top of page
Hugo_Simberg_-_The_Wounded_Angel_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

It was Tuesday morning, a month ago, when I received a text from one of my oldest friends.
She simply wrote, "George Pell ...".

I hadn't caught the news report yet, but I instantly noticed a mild defensiveness inside of me. It was nothing overbearing, just a dull, faint, but lingering defensiveness. I don't like it, but I know it's there. What sits behind it is a long and complex story: my own upbringing in the Church, my own experiences of betrayal and oftentimes tooth-and-nail fight to inner-healing, my deep love of the Church despite this, the 'good guys' in the Catholic Church whose love and leadership changed my life, the long and arduous journey to ordained ministry in the Anglican Church and its ongoing beauty and hardship, a history of seeing my friend grapple with her Catholic upbringing, her wrestle with the concept of resurrection, her hunger for genuine spiritual and psychological truth and what sometimes appears to be a love-hate relationship with Catholic spirituality. 

 

A defensiveness lingers. It wants to say, 'You can't try to hang my faith on that cross. Whatever George Pell did or didn't do, it has nothing to do with my faith.'

 

But it does. And my defensiveness is wrong. I realised this by Tuesday the following week.

 

Conversations about sexual abuse in the Church, both general and more specifically personal, are common in my work as a Minister. Maybe a third of us in the Church have experienced sexual abuse in some form, whether by those with direct spiritual authority or once trusted family members or friends. The exposure of lies, denials and cover-ups, which have infiltrated the Body to the core and, frankly, to the top, has produced a corporate trauma that needs deep healing. I know it is part of my work to assist with this. I'm pretty practised at putting my own needs on the shelf for a session, to focusing on the person in front of me and creating safe space for people to process aloud, to be angry, confused and hurting and to meet them where they're at, without trying to defend God or explain why some priests just aren't the real deal. 

 

But last week something cracked. After a conversation with colleagues, I found myself crying in my office. I allowed myself to feel something that I haven't wanted to feel.

 

It was the sense of betrayal, even at the thought, that it could be true.

 

Once I began to face the pain, I also revisited the question that society, and my friend, rightly have of me: ‘How can you have any faith in the institutional Church?’ I think we are all tired of throw away lines about there still being good people in the Church and about how believing in God isn’t the same thing as believing in the institutional Church, so, this is my attempt to share my honest answer at the very fair question, 'How can you ever know who to trust?'

 

I won't and don't make comment about Cardinal Pell's guilt or innocence. There are two absolutes I hold to (and to be honest, neither unfailing trust in the justice system, nor in the institutional Church are features). First, I would never question or speak against a person's trustworthiness in saying that they have been a victim of sexual abuse. Victims need to be believed and we know that the denial and excusing that so often surrounds the groomed household of a perpetrator, is half its tragedy. However, I hold in tension a second truth: that the conviction has a pending appeal, a man retains his innocence and I'm not God, "to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden." I grew up reciting these words every Sunday, a Purity Collect, which was first translated into English by a man who was martyred for his faith in 1556. God sees all. I don't and even an honest and unbiased jury doesn’t either.

 

Something has cracked for the Church, I think; something that's bigger than this case, questions about the evidentiary burden of proof or the life and ministry of this particular cardinal. 

 

This case has brought something to a climax. Tears in my office. My lingering defensiveness relaxed, long enough to see the devastation that even the thought of it, means for us. We thought he was friend and not foe. We need and want to believe that about our leaders, especially our spiritual fathers and grandfathers. As we await the final outcome of the case, we now sit with the tension that we don't know for sure anymore. Maybe that will resolve in due course. Maybe it won't. Maybe we won't know until all darkness is finally brought to light and we are in the full and awesome presence of God.  

​

I watch my friends in the Catholic Church wrestle with an assault on their trust in themselves and in a man who was, or still is, considered a friend of the Church. When and how will it resolve? 

​

Cardinal Pell’s profile and the vastly mixed public opinion about his integrity as a leader, and now his recent conviction, has unsettled the mud at the bottom of an ocean of tears. It reflects a far deeper tension, that pre-existed this case. It's about the ugly truths that we do know, for sure; the thousands of truths; stories that we know happened on our watch, for sure. It’s about all of the leaders who we thought cared about us, but it turns out, they did not. They were predators and liars. It's about wide-scale, generational, systemic sexual abuse and the lies, that leave us with a question, which sits are the core of the horror that is paedophilia: 'We thought you were our friend. Are you friend or are you foe?'

 

Tears in my office. 

 

Sexual abuse fractures and defiles that which we Christians have long considered to be a most holy and sacred part of our humanity: our inbuilt, God-breathed sexuality, the capacity to freely choose sexual intimacy, and to lovingly bring children into the world. It's a thief in the night that wants to kill, steal and destroy that free choice and the beauty of intimacy that is built on trust, freely exchanged between adults, at the right time, in the right place. Its damage reaches to the core of our capacity to build relationships and our ability to trust. This dark spirit parades as friend when, all along, it is foe. It leaves its victim vacillating between self-blame, or even self-hatred, and building survival strategies that shut down trust and set up walls of self-protection, leading to anxious cave-dwelling through to reckless self-abandon or even, in many cases, self-harm.  

 

Its victim is both individual and corporate. The groomed congregation is also left vacillating between anxious cave-dwelling (denial) through to reckless self-abandon (giving up). We see this vacillating, don't we? We see it manifest between those who have proudly walked away from Church and those who want to downplay the reality of institutional failure to protect our children, to nothing more than a few 'bad apples'. What sits in the middle is a broken trust that runs deep and wide. 

 

This broken trust is where my lingering defensiveness, triggered by a simple text message, is birthed. In this text message, in the news reports, the conversations in staff rooms and at dining room tables, there is an unspoken inference, to which we Christians want to put up a little internal fortress. I think the inference, even unconscious bias, is the idea that at a certain point, we will have to face the reality that the Church’s leadership, as a whole, is undeserving of our trust.

 

Oftentimes, this inference is even spoken with the voice of genuine or feigned compassion, as if to say, ‘There, there. We’re not saying you have to completely give up on God or all the good things Jesus stood for. We’re just saying that sadly, the system as a whole, is entirely dishonest and untrustworthy.’ The inference, is that if one of the most senior leaders of the Church is foe and not friend, then there might be a few good apples around, but the Body as a whole, is a lie; and not just a lie, but the ugliest lie there is at that. Even at a text message from a friend, our hearts naturally retaliate.

​

As a faith community, we have experienced a wide-scale attack on our ability to know who we can trust, which puts pressure on our core belief that God is love. There’s an evil that wants us to believe that we're too far gone; that the Church is defiled to the core and that we can never know who is trustworthy again. It's what every paedophile sows into their victim: the venom of self-loathing. If we were to believe much of the public rhetoric, we the Church, should submit to our inevitable destruction and collapse and allow our spiritual heritage to somehow re-emerge in a new format, that no longer sits within an ultimately untrustworthy, male-dominated hierarchy that is too far gone. 

 

Here's how I know this is not going to happen ... tears in my office. In fact, my faith in God and the Church that I serve and represent, is stronger than ever.

 

There are two antidotes. They are the same steps abuse victims take, in time, in the journey towards healing. The first, is to name and face the ugly truth and to begin to grieve its impact. This bit hurts like hell and it can’t be rushed. In the Church we call it the process of lament. It’s crying out to God, "Where were you? How could you let this happen?” It’s letting the anger out and crying for justice.

 

Eventually, lament leads to a readiness to move to a second step: the ability to hold to hope and truth again. Once we face the pain, we begin to consciously decide how we are going to respond. Are we going to give up? Can we love again? Who can we trust? What do we really know about God?

 

I could set out the Biblical answer, but instead, I just want to share what my heart has come to know; because what we know cognitively, doesn’t always satisfy the heart’s cry to be held and safe. There’s a ‘knowing’ that the heart needs, that reaches the intimacy of a trusted lover or best friend. There’s a knowledge of God that separates soul from spirit; joints from marrow.

 

The answer for me, is to admit, that my understanding of God, my expectation of Him, has been tampered with. Because the truth is, where spiritual authority is abusive, the hidden poison in the heart is the irrational but nonetheless powerful belief that God must be like that. For me, it happened on a mountain in Colorado in 2013. I had this unplanned moment with God. There was snow on the ground, but it was a sunny day and I remember He gently, ever so gently spoke:

 

“You still think I’m like that. I’m not like that.”

 

And as I gave Him permission to come close, I felt the poison start to lift.

 

So, how can I have any faith in the institutional Church?

​

Well, it’s kind of like the theory and practice of learning to play a musical instrument. As I step into closer relationship with God and I let Him heal and correct my heart’s brokenness, I start to see with clearer eyes, who is worthy of my trust and who is not; who is like Him and who is not. As I live out this thing called faith, the theory and the practice get sharper and more aligned; and I begin to notice the many people, whose practice and theory are aligned; who really know God’s love and who I am more than proud to be seen with.

​

My God doesn't expect me to 'just trust Him' because He's the boss. He is, and yet, He's not like that. My God has gone to lengths beyond my comprehension, to meet me where I'm at, to identify with my pain and to make freedom possible. He is bruised and scarred. He is risen. He asked me to trust Him as a friend, but He never rushed my "yes". 

​

Then He said the weirdest and most beautiful thing. He said, "The person who trusts me, will not only do what I'm doing, but even greater things." (John 14.11, MSG)​ He's the Lord of Lords and yet, He doesn't lord it over us, but sets us in the Heavenly realm and treats us as royalty. I don't get it, but I trust it,  and this is what gives me hope.

 

 

Friends We Can Trust

 

​

A personal response to sexual abuse in the Church,

April 1, 2019

 

 

bottom of page