religion
28 Jul 2009
The Revolutionary Priest
The sacking of controversial Catholic priest, Peter Kennedy, may satisfy conservative forces, but it's not a good look for a church that used to pride itself on its social justice, writes Ross Fitzgerald
Father Peter Kennedy had hundreds of followers and his church, St Mary’s at South Brisbane, was a beacon of enlightened thinking. What business would close down such a successful franchise?
Yet Fr Kennedy’s licence to exercise the rights of priestly office has been revoked for his refusal to stop outlawed practices such as allowing women to preach. Kennedy has been banned from conducting services as a Roman Catholic priest anywhere in the world, while his sidekick, Terry Fitzpatrick, has been banned from being active as a priest in the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane. Kennedy’s followers also face the possibility of excommunication.
Despite this, almost all of Kennedy’s flock from St Mary’s have followed him to his temporary "church" at the nearby Brisbane Trades and Labour Council Building. Indeed around 1200 people a week currently attend "St Mary’s in Exile" with services held at 6:30pm on Saturday, and 9am and 5pm on Sunday. In contrast, the official St Mary’s, which has now cancelled one of its services, currently attracts less than 100 worshippers a week.
As yet, no attempt has been made to interpret the battle between the institutional Church on the one hand, and Fr Kennedy and his many followers on the other, within a wider Queensland, Australian and global context. This needs to be done because the Catholic Church has been an influential force in Australian society and political life.
Australian Catholics have contributed widely and sometimes controversially to the rich tapestry of our public life. In his seminal history, The Roman Mould of the Australian Catholic Church, John Molony traverses the various conflicts within Australian Catholicism, some of them reflective of global tensions, between a rebellious and nationalistic Irish episcopate — led by Melbourne’s Archbishop Daniel Mannix — and attempts by Rome to bring them to heel. Yet the replacement of English Benedictines by Irishmen like Mannix signified a concession to the view that the Colonial Office should not run the Australian branch of the Catholic Church, and that no vestige of the subordinate position of restorationist Catholicism of the United Kingdom should taint the Australian Catholic experience.
From time to time, Rome has attempted to bring its rebellious Australian cadres into line through the appointment of disciplinary and interfering bishops and nuncios, but the historical record shows that Australian Catholics subscribe overwhelmingly to the political and cultural values of the secular state, and have remained firmly opposed to an established church.
When, during World War II, Archbishop Giovanni Panico was appointed Apostolic Delegate to Australia, he actively campaigned for the appointment of native-born Australian priests as Bishops and Archbishops, instead of Irish-born priests. This was seen as a very controversial move in some quarters of the Catholic Church in Australia.
So where does Peter Kennedy fit into this distinctly Australian tradition — in which respect for authority has to be measured against the capacity of authority to show leadership, command respect and engage critically with contemporary culture? Kennedy’s most spectacular foray into the field was during the authoritarian regime of National Party premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen, when Kennedy led the opposition of the Queensland Catholic Church, with the tacit approval of his then Archbishop, Francis Rush, to the moral and political excesses of the corrupt Queensland government.
Kennedy invited several key players, including myself (then widely known as an "Anti-Joh") and Tony Fitzgerald QC (who presided over the Commission of Inquiry into Queensland police and governmental corruption) to address his congregation — a testament to the engaged nature of his pastorate. Thus Kennedy deliberately brought the Gospels to engage with public life. And what a difference it made to engage with a priest who was well read, articulate and passionately involved with his audience, whether indigenous or white, Protestant or Catholic, male or female, straight or gay.
Kennedy offered an alternative model of Catholicism, one that is not as unique as is sometimes thought, but which is decreasingly tolerated as global Catholicism becomes more monochromatic and is reining in the so-called "excesses" of Vatican II reforms. Indeed, far from pleading guilty to excesses, Kennedy and his following convincingly argue that the rolling back of renewal has been on the part of the mainstream Catholic Church and its episcopate.
At a global level, the turning back of the clock began in earnest with the papal election of John Paul II. While the Polish pope was highly successful in sounding the death knell of Communism, his alliance with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher led him to make compromises with neoconservatives. This conservatism was reflected in a rejection of women as participants and priests in the Church, a matter now firmly closed since John Paul II’s papacy. Another issue was John Paul II’s crushing of liberation theology, which was the most interesting and relevant flowering of Catholic social teaching since Vatican II. He allowed his anti-communism to override and obliterate new theological and practical approaches to social justice.
Then the Vatican promoted clerics who in many instances were known to have blood on their hands — not simply indirectly through their compliance with policies intended to support corrupt military dictatorships but also through their silence over the murder of hundreds of priests, nuns, bishops and lay people in developing countries. Under the former and current pope, Catholic social teaching has been removed from its pivotal role in Australian Catholic consciousness and identity and replaced by an unhealthy return to Latinist practices that were not so long ago the precise reasons for Vatican II being called.
Father Kennedy’s helpmate at St Mary’s (and now at St Mary’s in
Exile), Terry Fitzpatrick, is a priest of the Toowoomba Diocese and
insofar as he is still a Catholic priest he is simply on leave of
absence from the Toowoomba Diocese and has been so for 15 years. This
is since he disclosed that he was the father of a boy, Jordan McGuire.
Edward
Kelly, then Bishop of Toowoomba, immediately relieved Fitzpatrick of
his position and forced him into taking leave of absence. In contrast,
the current Bishop, William Morris, took the view that Fitzpatrick had
some responsibility for the upbringing of his child and has continued
to support him during his extended leave of absence. Jordan, who has
taken his mother’s surname, has been cared for by both of his parents.
Unsurprisingly
while Fr Fitzpatrick is not the first priest to father a child — but
one of the few to acknowledge it — he has never been officially invited
back to Toowoomba, in part because such a move would be deeply opposed
by conservative Catholics and other fundamentalists.
Recognising these failures of the Catholic Church to renew itself is essential to an understanding of current events in Brisbane and elsewhere. It is well known that the power given by Vatican II to a commission to change the direction of Church teaching on contraception was revoked at the last minute by curial conservatives concerned as much about their loss of power as their opposition to such practices.
Pope Benedict has further consolidated conservative directions by adverse references to Islam at the time of the Crusades, to Buddhism as a form of autoeroticism, and by proposing that condoms not be used in the fight against AIDS.
In short, at exactly the same time as global consciousness has awoken to the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism, institutional Catholicism, fuelled by a resurgence of fundamentalism in its own ranks, now places increasing obstacles in the path of international peace and justice.
To see a once great and well respected Church, founded on the principle that faith and reason jointly inform a Catholic conscience and sentiment, move in this direction is therefore a profound tragedy. Fr Kennedy is the victim of a Church more concerned with papering over the cracks than in cleaning up its own act as a force for good in the world.
Indeed, Kennedy appears to have been made the scapegoat for advocating a socially liberal — and personally inclusive — Catholicism which is out of favour with Rome.
The revolutionary priest in Ross Fitzgerald’s prize-winning novel Soaring (Angus & Robertson, 1994) is loosely based on Father Peter Kennedy.
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“….a once great and well respected Church, founded on the principle that faith and reason jointly inform a Catholic conscience and sentiment…”
This is the church I grew up with and was educated by. Unfortunately for an increasingly conservative and reactionary church reason triumphed over faith many years ago.
For me and most of my friends, few if any of whom regularly attend mass - though some have persisted with catholic schooling for their kids - the church today is simply useless and irrelevant to the issues and problems of the times.
Good, well-intentioned lay people who desperately want the church to return to a progressive and reasoned path are still being driven away by the increasing conservatism, backwardness and simple lack of brains in the clerical hierarchy.
I don’t really see how the gap can now be bridged.
I read this article because it is important to be well informed - particularly about what organised religion is up to. For the most part, this piece appears to be a well-reasoned exposition of why the Catholic Church needs to change with the times. But I ran out of tolerance when I got to the phrase “founded on the prinicple that faith and reason jointly inform a Catholic conscience”.
Reason? I don’t think so.
There is a very good “reason” why in the last census, as many respondents described themselves as having no religion as described themelves as being Anglican (19%) and many people brought up as Catholic now considered themselves as having no religion (http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/6ef598989db79931ca257306000d52b4!OpenDocument).
The “reason” is that people are ever more rational - and religion, founded on a few ignorant persons’ faith in hundreds of years of error-prone oral tradition, is not.
jonnyboy55:
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said.
My interpretation of the phrase “founded on the prinicple that faith and reason jointly inform a Catholic conscience” is that in this instance it refers to the catholic church that had developed (evolved?!) in Australia up until about the early 70s.
I think everyone raised in this climate through the ’60s would have been surprised to discover as adults that….
a) the church they knew here in Oz did not actually represent a universal, coherent entity and that…
b) far more irrational and conservative forces would turn them away towards other faiths or, indeed, atheism.
neddy:
A very good point. My view is that this disillusionment is, in fact, a “modest” form of the exercise of reason that, if taken a little further, will lead the “reasoner” to realise that the church (any church) is founded on a collection of irrational concepts.
This is not to deny that some good work and many “rational” ideas have come out of “the church”. The issues are that:
1. These ideas typically arise from any organised, socially aware group (including atheists!).
2. The “good” ideas have been vastly outnumbered and overwhelmed by the “bad” in most organised religions (religious intolerance, wars, the subjugation of culture, the subjugation of women, the promotion of superstition, the “war” against science, adverse impacts on population health and the list goes on and on).
jonnyboy55:
1. Correct and agree.
2. Absolutely correct and totally agree.
None of it would matter much if they also believed in personal freedom and choice…but of course that’s no way to run any organisation !
That is the weird thing - I was taught to use my brains, reason things through and then, taking the facts into account, act on what my conscience told me…..I did exactly that as a very youndg adult and haven’t been back since.
For an outlet into dogmatic irrationalism I persist with the belief my footy team can win the flag.
Veritas Splendour is beautiful and I recommend it. For those that failed in an attempt to rationalise on matters of faith it will challenge.
The Catholic church’s core teachings are said eternal. The practices of the church laity are sadly very human. While our Cardinal might be a right wing bruva of old we also have those egoists that attempt to turn their personal heresy back on the institution.
And …. the numbers show that the prevalence of condom use as a factor does not correlate with a lowering of the spread of HIV.
To ‘rationalise’ is not the same as to think or act rationally.
Contradictory positions can only be reconciled by compromise. To reconcile between science and religious belief, for example, would require a compromise in one or both positions. If one of those positions is the result of rational scientific enquiry, it must be held firm against the vaguaries of mere belief.
As glorious and emotionally satisfying as a firmly held belief may be, it can never appraoch the empowering human certainty of true rationally derived knowledge.
Religion is fine for followers and sheep…both hand ultimate responsibility for their own lives and, in many cases, the lives and destiny of others in their care, to a third party.
And….nor do the numbers show the prevalence of condom use as a factor correlates wiih an increase in the spread of HIV. That is a misinterpretation of data made by those ideologically opposed to condom use for the purpose of reinforcing the social oppression of religion.
The Catholic Church has never been socially just. It has always used the media & it’s mentally deficient & total influenced political, large numbered congregation, to give the impression that it is.
One only has to look at Family law & child molestation within religious institutions to know the unorthodox methods, which are instigated to molest children & their parent/parent’s on such a large scale.
Catholic ‘s have so much money, with an incredible amount that is through donation, that makes it almost impossible to account for what is used for counteracts against those who speak out, or for the defence of the churches personal criminal actions.
Though the evidence of the church’s recent behaviour might suggest otherwise, Fitzgerald’s assertion that ‘faith and reason jointly inform a Catholic conscience and sentiment’ is a simple statement of fact. Reconciliation of the demands of faith and reason - whether or not anyone has done it successfully - was central to the theology of major thinkers (and whatever your point of view, they were major thinkers) such as Augustine and Aquinas. Even the present incumbent of the throne of St Peter has effectively argued that the capacity for reason is proof of divine providence. And let’s face it, if it weren’t for the intellectual and curatorial activity of monasteries during the early middle ages we’d all be doing such rational things as sacrificing our first born to the rising sun and having dung for dinner.
Of course there is much to criticise about the church, as Fitzgerald so eloquently and unrancorously points out, but let’s keep the bigger picture in mind.
I’d like to see this article posted in Eureka Street and see what comment it draws, both for and against.
Can you do that for us Ross?
Father Kennedy is not only a committed pastor but a successful one at that. I believe Jesus chose the outcasts rather than the hierarchy, and then there was Martin Luther.
Perhaps once again “the Church” could learn from the rebel.
Condomn use is neither here nor there because this issue is sex outside wedlock.
I wish Peter Kennedy all the best in his vocation.