32nd Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2018 

As we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus pulled no punches when he criticised the Jerusalem scribes,“Beware of the scribes who like to walk about in long robes, to be greeted obsequiously in the market squares, to take the front seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets; these are the men who swallow the property of widows while making a show of lengthy prayers.”

Human nature does not change all that much. Within the last month or two, Pope Francis wrote a letter addressed to the laypeople of the Church. Referring to a Report recently published in the United States, he commented: In recent days, a report was made public which detailed the experiences of at least a thousand survivors, victims of sexual abuse, the abuse of power and of conscience at the hands of priests over a period of approximately seventy years. The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced. But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it …. 

He went on: With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as [a Church] community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.

He then named the problem as Clericalism, and asserted: To say “no” to abuse is to say an emphatic “no” to all forms of clericalism.

Looking to the future, he wrote: It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s People. Indeed, whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore … the People of God, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives.

Back here in Australia, meanwhile, Australia’s Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse had already issued its report last December after five years of hearings and investigation It had concluded that clericalism is at the centre of a tightly interconnected cluster of contributing factors to abuse within the Catholic Church. It described clericalism as: a sense of entitlement, superiority and exclusion, and abuse of power.

An American woman theologian wisely commented: … clericalism hurts everyone: The laity is victimized and infantilized; the clergy is isolated and expected to be superhuman.

In relation to clericalism, Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane, head of the Australian Episcopal Conference, was recently quoted as saying: There will … have to be a change in the culture associated with the Catholic priesthood... Part of that change will involve… a greater sharing of responsibility with laypeople - which in turn requires a reconsideration of our structures of decision-making.

And here now are you, the small Catholic community in Ballan, wrestling with how to continue to face your immediate future without the presence of a resident priest. In some ways it is an exciting time in the story of our Church. You are not alone. Already in the west and north of our diocese, there have been a number of small catholic communities like you responding to this new situation for a number of years. Some have been doing it better than others.

I believe that the Holy Spirit gifts every community with the people and capacities it needs, not just to survive or to limp along, but somehow to thrive. But you need the courage to think differently, to dream or, more to the point, to learn or be helped to discern the presence among you of God’s guiding and empowering Spirit. One thing is certain: however you choose to continue your mission to the world here in Ballan, and to structure yourselves accordingly, steer clear of any new form of clericalism.