Death to the Church

Anne Manne, in her feature “Rape among the Lamingtons,” [Warning: her outstanding article may trigger deep emotional responses][1] has written one of the most devastating exposes I have read in a lifetime. One respondent, when I posted a link on my Facebook page, wrote “Sickening. Perverted. Revolting. These are the three words that rise up for me. I don't want to be associated with institutions like this.” 

I get that, I really do. Except that for me walking away may not help, may be just produce another head in the sand. After all, governments rape and kill, banks, extort, petro-corps screw Mother Earth, and humanity just screws. The institution is dying, justifiably. But do we walk away?

That cannot be, at least for me, the answer. It is too comfortable. The institution I love has screwed human beings over, tainted its message (a message it claims has eternal ramifications, though I have less certainty about that), left shattered lives reeling in its wake. I have few words that convey my horror. Even “fuck” has been so denuded of meaning that it is utterly inadequate. Like Dylan standing at the grave of the Masters of War, we have to stand there until we sure that its dead. Except we must stay in the coffin.

Reading Manne’s piece, fewer then twelve hours after skimming after the Royal Commission’s Report of Case Study No 36: the response of the Church of England Boys’ Society and the Anglican Dioceses of Tasmania, Adelaide and Brisbane to Allegations of Sexual Abuse (January 2017)[2] left me struggling to find meaning in so much that I have believed in and served and proclaimed for more than thirty years. Twilight zone, sliding into midnight zone, darkness long past the eleventh hour. Darkness visible. Dark, as Lawrence put it, darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s gloom.

The Report names figures like Daniels[3] and Brandenberg,[4] and adds for me extra, if irrational chills. Though I never met either of them, I was close to many who knew them well. One family in particular, with whom I stayed from time to time, were very close to both these men. Often, when I signed my hosts’ visitors’ book, I saw either Daniels’ or Brandenburg’s name amongst the names above mine. I knew of Daniels in particular as one of the up-and-coming priests in Tasmania, a name bandied around as someone to watch, someone I should meet. I never did.

I was never sexually abused by a priest. God knows what I would have done if I had been. I was protected, probably, only by the fact that I was married and, as it happens, married to the daughter of a bishop (later archbishop). His credentials as an opponent of sexual predation and indeed libertinism were impeccable, a dimension off-putting to would-be predators. I wonder how many others of who we younger men shared a knowing look and a nudge, nudge, wink, wink were in fact serious and serial predators? 

So I was saved from the predation of perpetrators of evil, men like Daniels, Brandenberg, Hawkins,[5] Elliot,[6] Rushton,[7] Hatley Gray,[8] Parker,[9] Lawrence[10] and others.

Thank God.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink? Manne tells of the vicious cynicism with which one powerful, obfuscating lay-person, a diocesan council member and solicitor, sought to downplay the seriousness of a brutal anal rape that took place on a table filled with lamingtons (small cakes) by bringing lamingtons to the meeting at which this same “rape among the lamingtons” was discussed. How sick, we might say in common parlance, was that? How evil? How satanic, with all the deepest resonances of those ancient adjectives?

This obfuscator generated what Manne calls a “grotesquely discordant response” to the evil. “Thus it is not child rape but merely funny, having sex with a boy on a table of lamingtons.” It is, Manne notes, a form of interpretive denial, designed to shroud the horror of an event in a cloud of faux humour. As a way to trivialize a cataclysmic assault on any person this form of dark humour is a satanic dehumanization of exactly the sort utilised by Nazis[11] and other perpetrators of extreme evil. It is an attempt to disassociate from the heinous nature of evil acts. 

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink? I can only hope that when we trivialized rumours and innuendos at the time I first encountered them (in the libertine early 1980s) we did so because we assumed that participants in the slightly seedy, Brideshead Revisited ecclesiastical underworld were consenting adults; never in my wildest nightmares did I think we might be talking about the rape of children. 

In Case Study No 36 the narrative recalls a moment when one of the serial abusers, Garth Hawkins, groomed a witness known as BYF. “We find that Hawkins …[12] ran his fingers through BYF’s hair, told him he was good looking, gave him compliments and invited BYF to share his bed.” Though I never met Hawkins, in 1983 I attended a clergy conference in a Victorian diocese. A priest – another figure considered to be “up-and-coming” in the national church – ran his hands through my hair, commenting tenderly on its alleged beauty, while his colleagues laughed. At 23 I looked about 16, and was, I assume he assumed, fair game for predation.

Homophobic in those days, I started, pulled back, and pushed his hand away. As the designated driver for the guest speaker I was icy sober; had I been less so, and unaccompanied, had I been alcohol- or other drug-befuddled, my bewilderment may well have compromised my reactions (as I well know, from occasions in my life not involving predatory clergy). Either way, as I pulled away I noted in the corner of my eye another priest, seated nearby, shaking his head in a vehement caution to the perpetrator, gesturing towards my soon-to-be father in law, warning that my links made me a risky prospect.[13] 

 

I can only begin to imagine the horror that the victims and survivors of this systemic perpetration of evil have experienced – and are still experiencing decades after the crime. To experience sexual assault or rape is to experience the deepest denial of human rights. To experience systemic cover-up and denial of the events is to enter into a Kafka-esque world in which yes means no and no means yes and any utterance can be tied down in an ugly slick of institutional obfuscation and denial. It is also to be confronted by the deep fiscal pockets of a bullying institution. To turn to trusted figures in an institution that is meant to be bearer of light and hope, to find there only cynical stalling tactics, smoke and mirrors, lies, threats, and systematic re-rape, is horror to match any that the great writers and painters of despair have depicted. It is to be embedded in the screamingest pores of Munch’s scream. It is to die a living death. 

The church deliberately prolonged and exacerbated the agony of the victims. The church that I love perpetrated evil every bit as great as the church that nudged and winked, aided and abetted the rise of Adolf Hitler. I was the church. My friends were the church. We are as tainted as post-war German Christians were tainted, tainted with the knowledge that our nudges and winks and blind eyes were acid in the raw wounds of the silenced sacrificial victims. 

For thirty years I have defended and served the institution that perpetrated this chorus of silent screams. I have stayed within the institution, arguing that inside, not outside, is the place to achieve reform. I argued often in preaching and writing that the institution was dying, had to die, and that its death was an act of the God I believed I served. I called it “creative entropy.” But never did I believe the depravity to which my tribe had sunk, that the death had to be so dead. I thought that the death was because we were marginalised. I knew of the horrors of the Canadian Anglican church, but Canada is so far away. I did not know how dead we must die.  

Where to from here, knowing my people decimated human lives in the name of the Christ I believed we were serving?

I can only for now stutter apologies to those who suffered. I am so sorry we never heard your cries. I will stay with this institution, for I know no other way, now. I will stay with it in its deserved death throes, will not swim from this Titanic. But by God, the vocation of those of us who are left will be to sink with this beast deep beneath uncaring waves. Only then might something resembling Christ-love rise, phoenix-like, from the tomb that is ours. 


Abuse survivor Clare Pascoe adds the following:


Three things I think those who are left must push for:

1) an independent complaint panel. Until the church demonstrates, by acceding to that, that it is willing to be externally accountable, it will not regain trust.

2) meeting survivors. Very few clergy, and even fewer laypeople have actually come face to face with survivors and their pain. Even reading RC reports is still one step removed. Congregations need to invite survivors to their parish to tell their story in person; to tell of the abuse, and of the church's humiliating and horrifying response.

And

3) listening to survivors. Not just listening to their stories, but to the insights they've gained about what needs to change. Because we are really the only ones who can see that clearly, from the depths of our bad experiences.

---

[1] https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/may/1493560800/anne-manne/rape-among-lamingtons. Retrieved Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

[2]http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/bdf99b59-7e8f-4e5e-9ce3-c36253cc96de/Report-of-Case-Study-No-36. Retrieved Tuesday, 16 May 2017.

[3] Case Study No 36, 49-74.

[4] Case Study No 36, 83-104.

[5] Case Study No 36, 10-11, 15-16.

[6] Case Study No 36, 107-122.

[7] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim.

[8] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim. To be strictly distinguished from Paul Gray, the victim, survivor, and witness, who was a preyed upon by Rushton. Manne notes, “Hatley Gray pleaded guilty and was given a three-year good behaviour bond and a $100 fine. As Sharp argued, this was a “very generous” result for raping a 15-year-old boy. Hatley Gray was then employed by the Willochra diocese in South Australia as a youth worker.”

[9] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim.

[10] “Among the Lamingtons,” passim.

[11] Hitler was well known for making jokes about Jews, according to his bodyguard, Rochus Misch, in a book yet to be released. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1028813/Hitler-comedian-The-Nazi-leaders-bodyguard-reveals-different-dictator.html . Retrieved Thursday, 18 May 2017.

[12] The ellipsis denotes omission of reference to (now) Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, who was interrogated in depth about his awareness of paedophile activity in the Diocese of Tasmania. Later reference to Aspinall notes “We are satisfied that, when Hawkins asked if one of the young men would spend the night in his bed, Mr Aspinall jokingly pressured BYF to do so. However, Mr Aspinall did not do so with any belief or intent that BYF would be sexually abused by Hawkins.” [12] Case Study No 36, 11.

[13] Unfortunately – or otherwise – I remain unsure of the identity of that priest, as two similarly named priests from that diocese at the time have become confused in my mind.