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Now that the royal commission hearings have finished, people are asking whether things will change. There are grounds for both cautious hope and pessimism. Hope is based on the expectation that the exposure of greed, complacency and lassitude in institutions, boards and regulators will lead them to hunger for a better reputation.
The problem goes much deeper than a few crooked operatives and it will not be fixed by changing the corporate 'culture'. The fundamental evil is the arithmetic of compound interest. Interest on debt rises exponentially, while economic activity is linear. That means that sooner or later those in a weaker position are unable to pay.
Whenever institutional interests are put ahead of the legitimate concerns of others, including the poor and marginalised, there develops a trust deficit. This deficit is gripping institutions here and overseas. Its impact is deep and destructive. Facets of Catholic Social Teaching point the way to reversing the downward trend.
It is understandable that canonists would try to find a kinder interpretation for the pontifical secret, given that the cover up caused more children to be abused, but in the canonical system, you cannot get away from the plain meaning of the words and the interpretation placed on them by the Roman Curia.
What we need is a listening and inclusive Church — a plenary council at which the clergy and the laity have a proper place at the table, at which the voices of the ‘rusted-on’ and the ‘cheesed-off’ Catholics are heard and at which the bishops are respectfully listening as much as speaking.
So here is a question. Which are you? A customer, a shareholder, a worker, a citizen, or, well, a whole human being? If you answered 'customer' then congratulations, you are in line with contemporary economic orthodoxy, and boy, have we got a society for you. If you answered 'a human being' then that really is a problem, I'm afraid.
Survivors and their families have been at the centre of this story, and now it's theirs to carry. For years, the people who maintained they were victims of abuse were told that they were trapped in a story about something that had happened to them when they were children. But that wasn't the story they were in at all.
May the Lord have mercy on us all. May the day come when church officials and victims will be comfortable in each other's presence in our Parliament even if not in our Church. But let's dare to pray that all might belong both in the galleries of our Parliament and in the pews of our Church seeing the light in fullness of days.
The numbers show this is not a witch hunt, merely the tip of a conclave. Any man who becomes a seminarian, then a deacon, then a priest, then a bishop, then a cardinal, will almost certainly have bumped into, bounced off or blindfolded himself to the endemic problem within the Church of the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable persons.
Recent airing of shocking treatment of elderly residents in Australian aged care facilities has led Scott Morrison to announce a royal commission. Sadly, the allegations of abuse and appalling conditions are not new. What has resulted in poor outcomes for vulnerable citizens, and why have we permitted such treatment to go on?
It has been a decade since the banking aristocracy Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in what would be the chant of doom that became the Global Financial Crisis. Today, the legacy of Lehman Brothers and the crisis it helped precipitate supply warnings of the next shock.
This book is a warning of the terrible price we shall pay if we do not follow Pope Francis' leadership. Frank Brennan launches Anthony M. Maher's The Forgotten Jesuit of Catholic Modernism: George Tyrrell's Prophetic Theology. Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, 11 September 2018
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