A great man is lost to us
AT 12.30pm on Wednesday, a capacity crowd of 1000 people spilled out from the Melbourne Recital Centre, the large and gracious auditorium that forms part of the Victorian Arts Centre and National Gallery precinct around St Kilda Rd, Melbourne.
The recital centre hosts about 450 events each year, but last Wednesday it was the venue for an “event” that was, in its own way, both extraordinary and memorable.
It was a funeral — indeed, a state funeral — attended by a mix of some of the most influential members of our community, as well as some of the most damaged and vulnerable.
Their damage and vulnerability began when, as children, they were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by church personnel in whom they and their parents had placed total trust.
Both the influential and the vulnerable had assembled to honour Anthony Foster who, along with his equally courageous wife Chrissie, had for more than 20 years fought for justice, recognition and reparation for the irreparable damage done to their daughters, Emma and Katie, by Oakleigh Catholic priest Kevin O’Donnell.
After a number of earlier suicide attempts, Emma took her own life in 2008, while Katie sustained injuries serious enough to put her, to this day, in a wheelchair, the result of an incident with direct links to the abuse she had suffered.
Katie and her younger sister Aimee (who mercifully escaped O’Donnell’s crimes) sat with their mother on the recital centre stage, two metres from their father’s coffin, which was draped with the Australian flag. Premier Daniel Andrews, lawyer Tim Secull, and Royal Commission Chair Justice Peter McLellan were among speakers who gave deserved praise to both Anthony and Chrissie for the intrepid manner in which they have carried the flag for justice and for recognition.
They did so not only for their own family, but for the many families that have suffered deeply due to churchrelated abuse crimes, crimes aptly described by the Victorian Government 2013 parliamentary inquiry as a “betrayal of trust”.
Had there been an exit poll of those attending on Wednesday, responses would most likely have ranged from “inspirational” to “gutwrenching” to “numbing”. For many, very much including myself, all three words would have been applicable.
The funeral was “inspirational” in that it demonstrated the courage of an entire family whose innocence has been snatched away many times over.
But they refused to be cowed or beaten, either by the crimes of O’Donnell or by the legal and moral resistance they have had to challenge for more than 20 years in their quest for justice.
It was “numbing” in its sad commemoration of the life and sudden death (from natural but thus far undermined natural causes) of a 64 year-old whose life has been defined by his fight for justice for families suffering similar overwhelming damage.
And it was “gut-wrenching” in the sheer tragedy of a family so brutally assaulted, yet still able to sit together on a stage, united not only in their grief, but in their honouring of a loved husband and father who had crusaded relentlessly for and with them, and for so many others. But there was another key component of the atmosphere in the recital centre: the inescapable reality of how the sins, the offences, the crimes that crush one person (in this case two little girls) can reverberate for decades and harm so many others.
Families gathered in sadness around the coffin of a loved one are not uncommon.
But for the Fosters, the sheer tragedy of what had begun nearly 30 years ago with the violation of two little children was clearly visible in the bereft faces of Katie and Aimee as they sat with their devoted mother alongside their Dad’s coffin.
Anthony and Chrissie Foster would be the first to acknowledge that they have not been alone in their persistent and challenging efforts to bring true justice to individuals and families who, like them, have been so horrendously betrayed.
But the dignity of this entire family, the suffering they have endured, and the strength with which they have fought for justice for their children and for many other similarly devastated families should be neither forgotten, nor be in vain. Fr Kevin Dillon is parish priest at St Mary’s, Geelong