The Church's Cycle of Scandal

Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church

By Geoffrey Robinson

307 pages, Melbourne: John Garratt Publishing, 2007

Bishops named Robinson are causing considerable heartburn in Christianity these days. The Episcopalians famously have Bishop Gene Robinson, the openly gay prelate in New Hampshire whose 2004 ordination is threatening to split the worldwide Anglican Communion. Now, the Catholic Church has Geoffrey Robinson, an Australian bishop whose incendiary new book, Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, calls for sweeping reforms in the wake of the church's sexual abuse scandals.

Christianity is a complex global family of faith, and the issues of power and sex are not necessarily of universal interest. More than two thirds of the world's 2.3 billion Christians live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where battles over sexual ethics or the authority of the Vatican are not generally top-shelf concerns. Yet in "the West" -- and for the purposes of Robinson's book, Australia may be counted as part of the West -- sex and power form the front lines of Christianity's most agonizing debates. Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church is therefore an important book, because it opens these debates to full public view.

More precisely, Robinson gives voice to one side of the conversation -- the liberal Catholic perspective that Rome is far too powerful, and that Catholic theology is unhealthily obsessed with what critics mockingly call the "pelvic issues," meaning sexual matters such as birth control, abortion, and homosexuality. Other constituencies in the church, such as those who find the late Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body" a persuasive account of human sexuality, or those who believe a strong papacy is essential to protecting Catholic identity in a secular world, find little echo in his account.

Such one-sidedness, however, cannot be considered a defect, because Confronting Power and Sex is not really designed to be dispassionate analysis. Instead, the book amounts to a cri de coeur from a spiritually sensitive soul who has been deeply shocked by the sexual abuse crisis. Robinson is determined that something -- indeed, one could have the impression that almost anything -- must be done to clean house.

Robinson reveals early on that he, too, was sexually abused as a young man, though not by a priest or anyone connected to the church. Later, when he was placed in charge of the Australian bishops' response to the sexual abuse scandals that erupted there in the early 1990s, his long-suppressed memories came flooding back. Initially, Robinson writes, he hoped that the church would respond to the crisis with compassion and vigor. When that didn't happen, in his view, keeping silent about the church's failures essentially revictimized those already abused.

"I eventually came to the point where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could not continue to be a bishop of a church about which I had such profound reservations," Robinson writes. So in July 2004 he resigned as auxiliary bishop, meaning an assistant to the archbishop of Sydney. Official Catholic theology still considers him a bishop of the church, albeit without office.

Of course, passion and good intentions do not always make for compelling logic, and there are times when Robinson's outrage appears to lead him into self-contradiction. For example, he argues that since the 19th century, the pope has become too strong a leader, yet in almost the same breath, he complains that the pope failed to exercise strong leadership on the sexual abuse crisis. Likewise, Robinson claims that Catholicism has become too hierarchical, yet at one point he proposes instituting "presidents of regions" in the Western church, tantamount to patriarchs in the East, which would inevitably create a new layer of hierarchy.

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