For Christ's Sake. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson

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      Priests and religious have many things in common, but they also have their differences. To be accurate concerning both groups in every statement I make would not be possible, and I feel that I would run the serious danger of making false statements about religious. Because of my personal experience, I shall here limit myself to speaking about priests, allowing religious to adapt my thoughts to their own situations.

      This book is a continuation of the book that I published in 2007: Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. I have repeated a certain amount of material from that book, but this book goes well beyond that one in the specific field of identifying causes of abuse.

      I have been supported by many people in the writing of this book. I express special thanks to Sr. Evelyn Woodward RSJ and to Tony and Gerardine Robinson for their helpful and constructive comments. I thank Fr. Michael Whelan SM and all the members of Catalyst for Renewal for their encouragement. I thank Gary Eastman, Tony Biviano and all the staff at Garratt Publishing for their assistance over many years and their enthusiasm for this book. I thank all those many people who have been calling out for a more radical response to sexual abuse.

      Above all, I thank all the victims of abuse who had the courage to come forward and tell their stories. If serious change ever occurs within the Church, the credit must go overwhelmingly to them.

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      ¹ David Ranson, ‘The Climate of Sexual Abuse’, The Furrow, 53 (July/August 2002), pp. 387–397.

      ² For a summary of the point psychology has reached, and for nineteen pages of bibliography on the subject, see ‘Child Abuse: A Review of the Literature’, The John Jay College Research Team, Karen J Terry, principal investigator and Jennifer Tallon, primary researcher. See also ‘The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States’, a Research Study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Both documents may be found on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at http:/www.usccb.org/ocyp/webstudy.shtml

       PART ONE

      Factors Contributing to Abuse

       CHAPTER ONE

MOVING FROM A RELIGION OF FEAR TO A RELIGION OF LOVE

      In any religion, everything without exception depends on the kind of god that is being worshipped. It is the single most important fact about any religious system, for every aspect of the system will flow from it.

      Ideas concerning this god will inevitably contain many elements that arise only from human minds; for, while there is only one God, there are an endless variety of human misunderstandings of God. Unable to grasp the infinite God, human beings constantly create a lesser god in their minds and worship that god, a god who is usually a very large human being rather than the true God.

      In particular, all people have both profound fears and profound longings within them, with the fears leading to ideas of an angry god, and the longings to ideas of a loving god, and then with these two forces in conflict within them.

      We can perhaps see this more clearly by looking at some developments in moral thinking in the Bible, reflecting developing ideas of God.

       SIX LEVELS OF MORALITY

      In the moral journey of the people of Israel in the First Testament, we may distinguish a number of levels of moral thinking through which they gradually rose as their understanding of God changed and developed. I suggest six levels.

       Level Six

      In Genesis 4:23 a man named Lamech demanded seventy-seven fold vengeance for any wrong done to him. This is surely the most primitive level of relationships between people, the very starting point of a long journey, and it reflects a very primitive idea of God. If a whole society were to adopt this criterion of seventy-sevenfold vengeance for any wrong done, it would be condemned to an endless cycle of violence and chaos, and any technical progress it made would be repeatedly destroyed by the violence. It may be called the level of superiority and vengeance, for Lamech sought vengeance because he considered himself superior to all other people. No one is immune from falling back to this level at any moment. Indeed, whenever a serious wrong is done to us, it is often our first spontaneous reaction: ‘If you hit me, I’ll hit you twice as hard.’

       Level Five

      The people of Israel began to rise above the level of Lamech, but progress was slow, and the next level was no more than that of the well-known biblical saying: ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’³ It was progress, for its force was: not seventy-seven teeth for one tooth—not even two teeth for one tooth—no more than one tooth for one tooth. It came from a time long before police forces and prisons, and so from a time when justice tended to be primitive, direct and physical. Far from requiring vengeance, it actually sought to restrict it. It may be called the level of justice without mercy.

      In practice, however, it was still too close to the level of Lamech, and Mahatma Gandhi’s comment on it was: ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’ It is the morality of ‘getting even’ (‘He hit me first’). One is reminded of the chilling phrase attributed to Joseph Kennedy: ‘Don’t get mad; get even.’ If humanity were to make serious progress, this rule would also have to give way to higher levels of morality.

       Level Four

      Throughout human history, people have related to other people on one of two bases: either the usefulness of others to themselves, or the essential dignity of others. Sadly, in all cultures and at all times (including our own) the first has tended to dominate, with people esteeming those who were useful to themselves while pushing to the margins of society those who were seen as ‘not useful’. This is the moral level of self-interest based on the usefulness of others to oneself. Needless to say, most of our relationships are reciprocal, that is, we both give and receive, and this is a good thing. But it leaves the question of how we should relate to both individuals and whole categories of people (e.g. the elderly, the Aboriginal people, homosexuals) who may in the eyes of some seem to have little to offer us. This level is reflected in many incidents in the Bible.

      Self-interest will always be a powerful force in human relationships, but it is not an adequate basis for living in community. A community will inevitably disintegrate if it is based solely on self-interest and there is no mutual respect and concern.

       Level Three

      The third level is that of the Ten Commandments,⁴ the level that best reflects the practical influence of the great Covenant between God and the people of Israel. This was the gigantic step upwards of the First Testament—reflecting a very different understanding of God—for the Ten Commandments were a serious attempt to base human relationships, not on the usefulness of others to ourselves, but on their essential dignity and on the rights that flow from this dignity. It may be called the level of respect for dignity and the rights that flow from dignity. Five consecutive commandments call for respect for one’s neighbour’s dignity as a human being. In the first four they do this by demanding respect for:

      • life and physical integrity (you shall not kill)

      • the relationships that make life worth living and give it meaning (you shall not commit adultery)

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