Introduction to the book.
Sexual
abuse of minors by a significant number of priests and religious, together with
the attempts by many church authorities to conceal the abuse, constitute one of
the ugliest stories ever to emerge from the Catholic Church. It is hard to
imagine a more total contradiction of everything Jesus Christ stood for, and it
would be difficult to overestimate the pervasive and lasting harm it has done
to the Church. This
book is not directly about that abuse, but about the better church these
revelations absolutely demand. In order to clear the way to speak about this
better church, however, I believe that I must devote this introduction to the
specific question of abuse.
In 1994 I was appointed by the
Australian bishops to a position of leadership in responding to revelations of
abuse, and for the following nine years I was at the heart of this storm within
my country. I felt sick to the stomach at the stories that victims told me, I
spent many sleepless nights and I lived at a constantly high level of stress.
Those years left an indelible mark on me, for they led me to a sense of
profound disillusionment with many things within my church, typified by the manner
in which, I was convinced, a number of people, at every level, were seeking to
‘manage’ the problem and make it ‘go away’, rather than truly confront and
eradicate it.
Through all of this I came to the
unshakeable conviction that within the Catholic Church there absolutely must be
profound and enduring change. In particular, there must be change on the two
subjects of power and sex.
That we should look at sex is
obvious, but there are two reasons why it is equally essential that we look at
all aspects of power. The first is that all sexual abuse is first and foremost
an abuse of power in a sexual form. The second is that within the Catholic
Church there is a constant insistence that on all important matters Catholic
people must look to the pope for guidance and direction. When a major matter
arises, therefore, and there is a notable and extraordinary absence of guidance
or direction from the pope - as was certainly the case in relation to the
sexual abuse of minors - it is inevitable that many will react according to
older values rather than with a new mind to meet a new problem. Those older
values have for a thousand years included secrecy, the covering over of
problems and the protection of the good name of the church.
In fact and in practice, there
was a wide variety of responses to abuse within each nation, ranging all the
way from the very good to the very bad. This very variety, however, was a
symptom of the lack of leadership from the centre in a highly centralised
church.
I am convinced that if the pope
had spoken clearly at the beginning of the revelations, inviting victims to
come forward so that the whole truth, however terrible, might be known and
confronted, and firmly directing that all members of the church should respond
with openness, humility, honesty and compassion, consistently putting victims
before the good name of the church, the entire response of the church would
have been far better.1
With power go
responsibilities. The pope has many times claimed the power, and must accept the
corresponding responsibilities. Within the present structures of the Catholic
Church, it is the pope alone who has the power to make the changes that are
necessary.
Even now I cannot see evidence
that a true confrontation of the problem is occurring. The staff of those
clinical facilities specially set up for the treatment of priests and religious
who have offended against minors have not been asked by Roman authorities for
their findings on the causes of abuse. The bishops of the world have not been asked
to coordinate research and study within their own territories. Until basic
steps such as these are taken, I find it impossible to believe that church
authorities are determined to confront rather than simply manage the problem.
Under this heading I want to
indicate areas where immediate study is needed and where the whole church
should be involved.
Celibacy is not the sole cause of
sexual abuse by priests and religious. It would actually be good if it were,
for then, by the simple expedient of abolishing celibacy, one could abolish all
abuse. But even if celibacy were abolished tomorrow, there is every reason to
believe that the problem would not disappear. As I hope to show a little later,
celibacy is a factor in a number of cases of abuse, but it is far from being
the sole cause of all abuse.
The presence among the ranks of
priests and religious of a number of persons with homosexual inclinations is
also not the sole cause, or even a significant cause. Homosexual adults are
attracted to other homosexual adults, and an attraction to minors, male or
female, is a quite different phenomenon. A homosexual adult is not more likely
to offend against minors than is a heterosexual adult. Screening out all
homosexuals from the priesthood and religious life will not make the problem of
child abuse disappear.
Offenders are not monsters who
can be recognised as monsters at first glance. On the contrary, in order to
offend, they need to be able to charm potential victims and win their
confidence. Far from looking like monsters, they usually look like a very kind
relative or friend, and they can be model priests or religious in all other
aspects of their lives. This is one of the difficulties in discovering them.
In short, there is no simple,
one-cause explanation of child abuse by priests or religious. If we try to
seize on any one single cause or give one simple explanation, we are avoiding
the depth and complexity of the problem and we will fail to overcome it.
The best statement I have
encountered concerning the causes of abuse, the one with the greatest promise
of showing us the way forward, is that child abuse, by priests, religious or,
for that matter, anyone else in the community, is most likely to occur when
three factors come together: an unhealthy psychological state, unhealthy ideas
concerning power and sex, and an unhealthy environment or community in which a
person lives.
Psychologists will admit that
there is much about the phenomenon of sexual abuse that is still not
understood. Despite this, there are many psychological studies on the subject.
If I have a reservation concerning them, it is that they concentrate on the
psychological state of the individual offender and look at unhealthy ideas and
environment only in terms of contributing factors to this individual’s
psychological state. I suggest that each of the three factors in the lives of
all priests and religious – psychological state, ideas and environment -
deserves a complete study on its own, followed by the way in which they can
interact on each other to produce the murky world out of which abuse arises.
In this field I claim no special
expertise, so I refer readers to studies that have been published, and add only a few points.
There are two types of
paedophile: the fixated and the regressive paedophile.
The fixated paedophile is the
person whose sole or at least overwhelming sexual attraction is towards minors, and who is consequently not attracted towards adults of
either sex. Just as there are no known means by which a homosexual can be
turned into a heterosexual, so there are no known means by which a fixated
attraction to minors can be turned into a sexual attraction towards adults.
The regressive paedophile is more
common and most priest and religious offenders fit into this category. Such a
person is basically either heterosexual or homosexual, but for a variety of
reasons is tempted to offend with minors.
One of the problems in overcoming
sexual abuse of minors is that there is no one single psychological profile of
regressive paedophiles. As a consequence, there are no practical tests that can
be applied to the general population that will tell us which persons will later
offend in this field and which will not, so it is not possible to screen out
all future offenders in advance.
There are what one writer has
called ‘red flags’ of abuse, that is, signs that should alert others to the
possibility of abuse, e.g. childish interests and behaviour, lack of relationships
with one’s own peers or a history of being abused oneself. It must be added,
however, that the presence of such a red flag does not of itself mean that the
person is an abuser, while the absence of all such signs is not proof that a
person will not abuse others.
The regressive paedophile begins
with free choice but eventually lives somewhere on the border between free
choice and compulsion. In almost every case there is evidence of careful
selection and ‘grooming’ of a victim, of planning of the circumstances, and of
care taken to ensure that the victim does not speak to others of what has
happened, so it is impossible to dismiss paedophile activity as the result of a
‘sickness’ for which the offender is not responsible. In most cases, there is clear
evidence that offenders knew what they were doing and were responsible for
their actions. On the other hand, there is also much evidence that even those
offenders who most sincerely do not want to offend again can feel an urge to do
so that is so powerful that, without outside help, they are unlikely to resist
it. As in so many other fields, the truly important thing is never to commit
the first crime, for there appears to be far more choice in that first offence
than there is once the urge to repeat has become powerful.
Other than this, three general
conclusions seem to be in order.
i) A wide variety of
psychological problems within the person can be contributing factors when
placed together with false ideas and an unhealthy environment.
ii) There are dangers if
professional people, including priests and religious, are not equipped to deal
with the high emotional demands of their calling.
iii) Professional people must
have both the external and internal resources to manage responsibly the
authority with which they have been invested. To give great authority to a
person who is incapable of handling it in a responsible manner is to invite
problems.
UNHEALTHY IDEAS CONCERNING
POWER AND SEXUALITY
POWER
All sexual abuse is first and
foremost an abuse of power. It is an abuse of power in a sexual form. Unhealthy
ideas concerning power and its exercise are always relevant to the question of
abuse.
Spiritual power is arguably the
most dangerous power of all. In the wrong hands it gives the power to make judgements
even about the eternal fate of another person. It needs a sign on it at all
times saying, ‘Handle with extreme care’. The greater the power a person
exercises, the more need there is for checks and balances before it is used and
accountability after it is used.
If the governing image of how to
act as a priest or religious is tied to the ideas of lordship and control,
then, no matter how benevolently ministry is carried out, an unhealthy
domination and subservience will be present. The worst case is that of the
‘messiah complex’, where a person believes that God is calling him or her to
be, as it were, a messiah, a chosen one who is called to some special mission
and is, therefore, above the rules that apply to ordinary mortals, including
the moral rules. In such cases, if sexual abuse does not occur, some other form
of abusive behaviour will.
There is an issue here that
applies mainly to priests and only to a lesser extent to religious. In my years
of training to become a priest, there was a phrase from the Letter to the
Hebrews that was much quoted:
‘Every
high priest chosen from among human beings is put in charge of things
pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.’
(5:1)
The Greek word (lambano)
here translated as ‘chosen’ means simply ‘taken’, but the Latin text that was
always quoted said assumptus, which means ‘taken up’. The implication
was that the priest was ‘taken up’ from among human beings to some higher
level. This is not what the Letter to the Hebrews meant, for the next words
are,
‘He is
able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject
to weakness, and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as
well as for those of the people.’ (5:2-3)
Despite this, the idea of being
‘taken up’ was part of the culture and it brought some reflection of the
‘messiah complex’ into that culture. It was not a healthy idea and it must now
be confronted.
This in turn led to a ‘mystique’
of the priesthood, a permanent state of being ‘taken up’. And this meant that a
priest could not simply be sacked for an offence, as another worker might be.
It was this ‘mystique’ that was in large part responsible for the practice of
transferring offending priests to new appointments in a way that, say, a lay
teacher in a Catholic school would not have been treated.
Closely allied to this can be an
inability to accept failure and vulnerability. Priests and religious can be
made to feel that, because they have been ‘taken up’, they must be perfect.
When they realize that they cannot achieve this, they can feel that they must
at least appear to be perfect. Perfectionism is dangerous in most fields, and
it is particularly dangerous in a field as vast as the spiritual and the moral,
where perfection is simply not possible for a human being. Feeling that one
must appear to be perfect even when one knows that one is not, being unable to
admit to failure and weakness, is an unhealthy attitude. Inherent in it is the
covering up of faults that do occur. There must be room for a painful struggle
towards maturity, with many mistakes along the way.
In priests and religious this
attitude can be strengthened by the expectations of others. They can feel that
religious superiors, people in their parish, the media and the community at
large demand that they be perfect and will strongly criticise any lack of
perfection. They can be made to feel that what would be described as an
understandable failure in another person would be called ‘sickening hypocrisy’
in them. These expectations can cause them to show externally a level of
perfection that they know they do not possess. In both priests and religious on
the one hand, and in the community on the other hand, there needs to be change
in the expectations that are present. Priests and religious are ordinary human
beings, and if either they or the community forget this, one kind of problem or
another will be caused.
SEXUALITY
In a later chapter I shall detail
a number of unhealthy ideas concerning sex and sexuality in the teaching of the
Catholic Church. Here I add only a few points that apply specifically to
priests and religious.
Eros or desire is the source of
passion, imagination and dreaming. It is associated with sensitivity, touch and
vulnerability, and is at the heart of compassion. It is an important means by
which a person participates in both social and religious life. For priests and
religious, desire has often been
denied or treated with suspicion. And yet the failure to cultivate desire can
take away the natural warmth and spontaneity of love and leave goodwill a vague
term not directed at anything in particular. Where eros is not given
sufficient attention, chastity can become mere control and lovelessness. Given
strong reasons, a young person might be prepared to contemplate a life without
genital sex, but no young persons in their right mind should be prepared to
give one second’s thought
If eros is denied, it is
inevitable that in male candidates for priesthood and religious life there will
also be a denial of the feminine which nurtures and fashions its energy. If the
masculine is not balanced by the feminine, there can be a growing danger of
incapacity
for interior reflection, an
inability to relate with intimacy, a dependence on role and work for
self-identification, and the loss of a humanising tenderness. The need for
intimacy is particularly important, for it cannot be extinguished and, if
unfulfilled, will seek expression in covert and distorted ways.
At the beginning of Chapter One I
shall make the statement that in the past the spiritual life was often
presented in the negative terms of self-denial, self-abasement and rejection of
the ‘world’. This negativity certainly extended to the management of one’s
sexuality and it contributed to the unhealthy world I am seeking to describe.
If some of the ideas of the
church concerning sexuality have been unhealthy, I also consider the entire
attitude that ‘anything goes’ to be unhealthy. When put together with other
factors, it, too, can lead to one or other form of sexual abuse. Priests and
religious who, in the name of breaking away from false ideas of the past, have
dallied with this mentality have entered very dangerous territory.
AN UNHEALTHY ENVIRONMENT OR COMMUNITY
Traditional seminaries (for
priests) and novitiates (for religious) can be unhealthy places in which to
grow to maturity, especially when candidates are taken in as young as eleven or
twelve years of age. There are many factors that do not contribute to healthy
growth: the one-sex environment, the absence of parents and other nurturing
figures, the other sex as a ‘threat’ to a vocation rather than as a positive
and essential influence for adolescents, the absence of any positive
preparation for a celibate lifestyle. At a time when adolescents and young
adults need to develop their own identity, this is subsumed into a collective
vision and expectation. The impersonal nature of the institution can cause a
sense of emotional isolation, and this can be accentuated by an emphasis on the
intellectual and spiritual at the expense of human development. Ordinary needs
for intimacy can seek their satisfaction covertly. While the situation varies
greatly from one seminary or novitiate to the next, one must seriously question
whether institutions are the place to form priests and religious.
Religious communities can also be
unhealthy places in which to live. Most members are trying to live by Christian
principles, but this can merely put a coat of paint over the lack of intimacy
and the failure to meet profound needs that can be present. It cannot make up
for emotional inadequacy and a covering over of conflicts rather than facing
and resolving them. A single ‘difficult’ individual can disrupt a whole
community. In a number of communities one must query how much effective
communication takes place and at what level. Today it is likely that the
members of the community go out to different jobs each day and there is often
little opportunity for an effective ‘debriefing’ on the stresses that are met in
these different jobs.
Priests in parishes, on the other
hand, more and more live on their own. Today, with fewer and older priests and
increasing demands, they feel stressed and overworked. Profound human needs are
not being met. The revelations of sexual abuse have caused morale to plummet
and have diminished the sense of satisfaction in the work they are doing.
There are few checks and balances
on the exercise of power by priests and religious and there is quite inadequate
accountability. I shall return to this in a later chapter.
THE SUM: A CLIMATE OF ABUSE
The three factors mentioned can
come together to form a climate, a murky world in which abuse is more
likely to occur. The church must look at the different ways in which this climate
can be created within its institutions.
There must be a three-pronged
attack, a study of the psychological state of priests and religious, a study of
their attitudes towards power and sex, and a study of the environment or
communities in which they live. In each study we must look at any and all
elements that are unhealthy and that could in any way contribute towards
creating the climate of abuse. Rather than wait for convincing proof that a
particular element has actually caused abuse, we must change all elements that
are seen to be unhealthy and could, therefore, contribute. There is no point in
making changes in one of the three areas while leaving the other two untouched.
The end result of sexual abuse
may occur in only some cases, but unhealthy elements have negative effects on
all priests and need to be changed for that reason alone.
CELIBACY
We must look well beyond celibacy
if we are to find and eradicate the causes of abuse. Nevertheless, celibacy is
all pervasive in the life of a priest or religious and needs to be looked at in
a special way.
Among the many and complex causes
of abuse, there are three categories in which celibacy appears to have made a
direct contribution.
While the abuse of children has
been the object of almost all attention, there has also been abuse of adults,
especially women, and this, too, has caused great harm to the victims. It has
not received attention because the police have normally responded that it
appeared to be a consenting relationship and so no crime had been committed. In
almost all cases, however, there has been the sexualising of a pastoral
relationship, and in many cases an abuse of spiritual power to obtain sexual
favours. It is hard not to see celibacy as contributing to these cases of abuse
of adult women.
There have been cases where
persons have been taken into a seminary or novitiate at too young an age and,
because of the environment, their psychosexual development has not progressed
beyond the age of about fifteen years, so that it is minors towards whom they
are attracted. This is the explanation of only some cases of abuse, but they do
exist.
In the third category, it is
known that in an environment such as a prison, some heterosexual persons can
become involved in homosexual sex, not by preference, but because it is all
that is available. It would seem that there have been some priests and
religious who abused minors, not by preference, but because minors were
available, either physically or psychologically. Physically, they have been
available in places such as orphanages or schools. Psychologically, it is known
that some offenders against minors can claim that celibacy applies only to
relations with adult women, so they claim in all seriousness that they have not
broken their vow of celibacy. For some priests and religious, this may be the
sense in which adult women are psychologically ‘not available’ but minds are.
Once again, this applies only to some cases and it would be foolish to
think that with these three
categories we had now explained all abuse.
In most cases it is not celibacy
itself that is the problem, but obligatory celibacy. There have been saints who
were so madly in love with both God and people that the idea of marriage did
not even occur to them, for there was so much to do in loving people and caring
for them that there would have been no time for marriage. A celibacy freely
chosen out of a burning love for people is unlikely to lead to abuse, for it is
not unhealthy.
The problem occurs when young
persons are attracted to priesthood or religious life but find that it comes
wrapped in a package that contains many elements. Because priesthood or
religious life can exert such a powerful call, some of the other elements of
the package, e.g. celibacy, do not receive the attention they should. The
system of removing the candidates from the world and from ‘temptation’ does not
assist them in this. Some time after ordination or profession, they can find
that priesthood or religious life still looks attractive, but celibacy does
not. Sadly, many priests and religious fall into this category. If the pope
were to ask for a disclosure ‘before God alone’ on this point from all priests
and religious, in secret and without betraying their identity, there might be
both surprise and alarm at just how large is the number of those who are
genuinely dedicated to the priesthood or religious life but are living it in an
unwanted, unassimilated and, therefore, unhealthy celibate state. Many of those
who have left the priesthood or religious life in the last forty years have
been in this category, but so are many of those who remain.
All of this points to the major
problem with obligatory celibacy, namely, that it is the attempt to make a free
gift of God obligatory, and one must seriously question whether this is
possible.
The law of celibacy assumes that
everyone who is called by God to priesthood is also called by God to celibacy
and given the divine assistance necessary to lead a celibate life. But is this
a mere assertion or a proven fact? Is it a case of human beings making a human
law and then demanding that God follow that law by giving special divine
assistance to those bound by the law? If church authorities really wish to
insist on obligatory celibacy as a requirement for priesthood, should they do far
more than simply assume a call to celibacy in those interested in the
priesthood? Should they, for example, continue to take students into the
seminary before they are adults and have an adult understanding of what
celibacy means? May they continue to assert that those thousands of priests who
have left the priesthood in recent decades in order to marry were all called by
God to celibacy and given every divine help they needed, but deliberately
refused this assistance?
Celibacy can contribute to the unhealthy
psychological state (e.g. depression), the unhealthy ideas (e.g. misogyny or
homophobia) and the unhealthy environment (e.g. an unwanted and unassimilated
celibacy) out of which abuse arises. If it is far from being the sole cause of
abuse, it cannot be said that it makes no contribution. If the church is
serious about overcoming abuse, then the contribution of celibacy must be most
carefully considered.
There is one other way in which
celibacy has contributed to abuse. A significant reason why the response of
many church authorities has been poor is that many bishops and religious
superiors, not being parents themselves, have not appreciated just how
fiercely, and even ferociously, parents will act to defend their children from
harm. If they had been parents, there would surely have been a more decisive
response.
At least in the Western world,
celibacy has come to be seen as the acid test of whether the church is truly
serious about overcoming abuse. Much that is said can be simplistic and involve
misconceptions, but this does not change the fact that, unless and until the
church puts celibacy on the table for serious discussion, people will simply
not believe it is serious about abuse. To start with the statement that the
requirement of obligatory celibacy cannot and will not be changed or even
examined, as both Pope John Paul II
and Pope Benedict XVI have done,
is to lose credibility before the discussion even begins. Some may speak all
they wish of the benefits of this celibacy for the church, but others will not
stop asking, ‘How many abused children is celibacy worth?’
It is not my intention to delve
further into the matters I have just raised, for they must be the subject of a
broader study in which the expertise of many different people in different
fields is brought together.
Instead of this, the present book
will look at a wider picture, including many elements that may not at first
sight appear directly connected with abuse. There are two reasons for this wider
study. The first is that we must look at the very foundations of
attitudes towards both power and sex in the church, for without changes in
these foundations, any action taken would not touch the underlying problems.
The second reason is that the fact of abuse has revealed a double problem, the
abuse itself and the response of church authorities to that abuse, and the
second problem has caused as much scandal as the first. It is only by studying
the wider church that we can see some of the more fundamental issues involved
in both of these questions. The rest of this book will, therefore, be about the
wider church rather than directly about abuse.
It will never be possible to
‘manage’ the revelations, so that they go away and are not mentioned again. I have
a serious fear that many church leaders are now feeling that the worst of the
problem is behind them, that is has been successfully ‘managed’, and hence that
they do not need to look at deeper issues. This attitude grossly
under-estimates the negative effects the scandal has had and involves wishful
thinking for the future. Yes, inroads have been made into the backlog of cases
that had built up over several decades and some offenders have been deterred,
if not by any moral reasons, then by the sheer terror of an offence being
disclosed. But if we remain silent and hope the problem will go away, abuse
will continue to occur. One day, sooner or later, the whole problem must be
confronted. Granted the present structures of the church, what we must cry out
for is a pope who will say publicly, ‘Yes, I am genuinely serious about
confronting both abuse and the response to abuse, and I will ruthlessly change
whatever needs to be changed in order to overcome both of these problems.
Please help me to identify all contributing causes.’
Before beginning the wider study,
I must confess that I am not a purely objective student of this matter.
The years I spent working in the
field of sexual abuse had such a profound effect on me because I had myself
been sexually abused when I was young. The offender was not a priest or
religious, nor anyone within the Catholic Church, nor was he a relative. I
belonged to that five percent of cases where the offender was a stranger.
Neither in my age at the time it happened nor in the duration of the abuse was
it as serious as much of the abuse I have encountered in others, and yet, if
the man had been caught in any one of his acts against me, he would have been
sent to prison. It was never a repressed memory, but for most of my life it
was, as it were, placed in the attic of my mind, that is, I always knew it was
there, but I never took it down to look at it.
When, in 1994, I was appointed to
an official position in the church’s response to abuse, I passed through three
stages. In the first stage I tried to act as a good human being, a good
Christian, a good priest. I soon realised that this was not enough, so I
quickly moved to a second stage of listening to as many victims as I could in
order to learn from them. Somewhere in this process I moved to the third stage
where what they were feeling and saying stirred strong echoes within my own
mind and heart. It was only then, some two years after I had been appointed,
and some half a century after it had happened, that I finally took my own
history down out of the attic, looked at it again and, for the first time in my
life, named it as sexual abuse. With the help of counsellors, I became
conscious of some of the effects it had had on me.
Flowing from all of this, my problems
with the church’s response to
the revelations of sexual abuse ran deep and reached up to the highest levels
of the church, for I was one of many people crying out for strong and
compassionate leadership on this matter and trying to do my best without the
support of that leadership. I felt that here was the perfect opportunity for
the papacy to fulfill its most basic role of being the rock that holds the
church together, but this did not happen, and the church fractured. I found it
impossible to accept that I must give ‘submission of mind and will’ to most
words written by a pope, but a failure to give leadership in a crisis seemed to
count for little. I felt that the demand was being made that I give my
submission to the silence as well as to the words, and I could not do this.
When, in front of several
journalists at a public meeting, I answered a victim’s question by saying that
I was not happy with the level of support we were receiving from ‘Rome’, I
received an official letter (7 August 1996) expressing ‘the ongoing concern of
the Congregation for Bishops that you have in recent months expressed views
that are seriously critical of the magisterial teaching and discipline of the
Church.’ I was told that ‘in a recent audience, the Holy Father has been fully
apprised of your public position on these issues and He has shown ‘serious
preoccupation in your regard.’ Two months later (16 October 1996) I received a
further letter informing me that ‘The relevant documentation will be forwarded,
for its information and review, to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith’, implying that I was suspected of some form of heresy.
I admit that I felt personally
hurt by this criticism of the only truthful reply I could have given to a room
full of victims, but it also led me to the conclusion that an authority that
had to be defended in a manner as heavy as this must have had serious doubts
about its own response to abuse.
There has never been a perfect
church and there never will be. I must always work within an imperfect church,
and must never forget that I am myself an imperfect member of that imperfect
church, contributing my problems and failures as well as my assistance. Sometimes, however, circumstances can arise
where there is only a fine line between accepting that I must work within an
imperfect church and becoming complicit in the harm that those imperfections
are causing to people.
I eventually came to the point
where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could
not continue to be a bishop of a church about which I had such profound
reservations. I resigned my office as Auxiliary Bishop in Sydney and began to
write this book about the very foundations of power and sex within the church.
I believe that in this book I
describe a better church, a church that is not contrary to the mind of Jesus
Christ. How others will react to the book is up to them, but the case for
reform must be most seriously considered, for we must confront all factors that
have in any way contributed either to abuse or to the inadequate response to
abuse.
I acknowledge the assistance of a
number of people who have read all or part of a draft of this book and offered
valuable comments that saved me from errors and gave greater depth to the book.
It says much about the need for change that, in the atmosphere that
prevails within the church, I
would be creating difficulties for them if I gave their names. They know who I
mean, and to each one of them I offer my sincere thanks for their comments and
support.