A couple of weeks ago I went to a sung Mass in Wellington, New Zealand, at St Mary of the Angels. Wellington was the city of my childhood, although for much of that childhood, I lived on Wellington's outskirts. To a great extent that also sums up my relationship to Catholicism: I am on the outskirts, yet close enough and invested enough to care very much how the Church evolves.
Because, it seems to me, how it evolves and the speed at which those urgent and essential changes take place will significantly determine whether it will survive — and whether it deserves to survive in any form.
My relationship to Catholicism has always been complex. It was only after my mother died of cancer at just 38, when I was eight, that my father — previously an intellectually convinced atheist — converted to Catholicism. In his wake, my older sister and I received 'instructions' — from a timid, entirely 'appropriate' curate — and then were received into the Church and re-baptised. In the many decades since I've been through every kind of permutation in response to Catholicism from absolute rejection and incredulity about the cruelty, banality and indifference that exist alongside genuine care and social justice action, to far more meaningful re-engagement. There's been intimacy, too. Over the last 25 years or more I have worked in my capacity as a spiritually inclusive minister and retreat leader with Catholic groups of all kinds, including congregations of nuns, school staffs, laypeople, chaplains and pastoral care workers, and priests.
Through those opportunities — and the parish I intermittently attend — I've met so many people whom I could admire and learn from, also experiencing in their company that ineffable, uniting spiritually alive 'something' that does seem to survive as a stillness, a resource, in the heart of all the ancient faiths, despite whatever human behaviour swirls around them. A lack of stillness desolates, plainly.
I also experienced among those committed Catholics shame, sorrow, confusion, rage, abandonment, remorse: remorse for crimes others had committed or allowed or covered up. Worse, horror — and it is horror — that their once-beloved Church has been massively more willing to shield perpetrators rather than victims; that the Church that preaches mercy and God's love had failed in its mission and duty of care to those whom Jesus specifically named as deserving of care, warning: 'Whatever you do to these, the