This story raises two critical issues in my view. Firstly at the secular level: Western civilisation is built on two foundation stones. One is Christianity - that complex set of values and a way of looking at the world and at life which ultimately derived from the vision of Jesus Christ, whom Christians believe is literally "the Son of God". The other foundation stone is what we might describe as the political and economic insights of democratic capitalism - the encouragement of the accumulation of capital by private individuals and the belief that in the encouragement of individuals to build commercial enterprises the whole of society ends up benefiting through rising standards of living.

Today, these twin foundation stones of Western civilisation are badly corroded. We are all too aware that on average, 85% of the baptised faithful across the Western world no longer take much interest in what the institutional Church has to say. It is largely irrelevant in their lives.

At the secular level, Western civilisation, when we thought it was perhaps about to enter a bright new phase where it lifted many more in the world out of poverty, faces a challenge from a completely unexpected quarter: we are beginning to realise that we have sucked our planet dry. The people of the Western world have been living an unsustainable lifestyle to the point where, if our present consumption continues, and is taken up by the most populous nations in the Eastern hemisphere, China and India, we are literally in danger of poisoning the very air we breathe. In a sense the doyen of modern capitalism is Rupert Murdoch. He is a man who has made an art form out of exploitation - exploiting the most base human instincts and emotions in the pursuit of profit without regard to the consequences of what his actions do to the heart and soul of the human beings whom he exploits.

This story which Cliff Baxter and The Irish Echo have brought to our attention down here in Australia, is gutter sensationalism at its very, very worst. It is designed to titillate the self-righteous indignation of yobbos and the emotionally immature in society. Western civilisation was not built on this sort of moral leadership by its leading secular citizens albeit there have been many individuals with an "eye for the main chance" who exploited the development of railways, or who saw the opportunity to "make a quick buck" exploiting the minerals beneath our feet. Statesmen have emerged though who have been able to stand up to these individuals and who have provided moral and civilising leadership.

In the Western world today, particularly in countries like Australia and the United States, we have governments that are more attuned to the sensationalism and exploitation of the most base human instincts in the way that has been turned into an art form by Mr Murdoch. Pandering to, or mining, the basest instincts of the great under-educated masses in society is not what built Western civilisation. Both governmental and business leaders have a responsibility to provide leadership in society. It is time we again recognised this.

There are also lessons in this for the Church though. The case of Fr Michael Hogan underlines two issues: one is the issue of homosexuality. Most thinking, intelligent people in the world are fast coming to the realisation that same-sex attraction is something built into the very fabric of God's creation. It's there like DNA is there. Some small proportion of human beings, probably around ten percent, for some reason perhaps only finally know to God, are born with some predisposition to be attracted to the same sex rather than the opposite sex. This is not some "abnormality" in God's plan, it seems built into the fabric of the plan. The institutional Church, of all people and all institutions, should be the leader in recognition of this fact and in acknowledging that the Creator of Everything continues to talk to the human family in the insights that are revealed through the sciences and modern scholarship, even when that science or scholarship might be undertaken by agents who happen to be agnostics or atheists.

It should be abundantly evident to most intelligent people today that the celibate life is a very artificial construct. The sexual abuse scandal in the Church where priests exploited the vulnerable and powerless for their sexual gratification is one side of the story. Fr Hogan's case is not at all related to sexual abuse in the sense it was being referred to in the previous sentence. It raises issues that encroach across the whole gamut of human sexuality and which the institutional Church needs to urgently re-visit if it is to regain the confidence of the vast majority of the population in Western civilisation. It is time for the leaders of our Church to do what they are paid to do: to LEAD! They are the ones who need to open up discussion of these difficult moral issues in intelligent ways and not, following the lead of Papal Knight, Rupert Murdoch, which attempt to pander to the basest insecurities and the self-righteous indignation of those who have never grown up. When Jesus Christ invited us to think with the minds and outlooks of children, this was not an invitation extending favoured treatment to those who never wanted to grow up and think. It was not an invitation to exploit the immaturity of the emotionally and psychologically insecure in society in order to try and cling on to power.

In secular society I submit, we need to clean up the behaviours of politicians and business leaders who have lost a sense of noblesse oblige and who have found a rich mother lode in exploiting and mining the basest human instincts for profit and for power.

The institutional Church needs to call its institutional leaders to account before God himself begins doing so for the shameful leadership that has been exhibited over the last couple of centuries which has driven the institution which should be the moral leader in society into a state of irrelevance and ridicule.

Both Fr Michael Hogan and his Bishop, William Walsh, show commendable moral leadership in the respective ways in which they have responded to this sensationalised story.

Cliff Baxter is a highly awarded journalist with a lifetime experience gained on the principal Australian secular newspapers, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and The Catholic Weekly.