Investigation:
Men have formed the power elite since the Church’s foundation. Yet, writes Susan Chenery, the furore over child sexual abuse and the Church’s handling of the issue is giving rise to a radical thought – the Catholic Church should be run by women.
why women should run the Catholic Church
Patricia Feenan grew up enveloped by the Catholic Church. Like all her friends and family, she went to Catholic schools, joined youth groups, celebrated the Catholic rituals. The best china came out for the frequent priests’ visits.
“They were God’s representatives on Earth. Talking to a priest was very much like talking to God. A visit from a priest or a pat on the head was fairly special,” she says.
As a young wife and mother of four boys in country NSW, Patricia’s life revolved around the Church. “I was a reader in church. I was minister of the Eucharist, I could give Communion, visit sick people in the church to give them Mass. I cleaned the church, shone the brass,” she says.
Her late husband, John, was the business manager of the MaitlandNewcastle Diocese and Patricia was chairperson of the parish council. “There was a lot of Church business in our home.”
She was thrilled when her 11-yearold son, Daniel, was asked to be an altar boy. She sewed his outfit.
The priest, James Fletcher, made her anxious with his loud laugh and “smutty” jokes, but he was a trusted person in the community.
As he entered high school, Daniel changed from being a champion cricketer, a good student, a bright and shining boy, to angry and abusing alcohol. “He became quieter and we saw temperament, which we hadn’t seen before,” says Patricia. “We thought it was adjustment issues.
He was at the age of puberty. This was our first son. Teachers talked about what a great kid he was.”
Daniel attempted suicide. “We realised he was in trouble and couldn’t figure out what caused it,” says Patricia. It wasn’t until he was 24 and about to become a father himself that his concerned mother asked the only question she hadn’t asked before. Had he been sexually abused? As she spoke, Patricia dreaded the answer – she instinctively knew what it was going to be. Daniel had been abused by Father James Fletcher from the age of 12 to 19.
How different it could have been for boys such as Daniel if women had not been excluded from leadership in the Church? In the wake of recent reports of the testimony given to the ongoing Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the Church must reform. As it moves into the future, women should be at the forefront of that change.
Patricia knows now that her whole family was groomed by Father Fletcher. When she was going to give her statement to the police, she had to pull the car over to be sick. She was remembering how he had infiltrated their lives completely. And worse, all the times she had asked him for advice and help with her son. Daniel was hospitalised with depression several times during the 11 months it took to give his statement to then Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox. When word got out, the family was shunned by the Church community.
“It’s very hard for people to believe this great person could commit these terrible crimes,” says Patricia. “They have a way of bringing people into their lives and making them feel special and important.”
In 2004, Father Fletcher was convicted of nine charges of sexual abuse, and died in jail in 2006. In November 2012, Detective Chief Inspector Fox spoke on the ABC’s Lateline program about high-level cover-ups in the Church and police force. Shortly after, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the Royal Commission. It is due to deliver its final report in December this year.
The Feenan family is still recovering from the enormity of the betrayal, the shattered trust, the loss of faith. Patricia and John’s marriage broke up and she no longer attends Mass. Yet she couldn’t let it go and wrote a book, Holy Hell, about what had happened to them. “The Church was very paternalistic,” says Patricia now.
Many people believe that the scale of abuse would have been much, much less if women held positions of power in the Church. Women are far less likely to be drawn into a secretive society and far more likely to break ranks where the welfare of children is concerned. At the Royal Commission’s 50th public hearing, Gail Furness, SC, Counsel Assisting the Commission, pointed to “the issues of a rigid hierarchy” and said “the lack of women in positions of leadership was identified by many as a factor”. She also noted that religious orders with Brother and Sister members had “the lowest overall proportion of alleged perpetrators”.
She began to see the ugly face of denial.
Yet, increasingly, in the wake of discrimination and patriarchal damage, women are demanding to be heard. On social media, their voices are ringing out loud and clear. There is a new pulpit and women are shouting from it, asking for equality.
It is not such a radical idea. In the US, a movement has long been running to challenge the Church’s stance and for women to be ordained, as they are tired of being treated as second-class citizens. Discrimination unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority has been a reason to deny women’s equal rights across the world for centuries. So women and children have suffered, lives have been destroyed.
The whistleblower
To meet her, you can’t imagine Dr Michelle Mulvihill ever having been a demure or pious nun. A high-powered Consultant Psychologist, she’s a strong, intelligent, compassionate woman and a whistleblower, speaking out against the Church she had given her life to. Like Patricia, Dr Mulvihill came from a deeply religious family. “Priests were our best friends,” she says.
She entered the Sisters of Mercy when she was 18, took final vows at 28 and lasted another five years before she felt able to leave. After her training in the convent, she studied psychology and became a social worker. Later, she decided to get a Master’s degree. This was when she realised, “I needed to get out, that it was not good for me and I needed to reinvent myself for the rest of my life.”
Through her counselling work, Dr Mulvihill was approached to be a mediator by the Brothers of St John of God order, which was dealing with numerous complaints of clerical sexual abuse. “We came up with some very good things to start with: going into jails, meeting [the victims] in their homes, horrible boarding houses.”
She asked the Brothers to pay for the victims’ rehabilitation, credit card and electricity bills, and buy them warm clothes. “All those very practical things,” she says. “We were trying to re-engage these victims in a very healthy way, so they could take stock of their lives, regain some dignity.”
St John of God had taken in some of the most vulnerable, defenceless and marginalised people in our society. At that time, it ran residential schools for boys with mental difficulties. In addition to everyday cruelty, these boys were at the mercy of a paedophile ring – it is estimated by the Royal Commission that at least 40 per cent of the order’s Brothers were abusers.
In her efforts to get as many resources to the victims as possible, Dr Mulvihill began to see the ugly face of denial. “I started to realise behind this pretence of good work was a culture that hated what we were doing,” she says. “I kept being white-anted. Behind the scenes, there was a lot of what I call corruption of the path. Something very bad and immoral was going on. The Catholic Church was protecting its own, covering up. The other side wasn’t being listened to.”
Every one of the accused St John of God paedophiles pleaded not guilty, says Dr Mulvihill. It was a grouping of men “with no accountability to the faithful. Institutionalising the men so they didn’t dob each other in.”
Dr Mulvihill was on the order’s professional standards committee