The High Court decision on detention in Nauru was brought down just before the Christian season of Lent. It left the government free and determined to deport many young mothers and children to Nauru.
For the mothers and children deportation will bring new trauma with renewed threat to their already precarious mental health. For the Australian public it again makes us ask what brutality, even to children, we are ready to tolerate.
The pain of the children and the savagery of their treatment are suitable subjects for Lenten reflection.
Religious feasts, like Lent and Ash Wednesday which introduces it, are often linked to significant public events, particularly those which are catastrophic, violent or shameful. We speak, for example, of the Tet offensive, of the Easter Uprising and Bloody Sunday in Ireland, of the Yom Kippur War, of the Ash Wednesday bushfires.
Such seasons of reflection also encourage us to be more sensitive to the large public events which form their context. This year violence in the Middle East and the vast number of people forced from their own nations to seek protection where they can find it are a sombre background to Lent.
They also fit: Lent begins with the ashes of illusory hopes, leads to the cynical torture and execution of Jesus and the apparent failure of his movement, and ends in the new hope of Easter day.
Australia's harrowing of refugees and their children fits uncomfortably well with Lent's universal evocation of suffering and torment.
Their flight from persecution and violence in their own nations, their incarceration on Nauru and Christmas Island, their brief hope when brought to Australia to bear and rear their children, and the snuffing out of that hope with a return to Nauru where their children will find no flourishing of life, echo the journey of Jesus in Passion Week when, too, the crowd applauded each new humiliation.
We might hope with powerless sympathy that those brutally treated will find in their experience and their own religious traditions intimations of the hope and strength associated with the Christian Easter.
The association between public life and the foundational religious stories is not merely descriptive. The stories and their characters also map an ethical framework for interpreting public events.
Brutal Herod, doubting Thomas, vacillating Pilate, treacherous Judas, scheming Caiaphas and enduring Mary enshrine for Christians ways in which people should and should not act. They are images that help us evaluate what is done in our