catholicweekly.com.au 17 16, August, 2020 E ditorial & letters Dorin’s World Send your letters to:
[email protected] By the post: The Editor, Level 13, 133 Liverpool St, Sydney NSW 2000 AUSTRALIA So how far will Confession precedent be applied? I am content to stand corrected, but I believe our laws allow a defence counsel to keep confidential his or her client’s admission to the breaking of a law no matter how serious - and still defend the accused to the best of his or her ability. If the proposed law requiring priests to break the Seal of Confession applies, will it not extend progressively to all ? Colliss Parrett Barton ACT Intrinsic issues with Jehovah’s Witnesses M onica Doumit’s recent article on the Jehovah’s Witness and child abuse makes a number of good points but the comparison of abuse within that church to what has happened in the Catholic Church needs refining. Jehovah’s Witness statistics came from internal records that track all wrongdo- ing among the entire JW community. The majority of cases therefore involve abuse allegations against parishioners and not appointed ministers. Isolating the cases involving ministers, the number of al- leged perpetrators becomes around 108. On a per-capita basis, this is still sever- al times worse than the Catholic Church and comes despite the Jehovah’s Wit- nesses not running schools, colleges, hospitals or other similar institutions. Why has child abuse been so bad in the Jehovah’s Witnesses? In my opinion it is to do with the closed nature of the community, including distrust of out- siders and secular authorities and pro- tection of an internal patriarchal power structure, including the head of the fam- ily unit. The Royal Commission spent a lot of time investigating the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They produced damning reports and many adverse findings against them that were almost universally rejected by the church’s leaders, who have largely re- fused to acknowledge their failings or make any changes to their policies. I agree that there has been very poor coverage of the problems among the Jehovah’s Witnesses. While the Catho- lic Church and Salvation Army were the subject of numerous 7:30 Report stories on the ABC, there was nothing – or al- most nothing - about the Jehovah’s Wit- nesses. This failure makes it easier for that church to carry on without any con- sequences and compounds the sense among victims that they have been for- gotten. HWolf Sydney NSW Letting governments select bishops is ... problematic A fter the deaf ear apparently given by Vatican Monsignori diplomats to the concerns expressed by Car- dinal Zen, at their agreement with China regarding the nomination of bishops, I reacquainted myself with the appoint- ment process for Anglican bishops. It begins with a Crown nominations commission consisting of the Archbish- op of the province (York or Canterbury), representatives from the diocese and the general Synod (lay and clerical). The commission submits two names for possible candidates to the Prime Min- ister. The PM selects the new bishop from one of the two candidates and forwards the name to the Queen. The Queen exercises royal assent and approves the Prime Minister’s selection. The name is then forwarded to the cathe- dral chapter of the diocese with a “leave to elect” the nominated individual. Thereafter, the diocese’s College of Canons meets to ‘elect’ the new bishop. (This stage of the process was mocked by Ralph Waldo Emerson thus: “The King sends the Dean and Canons a congé d’éli- re , or leave to elect, but also sends them the name of the person whom they are to elect. They go into the Cathedral, chant and pray; and after these invocations in- variably find that the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recommendation of the King” [Emerson, English Traits, XIII, 1856].) Such an approach is why we must strongly resist the Vatican deal with Chi- na. There must be no involvement of the state in the appointment of Bishops. Stephen Early North Richmond NSW Hiroshima, Nagasaki bombings were crimes T he recent 75th anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Naga- saki remind us that we have come to treat our technological achievements as demonstrations of our superiority. Yet, as Pope Benedict once put it, our moral progress has not apparently kept pace. While finding the quickest end to the war with Japan was obviously of supreme importance, wiping out two civilian cen- tres of population was, in my view, an equally obvious war crime. Victory was hastened - but at what cost? One could make the same observations about the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden and, in Japan, of Tokyo. Toby Garcia Lopez Baulkham Hills NSW Removing a racist’s name is a good start O n 21 July, the major US abortion promoter and provider Planned Parenthood of Greater New York decided to remove the name of Marga- ret Sanger, one of Planned Parenthood’s main founders, from its Manhattan clinic. The reason it gave for removing the name of Sanger was that she possessed, in their own words, “harmful connections to the eugenics movement” and it was “both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Par- enthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of colour.” We should hope that this decision is not just an example of the wave of “cancelling” historical figures left and right that we have recently seen, but the product of a serious re- flection about ideas Margaret Sanger shared and promoted. There is a stark difference between an organisation decid- ing to change the name of one of its buildings – or a group of citizens asking through legal means to change the name of a street or remove a statue – and the mob mentality of im- posing a certain concept of history on the whole of society by tearing down whatever monument a group of people de- cide to destroy. The same fairness that was demanded for St Frances Cabrini (the young widowed mother who founded a wom- en’s religious community that cared for orphans) during the controversy about her statue, or for early Californian missionary St Junipero Serra more recently, should apply to Margaret Sanger. Cabrini and Serra are saints we revere while we abhor the promotion of abortion and Sanger’s rac- ism. But in each case, the way we remember them should be based on serious historical perspective and the decision to have buildings or statues to honor them should be based on civil debate, not fanaticism or anachronistic judgments. Margaret Sanger was clearly a woman who held views that were racist, classist, anti-poor, anti-immigrant and against people with disabilities. Planned Parenthood has finally recognised the evil and harmwrought by Margaret Sanger and we pray that this is a first step in coming to real- ise the slaughter of the innocents to which it is contributing. Perhaps this will spark the process of realising that abor- tion takes a human life and snuffs it out before it can even be born. Perhaps Planned Parenthood will realise the harm that it imposes in its abortion mills. The Catholic Church teaches that life begins at concep- tion. She clearly teaches that all life is precious, from con- ception to natural death. She clearly teaches that abortion and the procuring of abortion is a grave moral evil. Yes, the church must be completely pro-life in the fullest sense, en- gaging the corporal works of mercy: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, give alms to the poor, shelter the home- less, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. All life has value – the unborn, the elderly, the prisoner, the disabled, the poor, the immigrant. Unless we give life a chance, unless we commit to being completely pro-life in all we say and do, in our actions and in our attitudes, we cannot say we are living up to the mandate of the Lord to “love one another.” Margaret Sanger’s name being removed is the start. Let’s pray that this will lead to those in Planned Parenthood re- thinking their actions and attitudes, to turn away from the culture of death, and to fully embrace a culture of life. This edited editorial appeared on 29 July on the website of The Tablet, newspaper of the Diocese of Brooklyn. LETTERS The gift of life itself A round Australia, a small number of organisations have carried out unseen heroic works for sever- al decades. Overwhelmingly they are the works of lay men and women. Often they are some- what ecumenical, we might say, in nature: Christians band- ing together in love and solidarity for those in need. Small, usually underfunded, relying overwhelmingly on volun- teers - often retirees - they are the pregnancy assistance or- ganisations who help pregnant mothers pressured to end the lives of their children by men, families, poverty and iso- lation. This magnificent work could – and should – spread throughout the church in Australia. It could, for example, be the kind of work that several parishes could band to- gether to initiate in their own area or region. The work is not complex and certainly not beyond the pale of possibili- ty. And Christians are supposed to be known by the love we show. The gift of life, after all, is what we are all about.