A friend - all right, I admit it, an Ozzie (and a PhD) - has sent me this. So I present it here for your delectation and delight.
I have an ulterior motive: my first novel, The Age for Love, is near release on Smashwords and Amazon and I'm guessing it will be greeted by what Paul Collits calls -
I have an ulterior motive: my first novel, The Age for Love, is near release on Smashwords and Amazon and I'm guessing it will be greeted by what Paul Collits calls -
The Strategic Silence of the Secularists
The recent decision by an appeals court to
overturn the earlier conviction of Archbishop Philip Wilson will have come as a
relief to many Catholics, and to his friends and supporters.
The verdict was both a blessed relief and a
vindication, for an innocent caught up in the current, post-Royal Commission
anti-Catholic and anti-clerical fever abroad in Australia.
But for those of us both appalled by the
still emerging international evidence of ongoing clerical sexual abuse, yet
also determined to remain faithful to the truths of the Church and to the
imperatives of the new evangelisation, there are two bigger issues raised by
the Wilson affair. These issues go
beyond the patent and absurd injustices of the Archbishop’s own initial trial
and verdict.
One is the chance of any Catholic prelate
or priest getting a fair trial on any charge relating to sexual abuse. The sheer pressure from the media and from
the loudest voices in society for guilty verdicts is palpable, and clearly
weighs on the courts.
The second issue raised by the circumstances
of the Wilson trial is of far broader and deeper concern. This is the conduct of the ongoing battle of
ideas in the public square over morality and the capacity of Catholic
(Christian) voices to win arguments, or even to be able to access the platforms
that are now available to those engaged in the battle. Those opposed to the Christian worldview on
matters of morality will stop at nothing to disenfranchise the Church and her
fellow travelling social conservatives.
And the forces of secularism and progressivism have the twin weapons of
crowding out and strategic silence to help them to achieve their objectives.
It is clear that the biggest fallout
globally from the clerical abuse saga is that it has empowered secularist and
relativist (so-called “progressive”) voices to shut down the voice of the
Church and so prevent the Church from gaining ground in the battle over
morality. The tawdry findings of the
various secular inquiries into Church abuse cases, both in Australia and
internationally, and the sheer scale of the apparent abuses, have denied
Catholics the capacity to defend the Church, let alone to get on the front foot
and put their case on important matters of morality, policy and culture to the secular
world.
The current stance of the Church’s many
opponents and enemies, in the media, the universities, and in governments and
parliaments, is pretty much – “What right have you guys got to speak on matters
of sexual morality any more?” This is a
strategically powerful position to have.
Whatever the origins and (much debated)
ultimate causes of the sexual abuse problem among priests and prelates, and
whatever the rights and wrongs of the “frozen-in-the-headlights” responses of
Church management down the years to cases as they emerged or were suspected,
the fact is the Church is currently stranded and groundless.
This is the Church’s ongoing purgatory, or
as George Weigel once put it, its “long Lent”.
So it is little wonder that the media in
Australia treated the Wilson acquittal on appeal with such active indifference. Nothing to see here. One of them got off. A setback, to be sure. So we won’t talk about it.
This is indeed a deliberate strategy of the
secularist progressives. Just as the
remarkable film Gosnell, about the American abortionist, has been given the
silent treatment by leading voices of the broader culture, so too cases that
prove the innocence of Catholic clerics will be ignored. The Wilson verdict on appeal was an
inconvenience, unlike the original trial which became a global opportunity to
insert the knife into the Church and twist it, when at its weakest. The mainstream media, reflecting as they do the
broad secularist culture, do not wish to surrender their strategic
superiority. Voices beyond the Church
that expressed sympathy to Wilson following that first trial were all but
non-existent. (The ex-ABC journalist
from Adelaide, Alan Atkinson, writing in Eureka Street in July 2018, was an
admirable exception.) Taking Wilson’s
side simply didn’t fit with the zeitgeist.
The Church’s undeniable awfulness over sex
abuse cases is one strategic opportunity, an ace to play as it were, for those
who would chase Christian, and especially Catholic, voices from the public
square. The other current ace that
secularists routinely play is the Church’s unchanging, traditionalist position
on sexual matters and its opposition to the right of individuals to pursue pretty
much any sexual lifestyle they choose in the socially liberal utopia.
The march of the relativist worldview
across Western societies is all but complete.
The Church’s position on matters of personal “self-actualisation”, to
use Abraham Maslow’s memorable and now much used term, can be characterised as
not just repressed and out-dated, but as significantly “on the wrong side of
history”. It is therefore all right to
shut down contrary voices, to un-platform and cut off oxygen to those who
express support for traditional morality, whether in relation to marriage,
abortion, homosexuality or, merely the latest craze, transgenderism.
The battle fronts here are broad and
many. We have witnessed the fight over
religious freedom following the vote on the same sex marriage “referendum” and
the passage of the ensuing legislation, to date totally lacking protections to
religious organisations. We have seen
attempts to prevent denominational schools and other institutions from following
their beliefs when these interfere with rights to employment for, say,
homosexuals. We see a steady stream of
judicial cases in the United States brought against bakers, wedding
photographers and the like who refuse to celebrate homosexual “marriages”.
Almost unbelievably, the latest victim in
the morality wars is the famous and outstanding legal philosopher John Finnis
of Oxford University. Being a leading
proponent of natural law and all that this implies now just doesn’t cut it with
his millennial students who wish to end his career and are actively seeking to
do this. His crime (of course) is
homophobia, very much a favourite of the new class bullies.
The biggest battle of them all, of course,
is the fight over truth itself. And
here, the Church’s position is utterly in the cowed minority in a world where
the phrases “my truth” and “your truth” are deeply embedded and routinely propagated. The Church and its traditionalist allies have
all the wrong, counter-cultural views on those issues that now seem to occupy
the collective public mind, and to matter most to society’s ruling classes.
So …
There is undoubtedly delight, both within
the Church and among those who favour proper judicial process over simply
targeting and punishing the Church for its sins, at poor Archbishop Wilson’s
ultimate vindication, following his absurdly misconceived trial and the public
denigration of him by opponents of the Church.
Yet this has been a very little victory in the context of the Church’s
far broader and extremely steep uphill battles against the secularist and
progressive tide, and against the voices who wish to shut it off and shut it
down. These voices have, alas, acquired
most of the big weapons that are available in the war over our future world.
And one of the most powerful weapons of all
is control of the air waves and of the bully pulpit of social media. Deafening silence is one heck of a card to be
able to play. Just ask Ann McElhinney
and Phelm McAleer, the brave journalists who uncovered the awful truth of
Kermit Gosnell but whose work has been denied the broad audience that it
deserved.
And stony silence was a weapon that was deployed
strategically and cleverly in response to the successful Wilson appeal.
Paul Collits
11 January 2019
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