4th Sunday Year A - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

Let me begin by quoting a recent notification from Francis Sullivan, who has been handling the Church’s response to the Royal Commission on Child Sexual Abuse:

"… the final hearing into the Catholic Church begins in Sydney on February 6th and is expected to run for three weeks. Unlike the case studies this hearing will be less forensic in nature and more of an exploration of the causes and contributing factors for the institutional responses from Church Authorities to child sex abuse cases. …

The history of abuse in the Catholic Church has been confronting and shameful. There is no excuse for it. There may well be reasons why it occurred but the fact that it did cannot be merely contextualised away. In its private sessions and through its data collection the Royal Commission has an estimate of the extent of the sexual abuse of children within the Church. I am sure this will be made public in the hearing and I for one am bracing myself for this revelation. This will be the first time anywhere in the world that the data of the Catholic Church on child sexual abuse has been compiled and analysed for public consideration.

The data and the evidence from expert witnesses will make for an intense examination of the abuse scandal. It will point to cultural and sociological issues in the Catholic Church in Australia – how decision making occurred, who was involved and why. It will look at where responsibility fell and to what degree accountability and compliance processes were effectively deployed. The hearing will seek to provide an understanding of how priests and religious were selected and trained in decades past as well as in current times.

It will be an important exploration of a devastating chapter in the history of the Catholic Church in Australia. And it will be difficult for the Catholic community."

I hope that the Royal Commission will prove to be a highly-valuable grace to the Church. Jesus spoke so often of sin as blindness, and people’s problem as having eyes, but not seeing, ears, but not hearing. Please God, the Commission will help us to see ourselves, perhaps even with a devastating clarity. Healing will not be a case simply of new laws and new procedures, however helpful they may be. We need help to go deeper than that, and see where we have sinned, where our behavior has been destructive and why and how. A whole Church culture, a deeply clerical culture, have to be recognised and changed. And most of the time we just do not see it.

It is against that background that I hear Jesus’ comment today: Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.

The catch is that our present humiliation as Church is the result, not of calumny, but of the revelation of the truth. We are not being criticized on Jesus’ account, but because of our sin. And I am aware that the ones who perhaps are made to feel the humiliation most strongly, and the confusion and the betrayal, are you, the ordinary parishioners.

Later in the Gospel Jesus told his disciples, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you. I think a lot about that. It is hard to be humiliated by others. It will be all the more tragic if we do not learn to, and in fact, become humble through it. Humility is something that is hard for us to see the point of, even to understand. I think that, in this, it is not much different from unconditional love, or unconditional sorrow, or unconditional forgiveness. We can talk about them easily enough; perhaps we even think we practise them. But I am not sure. As part of that package deal, they mark the breakthrough. When we get it, everything changes. We find freedom. We come truly alive.