Sydney
28 July 2002
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Bishop hopes sex abuse crisis is catalyst for ‘serious change’
By Kathleen Carmody
Two areas of the Church that demand further work post-Vatican II are sex and power, says Bishop Geoffrey Robinson.
Bishop Robinson, auxiliary bishop of Sydney, told the Catalyst for Renewal forum Vatican II: Unfinished Business that he hoped the current sex abuse crisis would bring about serious change within the Church.
“Two of the areas that demand further work are sex and power,” he said.
“The crisis of sexual abuse alone gives the enormous energy that is needed for further change to occur”
It was his hope, the bishop said, that in the year 2100 historians would look back and say that the issue of sexual abuse forced serious change to take place in the Church.
They would say: “Serious change in an organisation as large and ancient as the Catholic Church requires an immense energy, for it was this issue that finally caused vast numbers of Catholic people around the world to rise up and say ‘this is not good enough. There must be change’.”
The bishop, who is chairman of the Bishsps’ Professional Standards Committee, said he wasn’t calling for a revolution or battles in the street in front of cathedrals.
“The issue of abuse is complex and sensitive and it does not allow of instant and sweeping solutions,” the bishop said. “The whole Church must work together.”
He said he would like to see a request by Catholics to the Pope to undertake a serious study of any and all the factors within the Church that have fostered a climate of abuse or contributed to the covering up of abuse.
“I would like to see an insistence that obligatory celibacy, attitudes to sex and sexuality and all the ways in which power is understood and exercised within the Church at every level be part of this study,” the bishop said.
The Vatican needed to embrace collegiality and listen to the solutions of every country instead of imposing solutions, he said.
“If collegiality is not fully used in an issue so important, so down-to-earth and so crucial to the effectiveness of the Church, then the Vatican Council is truly unfinished business.”
On the local level, Bishop Robinson said he would like to see the 32 diocesan bishops and 150 leaders of religious institutes in Australia give up some of their independence and act as one on the issue of sexual abuse.
He said that Vatican II was the greatest event in the Church in his lifetime. It had inspired him for 40 years.
But it is unfinished business, he said.
“We should respond to the crisis of abuse for its own sake and the sake of the victims, but we should also seek to use its energy creatively, sensitively and intelligently in order to take further the unfinished business of the council.”