The Tablet
September 1, 2007

Outlook from the Outback
Stephen Crittenden

A devastating critique of the Catholic Church in Australia recently published by one of the country's most respected bishops has ignited debate about its future and pushed the progressive majority of the Church back to prominence after years in the shadows

Like the rural horizons of Australia after the worst drought in 100 years, the Australian Church is tinder dry, and a retired auxiliary Bishop of Sydney, Geoffrey Robinson, may have lit the match. His new book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: reclaiming the spirit of Jesus (John Garrett Publishing, Melbourne), accuses the leadership of the Catholic Church of treating the clerical sexual crisis as something to be "managed" in the hope that it will go away and never be referred to again. He says that until it confronts the root causes of this crisis, the Church will continue to be crippled.

One of the most intelligent and capable of the Australian bishops, Geoffrey Robinson, 70, is a former lecturer in canon law and was seen by many as the logical successor to Cardinal Ted Clancy as Archbishop of Sydney. Erudite, shy, rather unsmiling, and certainly no wishy-washy liberal, he is esteemed by Australian Catholics for his integrity in coordinating the Church's national response to the abuse crisis in the late 1990s. I interviewed him for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at that time, and his bleak and careworn demeanour left a deep impression.

Thanks to this book, we now know that he was struggling both with his own sexual abuse as a boy and his mounting frustration at Rome's silence and lack of support in relation to the crisis: "I eventually came to the point where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could no longer be a bishop of a Church about which I had such profound reservations."

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