lay people live is more functional and more ready to conscience-examine than the institutional Church. Why then am I still a Catholic?
The news that Aurora accused James Holmes had sought psychiatric help may broaden the Australian discussion of the secrecy of confession. The exemption of certain privileged conversations from the duty of disclosure may be justified on the grounds of the public good.
Most, if not all priests, would prefer to go to jail than disclose material from confession. The seal of the confessional is a red herring when it comes to protecting children. If confessional reporting were mandatory, chances are that the perpetrator would simply not come to confession.
The spectre of sexual abuse has become a defining moment for the Church; one that, if not addressed more universally, more openly, and more humbly, poses a serious threat to the Church's life and authority. We are, after all, dealing with something akin to crimes against humanity.
The consecration of Bishop McGuckin in Toowoomba threw into relief the poverty of our public life and the need of symbols of trust. In applauding dismissed Bishop Morris, the people expressed their esteem for a man who was deeply trusted, but also expressed their judgment on what had been done to him.
Most Australians would agree that it’s time to free the Constitution from all vestiges of racial discrimination. For this, it needs an amendment affirming the status as Indigenous Australians as equal citizens. But in the current political climate, a referendum is unlikely to produce the necessary super majority of electors in four of the six states voting in favour.
The many bad stories about the Vatican raise questions about how central authority is exercised. Some critics focus on arrogance and misbehaviour there in the way that others see these behaviours in News Limited, the Greens, the Unions, and elsewhere. To address the way people in any organisation behave, you must first understand why they act as they do.
Last week’s tragedy of another mass loss of life at sea between Indonesia and Christmas Island focuses our minds yet again on an intractable public policy problem for Australia – our search for a coherent, workable and moral asylum policy.
One character sings a risqué satire called 'The Ballad of Joking Jesus'. Another wanders into a church and misinterprets the liturgy to comic effect. The puritanical Catholic hierarchy were offended, but Joyce's seemingly anti-religious novels would not exist in their final form were it not for his Jesuit education.
Recently Catherine Deveny tweeted that my claim to be a Catholic and a feminist showed I was 'suffering serious cognitive dissonance'. Many gay Christians are confronted by a similar lack of understanding from non-believers who can't understand why they would embrace a Church that rejects them.
Meetings between holiness and politics are inherently dramatic. Think of Jesus' trial, of A'Beckett's murder, of Luther at Worms, of Romero's last sermon. These were tragedies. In Fr Pierre Ceyrac, a French Jesuit priest who died last week, politics and holiness met dramatically, but as comedy.
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