By losing, we find life

Sunday 12C June 26 2022

[1Kings 19:16-21, Luke 9:51-62]

Just now in Melbourne the trees of European ancestry have lost nearly all their leaves. Through stark black twigs we can see the sky, usually grey but today a glorious blue. In earlier years, bare winter branches moved me to feel sad, but now, when last summer seems like last week, I know how temporary these changes are. Poets and theologians have taught me how these trees must be stripped bare so that, just a few months from now, they can dress up in glorious new green.

The carpet of dying leaves shows us the truth in today’s gospel reading: if we are to “follow Jesus” – to “see the bigger picture” and go deeper into the Mystery of the One who formed us among trillions of stars – we need to let go of some things that seem basic and essential. Jesus, the itinerant preacher, had no permanent home. In his patriarchal culture, family was one’s only source of protection, but for deeper reasons he walked away from his family. He advised a person who clung: “Leave the dead to bury their dead”. Mark’s gospel tells us that Jesus’ family thought he was mad, and tried to restrain him.

The need to “lose our leaves” is clear too in the reading from the First Book of Kings. When the great prophet Elijah is approaching his end, he throws his mantle over Elisha, inviting him to be his successor. He does not compel him, but Elisha is willing. At once he stops ploughing; he kills his two oxen and burns their heavy wooden yoke to cook them as a sacrifice to God and a feast for his community before he departs.

There are times when we need to let go: after our spouse dies; or we are divorced; or receive a serious diagnosis; or when we need to forgive someone who has done us great wrong. Sometimes we need, literally, to move away.

I love the church, founded on Christ, into which I was baptised 82 years ago. I deeply respect the tradition of the Dominican Order, in which I have lived for 62 years. But after carefully considering the actions of the Catholic church, I am about to make a gesture to express my profound disagreement with some of its policies. I will move out of my Dominican community – we are still friends – but live alone and work as a priest among poorer people.

My disagreement is with clericalism: the idea that men [sic] ordained to preside at the Eucharist are more deserving of honour and privilege – and power – than other Christians.The church was founded as a community based on love, but has become a “pyramid of power”.

It is because of clerical privilege that a shamefully high proportion of clerics world-wide have sexually abused children. Clericalism was the reason that most bishops consistently concealed those crimes. In Melbourne and Ballarat, notorious priests were abusing children for decades, but bishops kept moving them to other parishes, without telling the people.

It was the church’s Canon Law that led bishops to protect clerical offenders rather than help broken children and families. Are not children just as much members of the church, as are clerics?

Our church-institution is still paying enormous legal fees to avoid compensating victims/survivors. In the USA, bishops are opposing new laws that would enable older abuse cases to be heard. In 1983 Pope John Paul’s “reform” of Canon Law declared that any complaint about abuse that was not made within five years, was simply “extinguished”; could not be pursued. (Canon 1362) Several dozen bishops and cardinals have themselves been abusers.

Even more importantly, clerics have gradually changed the Eucharist, our central Christian action and prayer. Originally the Eucharist was a thanksgiving meal of people rejoicing that Christ was in them. After 1000 years it had become a ritual dominated by one privileged man, while the people might receive a morsel of the consecrated bread only once a year, and never receive the chalice. Even the good reforms made by the Second Vatican Council do not give the people their rightful part.

Still today, about half the Catholics in the world cannot celebrate Mass, because clerical rules restrict who can be ordained to preside. Fewer people attend Mass now – in Australia about 12%. Many, especially the young, stay away because clericalism restricts our sharing.

Thousands of Catholics have asked the Plenary Council to allow our church to grow and develop. But many bishops are trying to smother the “voice of the faithful”. Are we praying enough that our bishops will listen? It is not only individuals who need to let go of things we think are important. Surely the Church-institution must also heed what Christ so often said, in all four gospels: “… those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

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By this love … everyone will know that you are my disciples

Easter 5C 15^th May 2022 [John 13:31-35]

We wonder why people walk away from the Catholic church. The sad statistics in Australia tell us that fewer than twelve percent, at most, now come to Sunday Mass. Attendance was much higher a few decades ago. In Europe the figures are much the same. In Germany, they are down to six percent. And it’s much the same in the USA, where attendance was once higher than in most countries. It is significant that large crowds still come to Mass at Christmas and Easter, for most people still have a deep conviction that our Christian faith contains an infinite treasure, a link with the Transcendent Mystery, the Holy One, something too precious to lose.

Clerics who run parishes and dioceses are inclined to respond to this important question by pointing out changes in the disappearing congregation. Yes, people’s lives are significantly different now from what they were in the 1950’s or even the ‘80s. People are busier now. Because of unjust social structures, many are forced to work on weekends. There is now an enormous range of entertainment and sport on Sundays, which was not there before. And children often need to be driven to their sporting events. People now know a lot more about the variety of religious faiths, and this may confuse their former understanding, which we were once so emphatically taught, that there is only one true way to find God.

Some clergy accuse “lay people” of having “lost their faith”. But there is plenty of evidence that people are searching for meaning in their lives; that they believe in life after death and the existence of “something beyond all this”. They just don’t want to come to church.

When we think of the declining numbers in our pews on Sundays, could a more sound approach be to look more critically at what we clerics offer, who stand here in front you? Why have we lost our “share of the market”? (I say “we” because I have been ordained for fifty-six years.) Do we have the courage to ask whether the clerics of the church operate, always and everywhere, on Jesus’ command, which is the title of this homily? By this love … everyone will know that you are my disciples. It is the last line of today’s gospel.

The following incident suggests that clerics do not always follow Jesus in this, but put law before love, seemingly to maintain the clerics’ own control and power. However I hope – with not much confidence – that this incident does represent the majority of clerics.

I was called to a hospital room to visit a woman who had terminal cancer, and was told that she was soon going home to die. I was pleased for her, for dying at home among family is preferable to dying in a vast modern hospital. But when I arrived at the woman’s bedside and met two of her adult children, I began to realise that she had chosen, in two days’ time, to die by taking some lethal mixture. I talked with her, and heard why she had made her choice, and that all her five children were content with it.After praying with her and anointing her, I left her, peaceful, even joyful.

The next day, during a conversation with other clergy, one man said that a ruling from the archdiocese commands priests not to administer sacraments to a person who has chosen to end their own life. The reason he gave was that the priest might be giving a sacrament to someone in a state of mortal sin. My mind went back to that hospital room. That dying woman had asked for a priest to visit her. One of her adult children in the room had shared with me that he “never goes near a church” because of “things that were happening” at his Catholic school long ago. Should I have obeyed a clerical rule and refused to anoint his mother, using our ancient sacrament, the symbol which declares that God – and the Christian community – loves her and is with her in her weakness? I sincerely believe that if I had refused her, no matter how politely I did so, it would be like slapping her across the face, then doing the same to her son, and walking away.

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Who is a hypocrite?

Sunday 32B3 7th November 2021

[Mark 12:38-44]

In this passage Jesus points to a poor widow giving her gift to the Jerusalem temple. She is one of those whom the bible is always defending: the poor, the helpless, the children. ‘Blessed are the poor’. God is on their side and promises them ultimate fulfilment. God asks us to help them. We are also recommended to be like the widow: to give all of our self in seeking to build up the Reign of God.

But just before we met this widow, we heard Jesus attacking the scribes for being hypocrites. Did Mark record these memories of Jesus so that we, reading his gospel, could check ourselves; asking if we are hypocrites in any way? Jesus criticised the Scribes for arrogantly wearing their graceful long gowns; and enjoying the honour and privileges that their education gave them. He condemned them for being dishonest: overcharging people for handling legal documents; swindling poor people; seizing a widow’s house, the only property she owned. Their penalties would be severe.

Could there be hypocrites in our own society? Our news has been full of the story of the little girl Cleo, missing for 18 days. We could feel the deep pain of her mother as she tried to cope with the terrible loss. And then, wonderfully, Cleo was recovered, unharmed. She had been kidnapped by a confused young Aboriginal man, Terence Kelly. But as we watched Cleo’s joyful reunion with her mother, did we think of the thousands of little girls and boys that our Australian government kidnapped, often violently, in broad daylight, from their Aboriginal mothers? Our governments did this during eight generations, taking ‘half-caste’ children from their parents, to ‘assimilate’ them into white society.

If we are greatly concerned for some children, but not for others… isn’t this hypocrisy? We can read some of the Indigenous children’s heart-breaking stories in the government report Bringing Them Home, released twenty-four years ago, in 1997. Can we even begin to feel the pain of those families? It was not uncommon to hear people express the shocking racist attitude, that Aboriginal mothers do not feel for their children in the same way that white mothers do.

So before people condemn Cleo’s abductor, Terence Kelly, we need to investigate how his family has been affected by our stealing of aboriginal children from their parents. We can be sure that little Cleo will be helped to cope with any after-effects she might suffer from being kidnapped. But. who is helping the children and grandchildren of those thousands of kidnapped Aboriginal children? The trauma of having children stolen continues to affect future generations.

Worst of all, do we realise that First Nations children are still being removed from their families? The documentary Incarceration Nation, on SBS last week, showed that, unbelievably, Indigenous children are being removed from their parents by the ‘Child Welfare’ system and the juvenile prisons at a greater rate now then ever before. The public rallied generously to help little Cleo – and I am sure each of us would have helped if we could. But will we press our government to change what they are still doing, now, in our name? Or does racism pervade our community so deeply, that we do not mind?

If we make no combined effort to stop this, doesn’t it look like hypocrisy on a huge scale: national concern for Cleo’s family, but no effort to prevent the breaking up of hundreds of other Australian families? Why is this happening? One major reason is that we will not give Aboriginal people themselves the power to care for their own. It is shameful that the Howard government refused to listen to the Statement from Uluru, which Aboriginal peoples from across Australia had carefully agreed upon. So it still happens that if an Aboriginal child is declared ‘neglected’, instead of allowing their extended family to care for them, they are fed into the ‘welfare’ system and almost always end up in children’s homes, then adult prisons. And they are treated cruelly, and die there. Since the Royal Commission to prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody, nearly 500 prisoners have died in jail. Although Indigenous are only 3% of the population, more than half of the children in juvenile prisons are Indigenous. And the Indigenous women whom we are jailing more and more, are mostly mothers, separated from their children, to weaken the family structure even more.

If this were not bad enough, our governments are building private prisons, run by trans-national companies, who make profits by keeping more people in jail. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry. If we used even half of the money it costs to keep people in prisons, to house and educate Australia’s poorer families and individuals, we would heal society, rather than make it worse. Like the widow praised by Jesus, probably all of us have in the past given generously to pay for God to be worshipped in our churches and temples. Isn’t it more important to help re-build the temple of God that is every person of the First Nations who lived in this land for thousands of years? They are God’s temple, as much as we are. Will we ponder deeply, now, what words and actions we can use to help overcome our hypocrisy and bring about the Reign of God?

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