The True Confessional

Sir: Reference the letter by Bernie Masters in the June issue. At my age of ninety-one, in defending the truth of the Catholic faith I must have answered this hoary old tale a hundred times. It is Mr Masters who “misunderstands the purpose of the Catholic Church’s Confessional”.

A penitent is confessing to God. The priest is an appointed intermediary and is there to give us some humility and perhaps human advice. The real forgiveness comes from God.

Our Creator is not as naive as Mr Masters thinks. Every honest Catholic and priest is aware of the hypocrisy Mr Masters mentions. His “vicious circle of abuse/repentance” is a figment of his ire.

It has also been stated many times that deviant priests are very secretive and avoid the Confessional. Statistically, as the small print of Royal Commission report makes clear, Catholic priests make up the smallest proportion of sexual abusers among the clergy.

Peter M. Couttie

The Student Challenge

Sir: I was bemused by Archbishop Anthony Fisher’s concluding comment to his article in the July-August issue: “We seek to stretch [school children] spiritually, feeding their minds, hearts and souls with the richness of our Catholic tradition, hopefully giving them the wherewithal for human and spiritual flourishing in the decades beyond school. What an exciting challenge!” Well, it certainly is a challenge, because at present it’s not remotely a reality. And unless I am as delusional as I fear some of our prelates appear to be, that desired result is not achievable because the “richness of the Catholic tradition”, as the bedrock of a present and future “spiritual flourishing”, is virtually non-existent in most Catholic schools today.

I taught for a couple of years in a Catholic secondary school and every Monday I would ask my Year 11 class, “Who went to Mass yesterday?” In two years, not one hand went up. I also supervised a student from a Catholic university who aimed to be a Religious Education teacher. She said they were told they must not catechise students, but simply teach them about religion. In other words, the purpose of religious education was not to form them in the faith, but simply to talk about religion. This from a Catholic university! And a professorial friend who coaches Year 12 students from Catholic schools is astonished by their all-but-total ignorance of the Christian faith, the Bible, and the fundamental tenets and practices of the Catholic religion.

My advice to Archbishop Fisher and every bishop in Australia is to get in touch with reality, otherwise they are just propping up a waste of time and resources. Cardinal Pell, when Archbishop of Sydney, directed resources into university chaplaincies. My hunch is that he knew Catholic schools were a dead loss, but there was some chance that, as some of those kids matured and came into contact with an intelligently explained and committed presentation of the faith, they would be interested in it, informed about it and drawn to it. 

Phillip Turnbull

Art and the Human Spirit

Sir: The distinction Rabbi Cowen (July-August 2021) draws between contemporary trends in the visual arts (and possibly applicable to all creative arts) and traditional views of the arts is instructive. It could go further, however, on the premiss that all art is religious. All art takes a position on the nature of reality, the nature of people, and the nature of the (dis?)continuity between the two.
The “modern secular” art he decries has a religious position in broad brush strokes. Underlying it, I aver, is the most popular but sub-articulate “Religion of Me”. This peculiar modern version of paganism and its arid monist view of reality presents its vapid revelations as new. They are introverted banalities at best. They tell us nothing, depleting the human spirit, rather than cheering it on to flourish.

One salient outcome of this monist vision is the suppression of true otherness, something that is demonstrated and echoed in marriage (I reserve that term to a declared union of a man and a woman with the general prospect of raising a family.)

In the Judeo-Christian religious vision, this is demonstrated in the generous missionary spirit of much of Christianity and of Judaism. Christian mission efforts are well known. Less well acknowledged is the implicit Jewish mission of the diaspora, Jews being everywhere, contributing to all sorts of societies unstintingly, distinctively and unremittingly.

This religious tradition unfolds from the notion of a transcendent personal creator: mind at the source of all that we know and experience. A creator who is radically “other” but who reaches across the otherness of his transcendence for fellowship with his creation. The Genesis story of creation etches this to dramatic and striking effect.

David Green

Covid and Trust

Sir: In Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book The Gulag Archipelago he describes how legal vertigo fed a paranoia amongst the citizens. There was no consistency or any recourse to the law because it was always changing. This bred a fear of being arrested and citizens were always on edge about their conduct.

Now, I am not saying that this is directly consistent with current anti-Covid measures but there is, on the whole, an unhealthy encroachment on behalf of the government into the previously personal and private affairs of its citizens. That I feel as though some criminal act has been added to my permanent record if I walk too close to another member of the public is testimony to this. Covid is killing our trust in one another, and killing consistency of trust in due process that usually applies to our country, beginning with the presumption of innocence.

When the government begins mandating our actions unreasonably, then it is responsible for the outcome. And so it is that the response to Covid has destroyed one of the principles of democracy and is implicated in the consequences.

Glenn McPherson

Les Murray

Sir: For some time I have been contemplating a poem about my interactions with Les Murray when he was poetry editor of this magazine, only to see in the July-August edition that Joe Dolce has done just that, far more gracefully than I could have, and covering everything I could have said.

It’s evident that Les dealt with everyone in the same inimitable way whether they were experts or tyros. Congratulations, Signor Dolce, for reminding us of the humility of that great man.

I’ll add only that to get an email saying, “Thank you for these, I’ll take both,” from Barry Spurr is equally thrilling.

Peter Jeffrey