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...