Church, State collide in Australia
In a disturbing sign of the times, the final report of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse seeks to rewrite Roman Catholic doctrine. It seems Caesar is back in the temple.
I do not in any way diminish the evil of child abuse or suggest that Catholic dogma should take precedence over or dictate law. Rather, precisely because officially established religion is undesirable, it worries me to see a governmental body telling a church what to think.
The spectre here, however faint, is not Bloody Mary or Oliver Cromwell seeking to ban all religions but one. It is Augustus Caesar, officially called “ancestral God and Saviour of the whole human race,” including by you if you don’t want trouble.
Sophisticated Romans saw all religions as essentially the same, socially useful but doctrinally ludicrous. And they tolerated all sorts of polytheistic or simply wishywashy religions provided they didn’t balk at squeezing in emperor-worship. But they persecuted Christians, often ferociously, because they would not call Caesar a god. And now this Royal Commission is trying not to forbid a certain religion because of its practices or ideas but, far more presumptuously, to dictate those practices and ideas.
Again, I do not suggest that Catholicism or any other religion should be above the law. In Australia, as in Canada, secrets revealed in a place of worship fall into the general category of “privi l eged” communications, which also embraces communications with doctors as well as lawyers, because privacy on important matters is essential to human dignity. But privilege is not absolute even between client and attorney.
If you ask your lawyer how to get away with a crime, you’ ll both be hauled into court unless they call a cop. And communications between congregant and clergy have only qualified legal protection in Canada and elsewhere because “religious freedom” is not, and cannot be, a cloak over otherwise criminal activity.
You can’t rob a bank because God told you to. Or burn noxious substances without a permit, sacrifice babies, or engage in female genital mutilation. In a way, the abstraction “religious freedom” is misleading, because the right to worship and discuss doctrine is not some special privilege extended by the state. It’s an outgrowth of normal freedoms of association, speech, etc., and goes no further than they do.
Thus if your religion en- dorses polygamy, and our laws don’t, you are free to advocate changing the laws, on religious or other grounds. But you are not free to ignore them.
On that basis it would be possible to ban certain practices consistent with Catholic doctrine, or even call some Catholic doctrines “hate speech” and forbid their expression, particularly on matters of human sexuality. I certainly hope we won’t. But it would at least have the merit of taking Catholicism as one finds it.
It is quite another matter to seek to make Catholicism into something different, more congenial to the prevailing mood, as the Australian Royal Commission seems to be doing. And not just in presuming to rewrite canon law, which, if needed, is surely the Vatican’s job. The Commission also recommends that Australia’s bishops “request that the Holy See consider introducing voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy,” because celibacy is weird, impossible and repressed.
You might well think so. And you’re entirely free not to be Catholic on this or many other grounds. But it’s not the place of government agents to tell the church what to think here. And while none of these recommendations are yet law, and some don’t aspire to be, including ditching celibacy, here’s one unavoidable collision between Church and State: “there should be no exemption to obligations to report under mandatory reporting laws or the proposed ‘ failure to report’ offence in circumstances where knowledge or suspicions of child sexual abuse are formed on the basis of information received in or in connection with a religious confession.”
To Catholics, the confessional “seal” is absolute. Thus far, civilized governments have generally accepted it as the most strongly privileged communication of all. And while it is not obvious how anyone would know what a priest was told in the booth, in principle this Commission recommendation declares a key aspect of Catholic practice and belief contrary to law, with the apparent intention not of jailing priests but of changing the sacrament.
I think postmodernism was bound to lead here. Or back here. We may scoff at legislating morality, but something somewhere must be the supreme source of our loosing and binding. And if not the church, T. S. Eliot warned, it will be the state.
When Caesar resumes telling other religions not just what they may not do, but what they must think, it may be many things. But I do not think it is progress to consider the emperor a divine lawgiver again after almost two millennia.
THE ABSTRACTION ‘RELIGIOUS FREEDOM’ IS MISLEADING. — JOHN ROBSON