24th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2015

As the Church today marks Child Protection Sunday, it is good to step back and to look more closely at how and where we are going. I get the sense that most Catholics feel indignant at the self-serving response made by the Church as institution when, years ago, allegations of abuse by clergy were first raised by parents and other concerned adults. The Royal Commission has done enormous good in alerting the whole community to the repeated failure of many people in positions of authority.

I think we can all be glad that we have become more vigilant, and that the Church has already put into place sound systems to ensure that the problem will be contained as much as legal procedures can do that. Children will be much safer in the future than they were in the past.

I wonder, however, if we have done enough. As I see it, there are still so many past victims of clerical abuse who have not been helped adequately. Sometimes it is hard to reach out to them, given that many are very angry and some are quite psychologically broken people. The difficulty does not absolve us. It merely heightens the need. What is the Church’s pastoral response to these people? We have been forced to look at issues of financial compensation; but that is hardly a pastoral response. How do we respond to them as persons in need? And might you lay people be more able to help them than members of the clerical caste who hurt them? The Church has yet to seriously address this issue.

A question that exercises me is, As Church members are we better, more caring, more compassionate, more sensitive and responsive people now than we were before? Has the Church “climate” warmed at all? Are we more mature, more responsible, more truly conscientious people than the generation that preceded us?

As the spotlight is trained back on the generation that went before us, we sometimes wonder, How could so many have been so blind, so naïve, so heartless? Where past generations were blind to issues of sexual abuse, is this current generation equally blind to other issues staring it in the face? Will today’s children ask of us what we ask of our predecessors? Take the issue of asylum seekers, for example. Will later generations ask, How could they have been so heartless? so gullible as to swallow slogans and sound-bites? so blind to how innocent people were detained out of view and forgotten, and used in order to deter others – all justified by the “national interest” – which, too often, is simply pure self-interest on a national scale.

Just as it took the image of a young Vietnamese girl on fire with napalm running in utter panic and pain towards a media photographer to alert Americans to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the poignant image of a little boy lying drowned on a Mediterranean beach seems to have galvanized Europe to respond better to the tide of refugees fleeing over their borders from countries tortured by war and injustice.  Emotional engagement can release incredible energy and goodwill. But in my present mood, I still wonder whether it necessarily leads to genuine conversion and lasting human growth. What sort of nation do we want to be – comfortable? or compassionate?

I listen to today’s Gospel against the background of Child Protection Sunday, conscious, too, that our annual Social Justice Sunday is just two weeks away, and reminded that Friday was the anniversary of the terrorist destruction of the Twin Towers in New York that spawned the so-called “War against Terror” and ushered in unbelievable turmoil around the world. Can there be real personal growth, genuine social progress, hope for a healthier and more life-giving Church without, as Jesus put it, taking up our cross, and somehow losing our lives in order  to save them? And what does that ask of me, and you, in practice?