Australia’s reform minded bishop schedules U.S. tour

By Dennis Coday, NCR staff writer

Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus By Bishop Geoffrey Robinson; Foreword by Donald Cozzens Liturgical Press, 320 pages, $24.95

From the number of e-mail queries I have received since NCR ran the story about the publication of Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus by Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, I know many NCR Book Club readers will welcome this news:

Collegeville, Minn.-based Liturgical Press has obtained the North American rights to Robinson’s book, and it is now available for purchase here. Here’s a link to the book's Web page at Liturgical Press: Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church.

For those eager to read the book, there is more good news. Robinson, the retired bishop of Sydney, Australia, will be on a U.S. book tour in May and June.

His first public event will be May 16 in Philadelphia where he will be keynote speaker at a two-day symposium titled "Rebuilding the Catholic Church."

After Philadelphia, Robinson will be visiting Chevy Chase, Md. (May 19), Morristown, N.J. (May 21), Manhasset, Long Island, N.Y. (May 22), Fairfield, Conn. (May 24), Dedam, Mass. (May 29), Cleveland, Ohio (June 5), Seattle, Wash. (June 7), San Diego, Calif. (June 10), and Los Angeles (June 12).

Information on the Philadelphia symposium is available on the co-sponsors’ Web sites: Voice of the Faithful of Greater Philadelphia and Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church.

Contact information for Robinson’s other U.S. stops is here: Tour schedule.

For those who don’t know who Robinson is, here’s the opening of the NCR article from Sept. 14, 2007:

For nearly a decade, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson headed the Australian bishops’ committee that developed guidelines and procedures for dealing with clergy sex abuse. He retired in 2004 at the young age of 66, when, he said, the burden of his "profound reservations" about the church he loved became too strong to be ignored.

He emerged from retirement [in August 2007] to promote a new book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, and to demand a better church.

Robinson says that the church -- especially the hierarchy in Rome -- must tackle the twin problems of sex abuse and power.

In the book, he writes that the church has not confronted the sexual abuse crisis; it is simply managing it. He blames Pope John Paul II, in particular, for failing to exercise the leadership demanded by the sex abuse crisis, allowing it, instead, to ravage the church.

He criticizes the church’s teaching on sex and sexuality, which are based on offences against God, as outmoded and inadequate. He suggests a sexual morality based on human relationships.

… In describing a "better church" he calls for a reconsideration of the distribution of authority in the church so that the collegiality of bishops and the sensus fidelium of the people of God are acknowledged and exercised. He suggests that the Roman curia be staffed by laypeople and that the pope should function as a prime minister rather than a monarch.

He wants a wide range of ideas put on the table: regular evaluations for those in authority, an option to remove a pope from office and an elected parliament of bishops. He even suggests updating clerical dress to do away with priests’ collars and bishops’ miters.

He suggests adopting the Eastern Catholic tradition of appointing patriarchs to lead national churches and that parishes have a say in priest assignments.

He notes that church language draws attention to the division between clerics and the laity and doesn’t have a collective term for all its members the way that a nation has "citizens."

Read the rest …

Robinson’s Australian publisher is John Garratt Publishing, an independent Catholic publisher of parish and school resources and books on spirituality. According to Michael Peters of John Garratt, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church has done extraordinarily well, selling more than 8,000 copies in eight months.

Robinson told NCR that he sees a fractured church with a major division between the "proclaimers of certainties and the seekers after truth," with the proclaimers of certainties seeming to be in the favored position.

"This has left many people feeling a sense of alienation, of being marginalized, of no longer quite belonging to the church that had given them much of their sense of belonging, meaning and direction throughout their lives.

"In writing the book I became aware that I was writing a book for these people, that I was trying to tell them that there is a church for them and that it is fully in accord with the mind of Jesus."