What is important about that interview... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Monday, April 30, 2012, 10:31 (390 days ago) @ Roy

I think you are right, Roy. The other thing I'd add is that the disadvantage these hierarchs have is that, unless they've been disobeying the rules, none of them have had the experience of raising a family through to adulthood and have had to put up with any back chat from their own children. Wives and children, for blokes, are an essential ingredient for "the gaining of wisdom".

The more sensational thing about that interview that Geoff Robinson gave Ingrid Shafer is the complete transparency and honesty of Geoff Robinson. I've met a few bishops in my time, and plenty of priests. There are a few meetings with priests that I can think of that would be exceptions but most meetings are simply not "meetings of equals". YOU CAN'T HAVE AN HONEST CONVERSATION WITH MOST PRIESTS AND BISHOPS. IT'S BUILT INTO THE CULTURE OF CATHOLICISM TODAY. The priest or bishop is "up there" on some sort of pedestal and the lay person is always in an inferior position — they perceive themselves in that way, and the person they are speaking to perceives the relationship in that way. They think of themselves as "the teacher", "the headmaster", or "the expert", who needs to "instruct" the naive member of the lay church in front of them. When you speak to most members of the hierarchy, unless you know them really, really well as friends, it is always a very unequal relationship of the ordained one "speaking down" to the supplicant. Priests and bishops are culturally incapable of telling the truth. They constantly have to figuratively "look over their shoulders" before they say anything lest they make some trangression against the "party line" or the "company policy". In most situations they are at least vocationally, and one might argue almost genetically, incapable of simply "telling the truth" about what they really think.

I'd bet it extends all the way up to the pope himself. In fact it comes through in all those videos from the Vatican, especially under the present pope, where all the meetings take place in these very formal, stage managed and scripted events. When bishops, archbishops and cardinals meet the pope they are in essentially the same relation as when some dumb lay person meets the local priest. They CANNOT talk honestly to one another. When popes meet heads of State even, it is likely to be all this "formal bullshit" and there is absolutely no "cor ad cor loquitur" that John Henry Newman was on about — heart speaking to heart — one human being speaking candidly and honestly to another human being "from the heart".

That conversation between Ingrid Shafer and Geoffrey Robinson is earth-shattering because it is a meeting of two minds on a level playing field and the one in the more authoritative position doesn't assume "airs and graces" and isn't having to look over his shoulder to ensure every word he says is "faithful to the party line" and he simply "speaks the truth as his own conscience" (not the consciences of his boss or whoever he reports to) is being shared with the listener — and, in this instance, with a wider audience on the internet.

More than the actual content of what he said — most of that we have heard in one way or another before — what is really valuable about that interview is its complete transparency and honesty. I've been writing quite a bit in recent years that one of the big problems the institution faces today is that culturally the entire institution is "living a lie". Everybody, when they speak publicly, has to watch their ps and qs for fear of upsetting the temple police. Nobody can have a really honest conversation with a priest or bishop even in a friggin' confessional. It's always this game of the "consultant" or "spiritual director" or "spiritual guide" having to "support the company line" even when, in their heart of hearts they don't believe a word of it themselves. That was the essential dynamic at play in those revealing sections of Chrissie Foster's book where she and her husband had six meetings with entirely different bishops. There was no "meeting of equals" — one human being to another human being — in any of those meetings simply because the culture of Catholicism no longer allows it even in a situation where the very welfare of children in life and death situations is the subject "on the line". We do have an extremely dysfunctional church and hierarchy today.

Geoffrey Robinson and Ingrid Shafer more than anything in that videoed conversation set up something that is like a stick of "communication gelignite" to blow a massive hole in the pretentiousness of what passes for most "communication" today anywhere in this entire institution. As I wrote in the introduction it literally is like having a bishop in your own lounge room and being allowed to hear their deeply honest personal opinions without having this "filter" that is normally there in all these sort of conversations — even in a confessional — where the priest has to be constantly dishonest because instead of thinking about their honest answer to the person in front of them they are constantly having to think of the person not standing in the room but their "boss", whoever that happens to be, and what he would be thinking if he was answering the question.

I betcha anything there will be a lot of bishops who eventually watch that video of Geoff Robinson and who would really envy Robinson in his capacity to be "totally and transparently honest" in saying what he really thinks and believes. As I also said in the introduction, there'll also be plenty of others running off to say their rosaries for Geoffrey Robinson because that interview will cause the shyte to run down their legs so fear-inducing might what he says be.

One interview is not going to change the entire culture of Catholicism but that interview is a hugely powerful and symbolic start. As I suggested it is like a huge stick of "communication gelignite" thrown at the front door of this almost impervious, monolithic institution.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]