The Holy Spirit -vs- Ego and Fear

Dear Friends,

What a fabulous afternoon and evening Amanda and I had yesterday catching up with Robert Blair Kaiser. He's in Australia for a couple of weeks and has a string of almost continuous media appearances for the promotion of his very clever novel, "Cardinal Mahony", which is really a futuristic imaging of a Catholic Church which actually returns to its roots and serves God and the people not its own ego, power and the fears of its leaders losing their moral authority. I recorded a short interview with Kaiser to welcome him to our country and allow him to tell us about the book in his own words. You'll find the recorded conversation at the end of this commentary.

Journalist, author and broadcaster Robert Blair Kaiser

It was the first time Amanda had met Kaiser and as we sat at the dinner table she put her hand on his and said to him how fabulous it was to be sitting with someone who had actually been at the centre of reporting to the world what was perhaps the single most lifechanging event in our lives religiously — the Second Vatican Council. Our dinner conversation became effectively a most invigorating exchange of ideas — Kaiser (yes, most people refer to him via his family name rather than his Christian name) sharing with us some of the excitement that gripped the Church, and the world, in those heady days of the 1960s and the way in which John XXIII's vision, and the collective vision of the assembled leaders of our Church, and more than probably the vision of the Holy Spirit, subsequently got stolen by a coalition of little men with massive out-of-control egos and little men driven by fear and social conformism. Back the other way, Kaiser was keen to learn about our country — this is his first visit to Australia — and particularly our views of where the Catholic Church is heading in this country. He says he's particularly interested in checking out the observation I have often made that the Church in Australia is in remarkably good shape with a huge, highly qualified and well paid professional work-force today, more highly qualified theologically than at any previous point in history, in good shape in terms of its infrastructure but effectively hamstrung and muzzled as a communicator with a massive crisis in participation and pastoral ministry — the ability to actually respond to the real needs of its people.

Dear people, to listen to Kaiser describing those heady days in Rome in the 1960s is something that makes one's heart beat a little faster even all these decades later. Amanda shared with him her experiences sitting around the dinner table as a young girl in one of the newly established suburbs of Western Sydney experiencing the excitement in the voices of her mother and father as they energetically discussed these "momentous events" unfolding on the other side of the world in Rome. Kaiser, in turn responded that he remains convinced the Holy Spirit was at work in what happened amongst that vast collection of men drawn from all around the world. He's convinced they didn't rock up in Rome with some big pre-set agenda to "reform" the Church. What happened at the Second Vatican Council surprised even the bishops themselves. He says that while he's convinced John XXIII had some sense of vision that the windows of the Church needed to be "thrown open to the world" he (John XXIII) didn't have any precise agenda as to how that would be realised in practice. He saw that as something that would emerge from the collective mind of the assembled bishops and God. And it did. Kaiser says, "even today I'm sure, many of the bishops who were there remain surprised at what they achieved and how it unfolded". It wasn't any "big plot". This was truly one of the most authentic and large-scale outworkings of the Holy Spirit in the collective life of the Catholic Church ever. Today the great tragedy is that the work of that Council has largely been stifled by a small coalition of men with massive, out-of-control egos and others driven by almost catatonic fear. Effectively the entire Holy Roman Catholic Church has been stolen from the people and stolen from the bishops who are collectively meant to be our pastoral leaders and shepherds. In America today, that is why he has set up the initiative called "Take Back Our Church"!

Today, with a Church dying on its feet all around the world under the stewardship of leaders seemingly intent on actually trying to turn it into a irrelevant remnant of the self-righteous, zealots and fundamentalists who believe they are the only one's on God's earth who know the truth and will be saved, it is difficult for our children to appreciate the collective excitement that existed within Catholicism for those few brief years up until 1968 when Ottaviani and his henchmen in the curia forced Paul VI to "bring down the shutters".

Who today is game enough to articulate what the match score is in this four decade's long contest that has been played out in the international Church between this coalition of little men driven by ego and fear versus the spiritual needs of the people at large and the Holy Spirit? What will be the response of our true Father when we all finally rock up for our report cards and the "final score" as to who read "the signs of the time" more correctly?

Kaiser today lives in Phoenix, Arizona and, by enormous coincidence, literally a couple of streets away from our Sydney-born Monday lead commentator, Tom Lee. Today, in the next serialised section of his manuscript, Tom continues his exploration of the mind of the early Church as it first embarked on its missionary journey of bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ to the wider world beyond the parched landscape where Jesus himself had walked and talked. <Read Tom's commentary>

LET BENEDICT KNOW HOW YOU FEEL: If you are of a mind to write to the Pope along with the others who are writing to him at the invitation of Paul Collins and Frank Purcell, you need to get your letters to Paul and Frank by this coming Thursday, 3rd July. <Link to more information about this initiative>

Wishing you a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life and in our world.

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher