By Geoffrey Robinson

ABC RELIGION AND ETHICS | 1 OCT 2010

BISHOP GEOFFREY ROBINSON WAS AUXILIARY BISHOP IN THE ARCHBISHOP OF SYDNEY FROM 1984 UNTIL HIS RETIREMENT IN 2004.

In the middle of the 1990s I found myself in a situation which I now recognise as bizarre. I was a bishop and the leader of a committee charged by the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference with the task of coordinating a national response to the constant revelations of sexual abuse by members of the clergy, but at the same time I was coming to terms with the fact that as a young teenager I had been sexually abused myself.
Unable to cope with the abuse at the time it occurred and with no assistance available in those days, I had, as it were, put the abuse into the attic of my mind – always knowing it was there but never taking it down to look at it.

It was only when, some half a century later, I met with many victims of abuse and listened to their stories that I finally took my own story down out of the attic, looked at it again and, for the first time, named is as sexual abuse. With the aid of therapy I became aware of the devastating effects it had had in my life.

I continued my work on the committee, but my own story made me more demanding of the Church and more radical in my approach. I became very disillusioned with the pope and those around him in Rome.

Even now, in 2010, I still don’t think they have really understood the situation and they have certainly not grasped the nettle and begun to make the changes that are essential and that they alone have the power to make.

As a consequence, shortly after my term on the committee came to and end, I resigned my office as auxiliary bishop of Sydney and started writing a book that was eventually published under the title Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church.

The basic thesis of the book was that, if we are ever to reach a situation where abuse has been put behind us, there must first be fundamental and far reaching changes in the church on the two subjects of power and sex.
Over the three years since then I have found myself in a very ambivalent position. On the one hand, the Australian bishops, under pressure from Roman authorities, have condemned the book and in my own diocese of Sydney I have been excluded from a number of ceremonies usually performed by bishops. On the other hand, I have been overwhelmed by a most extraordinary outpouring of support from Catholic people.

This has led to a new book, Love’s Urgent Longings (John Garratt Publishing, 2010). The title is from a poem of St John of the Cross, where he sees the powerful longings for love within us as the basis of all that is spiritual.

The basic thesis of this book is that, in the ambivalent situation in which I find myself, I feel that I need to go back to the foundations of who I am and what I believe.

The starting point is the powerful longings I feel within myself, especially the longing for love. I then try to see whether I can build a satisfying spirituality by seeking to put aside the more immediate desires I might have and trying to attend to the deepest longings I find within myself – the longings for such things as meaning, unity, controlled energy, peace, happiness and love.

I then, as honestly as I am able, look again at whether I really believe in God and, if so, what kind of God and what does it ask of me. My answer is that, yes, mixed with profound concerns about the problem of evil and suffering, I do believe, but only after I have rejected a number of false ideas about God and only on the basis that I can have a love relationship with God, for that alone would speak to my longings.

Finally, I look at my need for a Christian community. Here all my ambivalence about the Catholic Church comes out. I quote the phrase of the now Blessed John Henry Newman, “There is nothing on this earth so ugly as the Catholic Church, and nothing so beautiful.”

It is all too easy to list the ugly, with sexual abuse being the latest and ugliest. But I have also in so many ways experienced the luminous beauty that exists within the church and I will not abandon that beauty and replace it with nothing.

At the end of the book I say, “And so, after all this thinking I find that, at the stage of life I have reached, my conclusion is no more noble than the pragmatic one that I do not have either the heart or the energy to throw away the good with the bad and start all over again … I have concluded, therefore, that, unless I am pushed out, I shall continue to try to find my way to God within that ugly and beautiful church. If I am pushed out, it would be a cause of great sadness to me, but I have to add that it would not be the total catastrophe it would once have been, and I would seek to adjust.”

That a bishop has reached such conclusions certainly says a lot about me, but surely it also says a lot about what the church has come to today.
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson was Auxiliary Bishop in the Archbishop of Sydney from 1984 until his retirement in 2004.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/10/01/3026991.htm?topic1=&topic2=