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TOM'S
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A Question for Michael Willesee... Dear all, Michael Willesee was the subject in a highly publicised television interview in Australia last night. The focus of the television interview was Mike Willesee's journey from a sceptic, and highly decorated and remunerated, journalist and television producer, to a Catholic infatuated with miracles and producer of television programs and funder of research into miracles. Mike is quite possibly one of the most high-profile believers in miracles that anyone might nominate today. A few years ago his television program on the stigmata was watched by an audience estimated at 29 million people in the United States alone. Mike Willesee and I share a few things in common. One of them is our Catholic faith. Another is that his parents and my parents — or at least my Dad and his brothers and sisters — grew up together in the small remote West Australian town of Yalgoo. (It's hard to find on the map today. It's about 220km due East of Geraldton in the Murchison region of Western Australia.) His father, Don, you may recall, went on to become a Labor Party Senator and Federal Minister in the Whitlam government. The Labor Party split of the 1950s had caused a split between our two families. My father and his brothers, who supported the break-away Democratic Labor Party became estranged from Don Willesee (Mike's father) because of this split. My father's sisters though, and his eldest sister, Mary, in particular, continued to be life-long friends with Mike's mother, Gwen. I've only met Mike once in my life that I can recall and that wasn't in connection with family. In the late 1960s or early 1970s he was contracted to provide training to aspiring politicians in Western Australia on television technique and I was the technician who installed and operated the camera equipment that was used for the training session. At that time Mike was at the beginning of the career for which he became justifiably lauded as a journalist. I doubt either of us would even have been aware back in those days that we shared this family connection in common. A couple of years later our lives intersected in another way without our meeting when, through a mutual friend but again not connected with our family, he organised a meeting for me with the then head of the ABC's Four Corners program when I was seeking a job at the ABC. There was something in the water supply at Yalgoo — or some charismatic Domincan Nuns or a priest, perhaps the famous Hermit of Cat Island, Monsignor Hawes, who had been their parish priest for a time at Yalgoo. The "faith" of both all my aunts and uncles and of Mike's parents was classic "Irish Catholicism" at its very best — and worst. It was also lifelong. They believed in almost everything the Church said, and in things like "miracles", as though their very lives depended on it. Mike Willesee drifted away from all of that for most of his life. He returned to it in his 50's and that was largely the focus of Andrew Denton's interview last night. (To see the program or read the transcript of the interview go to www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/). Some of the leaders in the Church seem to be placing great hope that this kind of celebrity conversion might hold some hope of "rekindling the faith" in Australia. I am sceptical. My own faith journey, if anything, has been almost the direct opposite of Mike's. For most of my adult life I shared "the faith of my father" and also believed in "miracles" and would have been gobsmacked by the sort of experience Mike had of not just seeing on television but actually "touching" and "taking medical swabs" from the wounds of a stigmatic. Today I am sceptical of all of that. I am not sceptical though that God is in relationship with his Creation, nor that God communicates with his creation — and with us. I am sceptical of some concept of a God of magic who needs to perform "magic tricks" in order to induce us to believe*. My own belief, for what it is worth, is that in time it will be shown that these stigmatic-type experiences are more than likely induced by the complex capacities of the human mind and physiology. The stigmatics themselves might not know how they "do it" any more than most of them could probably tell you how they breath or circulate the blood in their own bodies. I do not believe stigmatic appearances "prove" that God breaks or suspends any of the laws of his own creation. They are not necessarily what we in the Church would describe as "supernatural events". They may well be "unexplainable events" but that is not the same thing as "proof" of supernatural intervention. Could I provide my own television demonstration of a miracle... Firstly, here's the short segment from Andrew Denton's program last night where we see Mike Willesee carefully taking the medical swabs from the wound of the stigmatic, Katya Rivas.
Now try this test for yourself, and ask yourself these questions...
What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum. Tom Scott can be contracted at: |
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