St Mary's and Peter Kennedy - the Book

It's been about 7 or 8 months since I've written on St Mary's South Brisbane and the dramas there with the former priests, Peter Kennedy and Terry Fitzpatrick. I had promised I would write something about going back to St Mary's but it seems other things got in the way. I have been pretty much a regular at St Mary's since the change took place last year. I don't live in the area anymore so I don't know how long I can sustain it, especially as, coming up this year, I have quite a bit of housesitting quite a few kilometres away in the southwestern suburbs. Along with quite a few others my main purpose in going back was to provide support in a difficult time and to ensure that a diversity of congregation was maintained. And lets face it I like the church and the community there. It still makes a nice contrast to some of the more mainstream suburban parishes I've visited.

I've not been to what's been termed St Mary's in Exile, at least not for their regular services in Trades Hall. However, last December I did attend a book launch for Peter Kennedy: The Man Who Threatened Rome (published by One Day Hill), a compilation of essays and reflections, in large part by people involved in or sympathetic to the Exile community. The launch seemed much more like a religious service - possibly something out of Hillsong - than any book launch I'd been to previously (I'm not used to community hymn singing at a book launch, for instance). And unlike other such launches it was the subject/s of the book, Peter Kennedy as well as Terry Fitzpatrick, at the centre of attention and signing copies of the book, not the authors/editors.

I have to admit the title of the book put me off. It buys into what is by now a founding myth of a new religious denomination forming amongst the exiles, that Peter Kennedy, alone standing for the principles of Vatican 2, was the victim of Vatican powermongers, aided and abetted by local reactionary Catholics dubbed the Temple Police. The first essay in the book, by Paul Collins, someone who did, unfortunately, get monstered by the Vatican apparatchiks, assumes that this myth is a realistic account of the events that led to the dismissal of Peter Kennedy and the community's move into exile/separation. I only wish the myth was a true representation of the facts in which case Collins' essay would have been quite apropos. But the reality is that the final upshot of the saga was very much a local affair, as much to do with Terry Fitzpatrick as Peter Kennedy and very little to do with either local reactionaries or Vatican enforcers.

But of course Paul Collins was not to know that and so I can't judge his essay too harshly. The real story behind the events will probably never enter the public domain and so reading Collins' contribution was for me a salutory process enabling me to make a perspectival shift before proceeding with the rest of the book. The rest of the book is fascinating, irritating, moving, depressing, confusing, inspiring and enlightening. It is, as the back cover blurb says, an assembly of voices, an assembly framed by a two part hagiography of Peter Kennedy by Melbourne based journalist, Martin Flanagan. There follows a large section - nearly 60 pages - by Michele Gierck titled "The People Speak" a series of sketches of eleven people involved with St Mary's (including Gierck herself and Terry Fitzpatrick). That's followed by some 21 essays/reflections mostly by people who are part of the St Mary's community or others commenting on the events. However there are other essays by such as John Shelby Spong, Hans Kung, Roy Bourgeois and Joan Chittister that I presume were chosen for their illustrative effect. None of them reflect on the St Mary's events or betray any evidence of awareness of those events. Kung, Bourgeois and Chittister have all in their own different ways fallen foul of the Vatican and so their essays presumably are meant to illustrate the Vatican power dynamic that was likewise supposed to have also rolled over Peter Kennedy. I strongly recommend the essays by Roy Bourgeois and Joan Chittister. They make a trenchant critique of the authoritarianism and patriarchal clericalism that is one of the key problems of the Roman communion. Kung's essay,'If Obama Were Pope', no doubt written in the heady early days of the Obama presidency, reads now as rather embarassing in its naive understandings of the dynamics of US presidential power. One thing we don't need in the Vatican is a charismatic and popular Pope; the last one was John Paul 2 and he was a disaster! The Spong piece is his recent Manifesto in which he declared that he is no longer going to debate the issue of homosexuality in the Church with those pushing homophobic agendas. I'm sympathetic to Spong's position. I get sick to death of always having to go over the same old stuff too. I'd love to move on myself - I've spent many years reading some most odious materials. I'm much more interested in developing very different readings and understandings of biblical and other texts that will help open up especially Christian possibilities for new ways of living, beyond patriarchy, sexism and patriarchy. In the St Mary's context, Spong's piece is presumably designed to reflect the reasons for going into 'exile'. Peter, Terry and community are no longer going to waste time debating with or justifying themselves to the patriarchal homophobes in the Vatican and the local Temple Police.

However, the remainder of the contributions reflect and comment on the issues at St Mary's and many of them are from members of the community and supporters of Peter Kennedy. Some of the pieces, like the four from overseas, were presumably first published elsewhere. Certainly the critical piece by Neil Ormerod, 'Mary Mary Quite Contrary', I remember reading last year, on Eureka St, I think. Some of the essays, like that of Paul Collins, take as their starting point the foundation myth of Vatican bullies and Temple Police, but others are more far-ranging and get into a range of issues that are highlighted by the St Mary's experience.

The strength of the book is those contributions and accounts of the ordinary members of St Mary's. It's a strange experience for me to read these accounts because of the shared ideals, often even shared languages. I know the well that St Mary's drew on. That well lay deep in the long traditions of the Catholic left, in particular the Catholic Worker movement and I think also the Poustinia movement. St Mary's in its heyday would have come very close to the vision of one of the early figures of the Catholic Worker, Peter Maurin, who imagined every Catholic parish operating a house of hospitality and active with the poor and outcast, building community and developing spirituality, not least by maintaining some sort of rural retreat. Each parish was to be a centre of activism in which the seeds for a new human-centred (not profit, not power driven) society would be sown. St Mary's didn't have a house of hospitality but it had a community orchard planted around the old presbytery and it also had Micah Projects, a government funded community agency. Peter Kennedy also had a property up in the Numinbah valley with little cabins for people to go and spend time in reflection. I spent a few days there myself many years ago in early '91.

But the crisis at St Mary's stemmed in part from a form of thinking in many Catholic circles that saw the 2nd Vatican Council as the Roman Church finally catching up with the Reformation. Vatican 2 was all about 'relevance' about modernising the Church and the modernity looked to was pretty much a Protestant Reformed modernity. This suited some of the more conservative circles who could engage in liturgical changes and purges of the calendar of saints and changes in clerical dress etc while not really addressing the underlying issues of power in the church. JP2 drew on such aspects of modernity as PR and the cult of celebrity to reinforce his authoritarian Papacy. He also heavily promoted a variety of rather strange and dubious movements to counter more progressive and dissenting movements in the Church.

But the same modernising discourse was embraced by many Catholic progressives as well. They were able to draw on it to develop critiques of Church power structures, often by looking to Protestant models or through liberation and feminist theologies. All too often, however, there came a jettisoning of any sense of value in the past/tradition, under the influence of modern myths of progress. The Roman Church was regarded as a medieval institution that had to shed all its backwardness to enter the modern age. In actual fact the Roman Church was/is as medieval as, say, the Anglican Church, having been very much remade through the 16th century Council of Trent and then through the various settlements of Church and Papal power in the 19th century. It was only in the 19th century, with the rise of secular societies, that the conditions developed, which enabled the full flourishing of Papal power and Vatican centralism. Papal Infallibility was only declared as an item of necessary belief in 1870 at Vatican 1, at the same time as the secular power of the Papacy was stripped away by the new Italian state. In purely political terms, losing that secular power was probably the best thing to happen to the Papacy. In some respects the post-1870 church anticipated various developments in the modern world. It became an international corporation operating under a democratic centralism that would put Lenin's to shame while the purge of the Modernists a century ago was every bit as ruthless as the late Bolshevik purges, albeit without the bloodletting. Papal infallibility itself would be echoed in conservative Protestantism with the notion of biblical inerrancy which became a key plank of the fundamentalism born in the US a century ago. So one could say that the Roman church was as thoroughly modern as any other aspect of modernity.

There were aspects of Catholicism, that sat awkwardly, were even embarassing, in the liberal bourgeois order. The cult of Mary is one such example and certainly over the last few centuries the place and figure of Mary had been progressively diminished within the Church from the great Mother and Queen of Heaven figure of medieval Latin Christendom. Her diminution mirrored the rise of the patriarchal nuclear family as the structuring base of the capitalist state. This diminution was accelerated post-Vatican 2 under the perceived need to get to a more Christocentric (and masculine?) focus in the Church.

I'm not knocking Vatican 2 or saying that there should not have been changes. Many of the changes I think were desirable and necessary. Others I suspect were distractions or were driven by a modernist desire to rid the Church of perceived medievalisms. But the real problem in the church is the problem of power, the centralising clericalism, which has its roots most strongly in the medieval reform movement of the 11th and 12th centuries in the Latin West (and in which the 16th century Reformation also has its roots). What's so rotten about this clericalism was illustrated by the various clerical sexual abuse scandals over recent decades. But those scandals were on symptoms of a continuing problem of power by which the local church operated as a branch office of the Head Office in Rome and the clergy were held up on a pedestal to function as agents of that head office.

In its early days I think St Mary's had the potential to challenge that clericalism and to do so from within, reconfiguring the language and traditions of Catholicism. I've written about this in some of my earlier posts. But in the end it failed to do so, taking instead a reprise the Reformation and more recently wandering into an almost post-Christian New Age realm. The St Marys exile church seems to have become pretty much a form of liturgical Unitarian Universalism. That's fine, of course, if that's what you want but is quite definitely not Catholic, whether it be Roman, Independent, Orthodox or even Anglican (which allows for a wide variety of styles).

And that is why, in the end, Peter Kennedy was not any kind of threat to Rome at all. By adopting a post-Catholic, even post-Christian, universalism, Kennedy and the community took themselves out of any Catholic orbit and abandoned any attempt to reconfigure Catholicism, from within its own terms (Roman and non-Roman), abandoned any shared discursive framework by which to challenge Rome on its own terms Instead they had developed into a new sect. And the even greater irony was that, far from threatening Rome, in a sense there was an emulation of Rome. Rome had its cult of personality around JP2 and I think in the latter years a cult of personality had developed around Kennedy. It's understandable - he had been a good priest. But I wonder if, towards the end, that cult of personality took him over. It's very easy for something like that to happen and certainly there were aspects of the book launch and the, dare I say, veneration of both Peter Kennedy and Terry Fitzpatrick displayed there, which gave me pause. And I couldn't help but think that this is the same old Roman clericalism reinscribed.

But by all means get a copy of the book. The questions raised, the hopes expressed, the visions dreamed have not lost their urgency, relevance and import. St Mary's was a model for how a church of Catholic tradition could be. The crisis last year arose because the priests and other leaders of the community had pretty much lost their moorings in Catholic Christianity. They were becoming, will become a distinct separate denomination, only vaguely Christian. On the other hand, the ongoing parish community has had to almost start again from scratch. It's early days yet but I hope that St Mary's may again one day model a way for church of Catholic tradition to be. Who knows, it might even one day genuinely threaten Rome, or even liberate it. Ah, but there I fall into utopianism.

Australian Story and St Mary's

Maybe it's the Mercury Retrograde this month but I just don't think I've been blogging the way I'd hoped to lately. There are varous topics I'd hoped to cover but am still to address and I seriously intend to get into them. One that has been constantly pushed to the back is my observations of the 'new regime' over at St Mary's. And in the last week, I've not only been to Mass at St Mary's again but also attend the monthly parish meeting.

However, last night Australian Story went to air with a programme not so much on St Mary's itself but on the two priests in the eye of the whole drama, Peter Kennedy and Terry Fitzpatrick. I didn't think I would see it as I was to be at my mother's last night. But she also wanted to watch it and so with my sister who was also there last night (and was a regular attender at St Mary's) we three sat down to watch it. And so today I am first going to make some obervations on the latest state of play of the 'exilists' in light of the Australian Story programme and then review a little of my own return from exile to St Mary's the parish at Sth Brisbane.

Last night's programme really was a form of hagiography an all too common feature nowadays of what was once a worthy show ; I agree with my flatmate's observation:

Unfortunately, Australian Story generally appears to be an outlet for PR spin, under the guise of human interest, and almost every episode, really, is quite an indictment of what the ABC should be about…

The hagiography was focused on the two priests and we were given an intimate glimpse of their private lives. Most intersting was the focus on Terry, who to date has been kept pretty much out of the spotlight. What we were presented was Father Terry, family man, because the hagiography revolved around Terry and his son, a family relationship which now also includes Peter Kennedy himself. The show provided glimpses of a domestic life of the two priests and the son almost like any other happy family, dare I say nuclear family. And coming after my last post on homosexual tradition and while I'm reading Irigaray's classic text, I couldn't but help feeling a certain irony about what I was viewing, an irony heightened by scenes of them together watching one of my favorite shows, Father Ted.

It's not my intention to comment on the details of their domestic lives. Indeed, I am pleased that Terry has taken his responsibilities as a parent seriously and openly. I wish more priests would do the same (priestly parenthood is much more common than people realise but it's more common for such f/Fathers to brush it aside and avoid their responsibilities). I'm also happy that Peter has been privileged to become a part of such a familial relationship in his old age after many years of celibacy and, presumably, loneliness. Celibacy can really only be lived in community - it's a monastic practice. When a person enters a convent/monastery they are joining a household and entering into a web of relationships focused around spiritual practice and other shared purposes. Celibacy really means unmarried and marriage itself has traditionally represented the entering into/establishing of a (patriarchal) familial household. Monks and nuns are not meant to be embedded in the ways of patriarchy and its family structures, hence they are celibate. But it is a great cruelty for the Roman church to expect its ordinary, non-monastic (and I use the term here broadly to signify life in religious communities, be they monastic, mendicant or 'service' oriented), parish clergy to live a life of celibacy, which of course also entails sexual abstinence, with all the associated sexphobia and homosexual panic, in a setting of an authoritarian hierarchy .

But to return to St Mary's, I really am puzzled by the major stress on the domestic and family life of the two priests in last night's show, except if to say in a hagiographical manner, these are just ordinary regular guys us like the rest of us. It was designed to make us like them but also to deflect from discussing any of the substantive issues involved. In that sense, then, the programme was dishonest.

I'm told that the priests were concerned that the programme might have revealed more than they intended. I don't know what they feared was revealed but they were correct, there were several moments of, I suspect, unintended revelation cutting through the fog of hagiography. I want now to highlight these moments because they shed a striking light on many of the substantive issues in the saga, issues that have been ignored by the media in their persistent and dishonest 'simple caring priests being victimised by evil authoritarian Rome' narrative.

The first relates to the odd recurring understory of Buddhism that just keeps cropping up. It's when Peter is heading off to his appearance on Q & A in Sydney. We see Peter and Terry heading off to the airport for his flight. In the car is a little Buddhist image. It's just a glimpse and I'm sure we glimpse a similar image at another moment in the show but I can't recall when. The image itself is none too special, I think Japanese in style, almost a bit of Buddhist kitsch, but I'm wondering if this is an example of what was in the church that caused all those dramas last year with the conservatives. In which case, I think it's quite dishonest to say that the image in the church was simply a representation of a monk. And the Buddha/ist image is then juxtaposed with Peter saying on Q & A, in response to whether he believes in the divinity of Christ, that 'we can't corroborate the existence of Jesus'. It's a point he's repeated in various public fora and I am frankly puzzled by what he intends by it. Would he say the same for Gautama Buddha (for which the same claim can be made quite justifiably, I would say). And if not, why not? Is Peter really signalling here that he no longer believes in anything of the Christian, let alone Catholic, package that as an ordained priest he is supposed to represent and sustain. A lot of good people have left the Roman Church, people I admire and have been influenced by, including many priests who left over celibacy and sexuality issues. So Peter would be in good company and if he's no longer a believer then leaving the priesthood would be an act of honesty in keeping with the Buddha's own dictum of right speech.

Not all the revelations in the show were by Peter and Terry themselves. There was an important moment of revelation from 'the other side', in the person of Adrian Farrelly, who for some reason terms himself Chancellor of the Brisbane Archdiocese (that title is actually held by
James Spence while Farrelly is Vicar Judicial UPDATE I have been informed that Spence retired a few months ago and that Farrelly has been appointed to the Chancellor position but at this time 1/6/09 the Archdiocese has yet to update its website). Farrelly's own contributions to the saga have been none too helpful, however, he cut through all the crap last night and said that if Peter had kept to authorised Eucharistic prayers and worn some vestments when celebrating the liturgy then none of this would have happened. In large part, Farrelly is correct. Questions of social justice and inclusion are a smokescreen here. The Archdiocese did not intervene because of St Mary's social justice work (which is carried out by Micah Projects, not the priests) or because of its commitment to inclusion of LGBT people. If the priests hadn't de-natured the Eucharist there in the last few years then there would have been no problem.

Except... and here the next revelation is just as crucial as Farrelly's. Peter Kennedy was talking about his interactions with Archbishop Bathersby and said words to the effect that every time he (Kennedy) saw him, Bathersby would regale him with 'all the complaints he was getting about Terry Fitzpatrick'. I've heard some of those complaints myself and they have nothing to do with social justice and inclusion. Quite the opposite, in fact. And as I have said repeatedly, Terry's status was one of the key issues raised in Bathersby's first letter to Kennedy last year. It's a fact that's been continuously ignored by the media's handling of the whole affair. Any reporter worth their salt should have been following up those complaints and indeed I've been told that up until now Kennedy has been concerned to keep Terry out of the spotlight as much as possible. Indeed the other intersting fact about last night's programme was that Terry was brought out into the open at all, if one can call such uncritical PR spin being out in the open.

Two other moments of revelation came in the final credits. We learn that Peter is still being paid by the Brisbane Archdiocese. Terry is not a priest of the Archdiocese and to my knowledge never has been. He was originally from Toowoomba but after all these years in Brisbane could hardly be on Toowomba's payroll. In the credits to last night's show we learn that Terry is paid by 'private supporters'.

They must pay him well, because the other and most disturbing revelation of last night's show came in the lead up to the departure into 'exile'. We see Terry coming down from the choir loft in the church with his golf clubs (golf is not a game of the poor) and fishing rod, all part of the packing up to move out. And he laments the fact that packing up the golf clubs and fishing rod brings home to him the reality of having to move. I'm surprised the programme makers didn't ask him why he was keeping such personal items IN THE CHURCH. Indeed to me it was indicative of a real blurring of boundaries that has been an ongoing pattern of behavior both publicly and privately (according to the complaints I've received) that represents priestcraft and clericalism of the worst kind. Both priests were treating the church of St Mary's as their own personal property. I know too that they took more than just their personal items from the church when they left. It seems, they stripped it of just about everything they could carry; even the vestments, I believe, went (curious given that both priests made the such an issue about not needing to wear vestments) and altar vessels. The piano was taken too on the basis that Peter Kennedy had put so many thousands of his own money towards it. The proper thing to have done was to have tabled a receipt to the Archdiocese for reimbursement. The piano belongs to the community of St Mary's which does not only comprise those who have gone into exile but the full community of people that have been part of it since it was founded in the 19th century and all those yet to come in the future. But it would appear that for Peter Kennedy the community 'c'est moi'. And so it comes as no suprise to hear that he has already excommunicated someone from the exile community for espousing ideas of which he doesn't approve. I know he was all too ready to excommunicate in the days before exile, a fact that is also behind the Archdiocesan intervention.

But to be quite honest, I'm really bored with writing about the two priests. I only took on this role because they had captured the media coverage of the affair and had seriously misrepresented what was really going on. And it appeared that no one was publicly prepared to challenge the spin that was being promoted through the media, apart from some of the silly conservatives who were taking unjustified credit for the Archdiocesan intevention. Let me put it as plainly as I can. Bathersby did not intervene because Rome told him too. He also did not intervene because he wanted to stop the social justice work of the parish. That work continues; it was never at risk from the Archdiocese. What was at issue was the behaviour and accountability of both Peter Kennedy, employed by the Archdiocese and Terry Fitzpatrick who was employed by no one and thus completely unaccountable to anyone. Such lack of accountablity led not only to them denaturing the key rituals that constitute a Catholic identity, it also led them to create their own quasi-religion, a hodge podge of new age Buddhism lite, ersatz Christianity with a sprinkling of appropriated indigenous religious forms to boot. They capped that off with an authoritarianism and abusive behaviour vis a vis individuals in the congregation, hence the many complaints Bathersby had received. What they had done was set up a Peter and Terry cult which bears little or no relation to social justice or inclusion but encouraged the worst aspects of priestcraft. And if I have labored the point it's because the media have been complicit in their whole spin exercise.

But to St Mary's itself, the parish, the forlorn bride. I have returned as has my flatmate, Mark. It was strange to be back there after all those years. I don't live in the area anymore but I don't want St Mary's to die; it has a rich history and a tradition of social justice and inclusion that must be honoured and maintained. And yes there are some conservatives who have turned up and want to turn things back to the way they used to be once upon a time. Once upon a time does not exist and it's to Ken Howell's credit that he is determined not to radically change the way things are done at St Mary's. I believe he was concerned to hear that the Pride Choir had packed up and moved out on the belief that they would be forced to leave. I'm told he wanted them to stay. Certainly the numbers at Mass now are small but that's to be expected given the history. And small numbers give a sense of intimacy which I like. I also like the somewhat impromptu nature of things; when you arrive you are likely to be asked if you want to do a reading, take up the collection, distribute communion etc. My first mass there I did the procesion for the gifts at the Offertory and last Sunday I found myself assisting the priest as a server. THe other positive thing too is that as Dean of the Cathedral, Ken Howell has a lot of other commitments so he shares his St Mary's role with a number of other priests. On Sunday the priest was from Australian Catholic University at Banyo and there is a very social justice oriented priest involved with the Timorese community who has also regularly celebrated Mass there. This diversity of priests is also a good thing, I think. I have also recognised some faces of people who I remember were very active at St Mary's back when I was going in the 90s. Clearly they did not decide to go into exile and they provide a valuable continuity.

Micah Projects is moving out of the old presbytery. It's not clear why. They say that it's 'to allow members and supporters to continue to access and participate in the work of Micah Projects regarless of where they choose to worship' and I seriously hope that connections are maintained between the organisation and the parish. My concerns are heightened by the fact that there are conservatives who love nothing more than to bring to an end the social justice traditions of the parish. I don't want to see that happen but I'm concerned that the media misrepresentations of what was going on at St Mary's might have given them a false sense of empowerment that is undeserved.

So it is my intent to get along to St Mary's and help out as often as I can. I would also hope that those who went into exile will reconsider and return. I suspect many think that the exile is only a temporary thing and that Peter and Terry will eventually be restored to the parish. I can't see how that can happen quite frankly. Mark observed about the exiles

I think the Exilists’ story does show a strange sort of pull away from an absent centre – towards the other. But a certain imaginary other, rather than the others in our midst. The centre might be the institutional church, or a space of privilege. But what’s not going on, I don’t think, is any decentring. There’s something in that centre, still – the priestly authority, and the particular priestly authority of Terry and Peter Kennedy. There’s a gesture towards the other, but I question how much the other is listened to, and more broadly.. there’s something of a spiritual emptiness within that core place.

I would agree. The path they have taken can only lead in one direction, a separate church, a separate denomination. I support and participate in Independent Catholicism myself. For those of us kept at the margins of the mainstream Catholic/Orthodox churches it can be a vital, even necessary way to balance the institutional homophobia and authoritarianism of the mainsteam. But a living religious community needs more to sustain itself than a cult of personality around its clerics. In the end it's not about priests, it's about a community, a living ongoing community of people. That was very much part of the magic of St Mary's. My hope is that the magic, which hasn't quite died, will be sustained and revive to flame forth anew, a beacon of hope once more.

And my next post before this month is over will be on matters biblical.

A Buddhist Take on St Mary's

My friend Mad Hatter has been following the St Mary's saga and has put up a post commenting on the way Buddhism and Buddhist references have been a sub-plot in many of the reports. Check it out.

Coincidentally, I went to the St Mary's parish meeting tonight and hope to be attending Mass there more regularly. I also plan a post on the new regime at St Mary's soon (I know I know, I keep saying it, but I will, I will).

An Addition to my Blog Roll

My flatmate, Mark Bahnisch, who normally blogs on politics and society at Larvatus Prodeo. However he has established another blog, Angelus Novus, in which he intends to write on religion and society 'from a radical Catholic perspective'. His first post he originally put up on his Facebook page and reflects on some issues around the St Mary's imbroglio, in part following on from my latest St Mary's post. I've added Angelus Novus to my blogroll.

Some more on St Mary's

It's been my hope to write about my recent return to Mass at St Marys over at Sth Brisbane but I've been sidetracked. During a spare moment between tutes this morning I checked out the St Mary's exiles website. It was there that I found a recent homily by Terry Fitzpatrick, the other priest associated with St Mary's, the one who's status was explicitly raised as an issue in Archbishop Bathersby's letter last year but the one you never hear about in the media.

The setting for this homily is that it's the first one in the new building, or at least their temporary space in Trades Hall. Terry's homily is your basic rah rah rally the troops type piece - we've walked out of our church and we've walked out of our Church and aren't we courageous, that type of stuff (and I don't doubt that, for some in the community, it was a courageous act on their part). Terry also does what any good leader does in such a situation and finds parallels for the community's experiences with a narrative from their central myth, in this case from one of the Gospel readings post-Easter. Terry makes an attempt to identify the community with the resurrected Christ (and, of course himself as a leader of the community too). But I was struck by this piece:

But look at my wounded hands and feet, says Jesus. The same wounded, marginalized, persecuted, crucified one is among you. We may then ask ourselves, "Is the same wounded, marginalized, persecuted ones among us at Micah and St Mary's in Exile? Is it not our stance with those same ones why we have been ostracized by the Institution?

Women, the voices of the feminine, who continue to be marginalized by the church,
people who are gay and lesbian or transsexual,
people who are of other faith traditions and cultures such as the Buddhist communities.

We continue to touch and see for ourselves that this same wounded one is amongst us, and with the disciples in that upper room who recognized Jesus.

Now I have several problems with this statement. The 'exiles' haven't been ostracized because they are standing with the persecuted. The exiles went into exile in support of the priests who had been rightly called to task for no longer celebrating the Eucharist in any recognisable form. So perhaps, Terry is claiming that he and Peter Kennedy have been persecuted and ostracized by the Institution and going further and claiming an identity with women and LGBT people and Buddhists (?!?) who have been marginalised by the Church.

Now Terry is a white, male, by all accounts very heterosexual priest. I have no idea of his class background but Peter Kennedy who is also white male etc was earlier this year bragging about his family's wealth, saying his brother could buy him a Cathedral. So whatever else, Peter is certainly upper class. And, of course as priests, they are very much up on the top levels of the Catholic pecking order and from what I hear they don't muck about with any false modesty when it comes to their priestly prerogatives.

Women and LGBT people are definitely marginalised by the official Church. I'm a gay man. I am very much aware of my own marginal status within the institution. I've lived with it all my life. Along with every other LGBT person I get regularly reminded of my marginality, most recently by the pathetic attempts to keep gay and bisexual men out of the priesthood through extraordinary psychological screening and profiling of priestly candidates. I also have to endure the constant heteronormative family imagery and language in official Church discourse, including at St Mary's in the past, too. And there's all other manner of ways the Roman Catholic Church like just about all the Churches marginalises LGBT people. Actually LGB people - trangender people don't even seem to be blip on the church's perceptual horizon. And women, generally, kept always on the fringe but always on hand to do the heavy lifting. Ordination anybody?

So, I make no apologies for saying that neither Terry or Peter have any understanding of what it means to be on the margins, none whatsoever. All that they've experienced is some diminution of privilege.

But what I'm really confused by is "people" marginalised "who are of other faith traditions and cultures such as the Buddhist communities."Are Buddhists any more marginalised by the Church institution than Catholics by the Sangha, for example? And why mention Buddhists? What about Jews (and if ever there's a tragic history, this is one) or Muslims or Hindus? Or, hell, why not mention indigenous Australians who were colonised and missionised and totally screwed over and are very definitely marginalised in both Church and society (including in St Mary's itself). Nope, just the Buddhists.

I don't understand except perhaps when I recall that Terry has been running a Buddhist meditation group at St Mary's for some time. So maybe this is another attempt of Terry's to claim a marginal status. Terry's been marginalised just like myself and my sister and indigenous and poor folk, except he's been marginalised because of his Buddhism. But hang on, Terry's a Catholic priest, how can he be a Buddhist? Well, he teaches Buddhist meditation anyway. Well, it's his version of Buddhist meditation anyway, picked up, I gather, from a bit of reading and some Buddhist retreats. So it's Terry's pop version of Buddhism, which from what I've seen of some of Terry's other oratorical efforts is really a form of new age Buddhist lite.

If anything, what strikes me most is Terry's religious illiteracy. He's got no understanding of his own religious tradition (a testament to Catholic seminary formation perhaps) and he clearly does not understand Buddhism. Furthermore, given that he's set himself up as some sort of Dharma teacher he shows no real respect for Buddhism either but rips it off in typical colonial fashion. But even ersatz Buddhism is cool these days and no doubt Terry has lots of adoring fans, or so I've heard anyway. That's what you get when you augment your Catholic priestly authority with the aura of spiritual teacher.

But Terry marginalised? Uh uh, no way. As my friend, Mad Hatter, would say LOL wut.

UPDATE My flatmate, Mark Bahnisch, has written a superb piece on his Facebook page about St Mary's and the situation with the exiles and ongoing non-exile community to which he has returned (return from exile?). Even though it's on Facebook I believe it's publicly accessible and you don't need to be signed in to Facebook to read it. I strongly recommend you check it out.

St Mary's 4: The drama comes to a conclusion

I saw it on the ABC news on Friday night and yesterday's Courier Mail covers the story here. It appears an agreement has been reached by the St Mary's Council and the Brisbane Archdiocese. Peter Kennedy will give his last service at St Mary's on 19 April. Dean Ken Howell will assume responsibility from 20 April and will be given the keys at 8am on that date. The council itself will resign as at midnight of the 19th. A pdf of the agrement can be obtained here. (Since I first posted this piece the agreement has been taken down from the St Mary's website)

The agreement acknowledges that Peter Kennnedy has been dismissed and that the property belongs to the Archdiocese. I note that there is no mention of the other priest, Terry Fitzpatrick, in the agreement. My understanding is that he is not a priest of the Brisbane Archdiocese but still theoretically attached to Toowoomba. Presumably he's been on long term unpaid leave. I presume any role he has at St Mary's will come to an end. I don't imagine Ken Howell will want to continue Terry's 'hippy masses' as one person I know describes them. In my opinion they were neither hippy nor a mass but the person, who likes Peter Kennedy and wanted him to stay on, did not have the same feeling for Terry. I don't know if his Buddhist meditation group met at St Mary's. If it did it probably wont any longer as under the agreement "St Mary's shall be restored solely for Catholic worship and for such other complementary purposes that Dean Howell approves."

Under the agreement the Dean will have full access "to all the books and records of the parish" - I have heard all manner of allegations re the handling of the finances at St Mary's by Peter Kennedy. If half of what I've heard is true then it seems the parish was run as his own sinecure, more reminiscent of US tele-evangelists than anything else. And presumably Kennedy's bottled water business, Heavenly Drop, will no longer operate from the church.

Oddly, Micah Project is able to continue to operate from the church house until the end of June. Micah director, Karyn Walsh, was quoted in the ABC coverage on Friday night as saying that Micah would move from St Mary's at the end of June. I don't understand why that has to happen, unless, of course, the Archdiocese plans to appoint a new adminustrator who would once more live in the church house. It's important to note that St Mary's social justice reputation was based on two things: Micah Projects being based there and the Ozcare homeless men's hostel located next door to the church. Micah operates on a $5million budget and if every parish had something similar they would all be very much social justice parishes. The Ozcare hostel is very much a separate operation and while Ozcare came out of St Vincent de Paul it now seems to be a curious business welfare hybrid. (I was disturbed to hear reports that it is planning to relocate the hostel to Logan City and put its South Brisbane site to more commercial uses. If that's true it's absolutely outrageous and should be prevented if at all possible.)

As someone who used to attend St Mary's I find is very sad and all so unnecessary. What happened there was a case of priests being carried away with their own self-importance. Despite all the rhetoric of a new paradigm of a congregationally driven church, that was not true. It was no more than the reinscription of the old priestcraft model but under the sugar coated veneer of social justice concern and a progressive paradigm. But on what I've heard Peter Kennedy was not much different to George Pell in terms of controlling the show. And both Kennedy and Pell show the paucity of theological training for priests in the Australian Roman Catholic church. Terry Fitzpatrick's efforts are even more woeful. When I first went to St Mary's, Peter was doing a good job of transmitting some contemporary theological and biblical debates to the congregation there, surely part and parcel of what a priest should do. But as I would discover through my own studies, Peter got stuck and not only did not continue to follow the developments of these discourses, but himself eventually got sidetracked into such extraneous ideas as Eckhardt Tolle and other new age bourgeois thought. All so Benny Hinn, really. And in a sense St Mary's was turning into a kind of Catholic version of the wierd New Mystics and Latter rain phenomena that are so blighting US Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity today.

UPDATE On the ABC News tonight came the news that Peter Kennedy announcded today that he will continue his congregation outside of St Mary's church. He has accepted the offer of the Trades and Labor Council to use meetng space there for Sunday services. Kennedy calls it a community in exile. Effectively he's taking the Independent Catholic route. There really is no other option, although in his case I'd say it's more an Independent option as really there didn't seem to be much that was Catholic left in what Peter or Terry were doing. But going Independent has some implications. Peter has no other option but to seriously plan for the community's long-term survival which also includes a time beyond Peter. This fact also means that the community must look beyond Peter and towards the future. Whether it be a community in exile or an Independent community they have to decide what model they want and start instituting it. It can't just revolve around Peter, as it has been, or it will wither and die. Furthermore being part of the official church gave Peter an out when it came to implementing various possibilities such as women's ministry. He could always say that it was not possible as it would mean an open breach with the Church. The breach has happened now so there is no longer any cause to resist implementation. It all depends on what model of community they adopt - a more Protestant model or a more Catholic one. If the former there is nothing to prevent appointing women as ministers to lead the communion service. If the latter, then Peter can ordain women and men as deacons. He could even ordain them as priests given the extraordinary and emergency circumstances or he could seek assistance from other Independent Catholic denominations either to seek consecration as a bishop himself (or of someone else in the community) or to affiliate. There are two such denominations in Brisbane as well as the Liberal Catholic church. My advice to them would be to provide assistance , if asked, for the 'community in exile' to become self-sustaining rather than to affiliate with them. My concern is that Peter Kennedy has moved to the very edges of what it means to be Catholic and perhaps beyond. It might be better for this community in exile to remain its own entity and I suspect any such affiliation would not be a happy one. But, judging on the rhetoric so far of both Peter and Terry (will he likewise walk out and minister at the TLC?) they will probably not take any such Catholic route. My real concern is that this has already become a cult of Peter Kennedy and I note that on the ABC news report he couldn't resist once more comparing himself to Christ. And according to this report in the Brisbane Times there are members of the congregation who also compare him to Christ (taking too far the Roman position that the priest is alter Christus?). I also note from the report Peter's fantasy of buying the Cathedral (with his brother's money - he's a wealthy "director of a public company") so I suspect that any offers of supportive affiliation might lead to a takeover bid in return from these exiles.

Radio National's Encounter Programme on St Mary's

Last Sunday's Encounter programme was a special feature on the St Mary's dramas. In a sense it promised more than it delivered but then I'm not certain if Encounter is the right sort of programme to cover the current imbroglio. It's mostly a series of interviews with Archbishop Bathersby, Peter Kennedy and some of the congregants interwoven with some sound grabs from a recent Sunday service at St Mary's. So it gives more of an impressionistic account rather than an investigative one and, given that most of the interviewees are from St Mary's, with Bathersby the only speaker with an opposite stance, one could say that the programme is heavily weighted towards the current 'orthodoxy' at St Mary's.

Two things strike me about the programme. Firstly, the lack of any theological depth or even understanding by any of the speakers, and I include here the Archbishop. I personally think Bathersby is someone with a better heart than mind, his sermons really are endurance tests, at least the ones I've had to sit through. In his interview, Bathersby mostly goes over the history of the dispute: he does touch on some theological issues such as the Trinity, Eucharist and Mary but not in any specific way. The most specific he gets is about the power dynamics of the Roman Church:

I mean, it’s a structure that comes from the Pope through the bishops, through the priests and then to the members of the church, and the priest is the leader of the community, he’s the pastor, he’s the teacher of that community.

Particularly since the second Vatican council we are encouraged to bring laypeople
into the life of the church. Certainly laypeople didn’t have a great say within the life
of the church and many would say they still don’t have enough say within the life of
the church. But nevertheless the second Vatican council was on about reaching out to
the world, and because of that therefore laypeople came into it. But it was still a
structure in which the priest would consult the laypeople, would seek advice from the
laypeople, if possible would seek a consensus about decisions and then to follow
through on that decision.

What Bathersby is presenting is a sacralised version of the corporate hierarchy at a time when the corporate world is so much in disrepute. Besides this is his weakest point theologically. This historic model that he describes only came into in existence in the late medieval period and was heavily contested especially at the Reformation but did not come into full flower until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And this top-down model of authority in the Roman church is really a stultifying blight. It represents the imperial ambitions of the Papacy whereby the office is configured as a type of secular ruler or more recently as the ruthless CEO a la the former Telstra boss, Sol Trujillo, or even as a sacral form of the Leninist democratic centralism which dictators like Stalin and Mao used to ruthless advantage. Was the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union modelled on Vatican ambitions for the Church? Did Stalin maintain a tacit admiration for the Pope's apparat?

So speaking in this way Bathersby has essentially alienated people who don't know or understand the real issues at St Mary's and maybe Bathersby doesn't understand them himself. He won't go there to check it out lest his presence be seen as an endorsement but surely he could get copies of the weekly service sheet or even send a delegation to observe the Sunday service? Bathersby would have been on much stronger ground affirming eucharistic theology but then the danger is that there are radical implications of such theology that not only challenge what has been done at St Mary's but also challenge the Archbishop's on top down model of church. However I think he was spot on when he says:

Now you’ll even get people over there who very strongly don’t agree with what
Father Peter is doing. It’s been said to me he’s going to drag this whole show down
and it will go through the plughole. And they’re not happy about that, and they would
say, with all due respect to Father Peter, that the authority lies with him and you better believe it, they say to me. I think there is a very strong authoritarian aspect in Father Peter himself, but you talk to him and he says no, the authority is out there with the people.

I've received similar complaints and have been told stories about Kennedy coming down in quite a strong authoritarian way to ensure his position is unchallenged by anyone at St Mary's.

Turning to Peter Kennedy's interview, I can only say how sad it was to listen to it. I remember him giving really interesting sermons once many years ago but it seems that he has completely lost his way theologically. Not only that but doesn't even understand the old heresies. Peter seems nowadays to hold a mixture of Protestant Unitarian perspective whereby Jesus was simply a very inspired man, a kind of wandering guru or first century Palestinian hippie, or in a more sophisticated version a kind of Jewish Socrates, but also blended with a little New Age theosophical notions of Jesus as an avatar of the divine. So Peter makes an appeal to Arius:

If I’m going to be true to myself here, I would say that I would rather believe that Jesus was a human person rather than what the church teaches that Jesus is a divine person with a human and divine nature. I would tend rather to agree with Arius that Jesus was a human person.

But that's not what Arius taught at all. It would appear that Arius taught that Jesus was either a kind of subordinate divine figure but not part of the Godhead or possibly that he was some sort supreme angelic figure. But Arius never taught that Jesus was just a human person. Islam teaches that, as do Unitarians, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians and it's a strain in forms of liberal Protestantism. Many Protestant fundamentalists when getting over their fundamentalism adopt this sort of Jesusology, one example is the late Robert Funk who kicked off the Jesus Seminar. Funk wouldn't have bought the Jesus the avatar business but he certainly had a similar religious imperialism agenda, whereby the rationalist/hippie Jesus could be the focus for a new religiosity that would absorb all the world's religions - a kind of liberal counterpart to that good old-time evangelical missionary fervor.

Citing Arius, Peter Kennedy then calls on some vision of the 'pre-Constantinian Church.' It's an old Reformation trope - to get back to some pure original Christian experience. It's pretty common on many evangelical Christian sites, especially the Rapture-ready, to decry Constantine as the evil genius who set up the Catholic Church and destroyed Christianity by paganising it. While Constantine was responsible for the Roman Empire appropriating the Church, the Church was quite happy to be appropriated and was also busy, itself, appropriating the Roman Empire. Appropriation is a two way street as evidenced today by the push for same-sex marriage by LGBT people. And I should add that the Arians were just as keen on the Constantinian church too. Several 4th century Emperoros were Arians themselves and tried to exert imperial power to make Arianise the Church. The Arians themselves were great missionaries and Christianised many of the barbarians. Indeed the barbarians that detroyed the western Roman Empire , the Vandals, Goths etc, were themselves Arian Christians and these Arian churches were just as much Constantinian churches as the Roman Empire one. And if Peter Kennedy really wants to go back to the pre-Constantinian Church, he'd better be sure he keeps clear of Ignatius of Antioch, to cite just one example.

But even worse than the poor theology was the faux humility, masking an incredible arrogance and elitism. He says of his congregation

And we’ve always done that with our people at St Mary’s, they’re adults, for God’s sake, they’re professional people, they’re far more educated than most priests.

That's certainly true. St Mary's is very much a white upper middle class congregation, despite all the claims about its outreach to the homeless. In all my years there, I rarely saw anyone wander in from the St Vincents hostel next door (or indigenous people either for that matter). And while Kennedy's congregants might be more educated than most priests, those interviewed for the programme showed no more theological sophistication than Peter Kennedy himself. And I come back to Bathersby's point

It’s been said to me he’s going to drag this whole show down and it will go through the plughole. And they’re not happy about that, and they would say, with all due respect to Father Peter, that the authority lies with him and you better believe it, they say to me. I think there is a very strong authoritarian aspect in Father Peter himself, but you talk to him and he says no, the authority is out there with the people.

I have heard similar complaints. And while most might not complain, although they are more educated than most priests, they are still prepared to follow what Father says, in this case what Peter says. There is much more I could say about the content of the programme and the interview transcripts but time and space don't allow.

What I do want to conclude on is the incredible wasted opportunities by the makers of the Encounter special feature. Granted Encounter is not an investigative programme but it would have been a lot more interesting exercise if someone had tried to seek out those critical voices from St Mary's, the Archbishop refers too. Given Encounter is a religious programme they might also have tried to explore in greater depth the theological issues at play at St Mary's, especially those to do with the Eucharist. There is another glaring omission amongst the voices of St Mary's, namely the other priest, Terry Fitzpatrick. Given that Terry's status was one of the main issues raised in Bathersby's letter to St Mary's back in August, I'm amazed that no one thought to interview him. In the sound bites of St Mary's sunday service you can even hear him leading the congregation in prayer. So why was he not interviewed? Why the focus on Peter Kennedy? That's been the real problem with media coverage of the whole drama - it's been superficial and hasn't bothered to get into substantive issues at all. Instead it runs a simplistic people versus the hierarchy trope which draws on long traditions of sectarianism in this country whereby you have a moribund reactionary hierarchy versus plucky democratic congregation like the rest of us and who just want to be like the rest of us. And unfortunately the Roman hierarchy seem all too willing to live up to such expectations. And yet the same media organisations are very much moribund reactionary hierarchies themselves, including the ABC, as evidenced by its handling of the Religion Report last year.

I still plan a further post on the overall media coverage of St Mary's which will go into greater detail about some of the issues arising from Encounter's treatment of the story and how the rest of the media have similarly covered it; but not tonight.

Some More on St Mary's. Diptychs: A Missed Opportunity

My series on St Mary's seems to have generated a bit of interest, presumably because of the apparent novelty of a gay man like me who leans towards the "left" of the Church critiquing a congregation that not only situate themselves on the "progressive" side but aim at being inclusive of LGBT people. How shocking!

But because of this interest I keep getting bits of feedback and commentary both electronically and in daily life. So I've heard that, yes, all the publicity caused by the affair has definitely led to people, who would not normally do so, turning up at St Mary's on the assumption that it might be a church for them. I was told that a number of lesbian families have started attending there now. I don't know whether these women were Catholic or not before the affair erupted into the news. I have also heard some strange stories as to why the priests there wont do a lot of things in terms of vesting, the communion cup, Peter Kennedy's bottled water business that he operates through the church and so forth. The one common pattern in all these stories is the way so many decisions about practice seem to be based on the personal likes and dislikes of the priests, Peter and Terry, and not anything substantive even stemming from some form of 'progressive' theological position.

One story concerns why Terry won't wear the alb or anything else too clerical. The story is a little garbled both from my memory and the recounting. But it appears that Terry got some negative feedback at one time from some kids in the church saying how he reminded them of a rather bossy priest who was always telling them what to do. Terry stopped wearing the alb at all on that basis.

A more serious story I've been told concerns why the anaphora or eucharistic prayer was so seriously denatured in St Mary's. According to my informant, who's been attending St Mary's for some time on an occasional basis, the reason for altering, changing and then writing their own eucharistic prayers was the wish not to pray for the Pope at every Mass. This prayer in question comes after the consecration and thanksgiving/offering and, generally, in the Roman rite within the Roman communion, prays for the local bishop/archbishop, Pope, all the clergy and people. If what I have been told is true then it would appear that Archbishop Bathersby's concerns raised in his letter last August that St Mary's had withdrawn itself from communion with the Roman church have some basis to an extent that even the Archbishop himself didn't appreciate.

This prayer that the two priests wanted to elide is a form of what's known in the eastern churches as the diptychs. This prayer highlights the connectedness of the local congregation with the broader church. It's found in pretty much all the rites of Catholic Christianity east and west and always forms part of the greater eucharistic prayer. In the days before the great schisms of east and west in the first millenium, the days of the Catholic Ecumenical church of the five patriarchs (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria) it was the norm for the five patriarchs to pray for each other in the diptychs. For any of the patriarchs to omit mention of the others in the diptychs at the eucharist was a serious matter - it signified a rupture of communion. In the struggles between Alexandria and Constantinople for primacy, omitting one's rival/fellow primate in the diptychs was one tactic deployed on both sides to signify rupture and likewise in the latter first millennium in the struggles between Rome and Constantinople. Much more than formal excommunication, omission from the diptychs was the way one patriarchal see signalled a break with another.

I don't know how familiar the priests at St Mary's are with church and liturgical history (a lot of the time I think not much) but if it is true that they wanted to omit mention of the Pope in the eucharist then they have effectively severed communion with the Roman church and, indeed the Brisbane church of the Roman communion too (especially as they also omitted their Archbishop to boot). I don't think most Catholics (Roman or otherwise) really appeciate or understand the purpose of the diptychs in the eucharist. Consequently I don't think most of the St Mary's congregation appreciate just what has been done by these changes that along with so much else, seem to have been instigated by the priests.

This is possibly one of the saddest instances of St Mary's reformulated liturgy because there was a for more expansive and, indeed, most Catholic possiblity that St Mary's could have embraced instead. Instead of dropping the prayer altogether, it would have been better to expand it by remembering at least the other four Patriarchies of the older Ecumenical church. i.e Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria and possibly some other primatial sees as well e.g Moscow, Echmiadzin, Utrecht, Canterbury, Uppsala, and, for some more gendered nuance, the presiding bishop of the US Episcopalian church, and, for a local touch, the Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia. In this way St Mary's could be a pioneer on the road to full intercommunion across all the jurisdictions of the broader Catholic Church.

Such intercommunion won't occur until people get into the habit of praying for each other in the diptychs. It's likely the rupture between east and west was easier once both sides had omittted each other from their diptychs. Inclusion in the diptychs rather than dropping them altogether could have signalled catholicity and commitment to restoring the connections that have lapsed. In so doing it would be fulfilling one purpose of the eucharist, which is to create connection, community, communion. But instead, dumping the diptychs not only effectively severed St Mary's from a broader connection even with the Roman communion but also led to St Mary's effectively dumping the eucharist itself.

As I said I've been hearing all sorts of stories about St Mary's and the background to some of the odd things that it does. If you have a story to tell, let me know.

I still plan to write on the media and St Marys when time allows. There's been more in the papers today. But if you went a giggle check out this piece in the Spectator by the Dreadnought, John Heard. I'm not quite certain what his point is but it seems to be that the clampdown on St Mary's by Archbishop Bathesby represents some sort of resurgence of the Tridentine rite against 'liberal' liturgies. But I'm open to other suggestions. Heard is an oddly tragic figure but one who is so immured within his own contradictions and clearly without any self analysis and reflection that he can't see his own tragedy but sails on blithely regardless.

St Mary's 3

I had hoped by now to write on the media and St Mary's but I wanted to address another issue about what's been happening there, what I would term syncretism as neo-colonialism. For some time now St Mary's has had a regular Buddhist meditation group. I only found out about it last year.

Of course the obvious question arises why Buddhist meditation at a Christian church? It's not as if there aren't Christian traditions of meditation. Indeed there is a world wide movement for Christian meditation which comes out of the work of a Benedictine monk, John Main, and under the currrent drection of his student the Benedictine, Laurence Freeman. They have many groups in Brisbane including one at St Francis church in West End but nothing listed at St Mary's. Furthermore there are rich meditation traditions in both eastern and western Christianity, including the Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy. So I am curious as to why a Buddhist meditation group.

I'm not criticising Buddhist meditation. Of all religions, Buddhism is the most adaptable and can sit together with just about any other religion. I further appreciate how mutually enriching inter-faith dialogue of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu monastics has been. Long may it flourish! But I also know that there are varieties of Buddhism and of meditation practices. One of my friends and colleagues while doing my PhD was Patrick a practitioner and teacher of Vipassana or insight meditation. So I wonder what sort of Buddhist meditation is being taught at St Mary's?

Very recently I found out that it is the unofficial priest, Terry Fitzpatrick, who runs this group and presumably is the meditation teacher. Now I have a number of friends who are Buddhist practitioners. some of whom have entered the sangha. I think I have a grasp of what is going on in Buddhist meditation. Patrick especially taught me much about vipassana and I think I can understand its dynamics. Patrick learnt much of it in monasteries in southeast Asia. So I also know that there's a lot of work involved before someone can teach this stuff. I might have a grasp of what's going on but I would never set out to teach it although I could teach people about it which is a different thing altogether.

So what's happening at St Mary's. Is it a case of trendy neo-colonial appropriation as was the case with the supposed 'native american dance for peace' we were invited to join at the opening of the Good Friday liturgy back in 2003? If there were Native Americans in the congregation at the time I would have but St Mary's is one of the whitest congregations I've been in in Brisbane. So my friend and I walked out and went to the cathedral because that was clearly a case of Native American = 'spiritual' = cool, lets appropriate it. I wonder if the Buddhist meditation is more of the same. And I wonder what credentials, if any, Terry has to teach it or whether this is just another case of appropriating neo-colonial spiritual cool.

St Mary's 2

Actually, it was a good thing that I walked away from St Mary's. It enabled me to re-explore Catholicism and its varieties in my own town. As I mentioned in my previous post, I discovered that the cup was now a standard part of communion in Roman churches, something I would not have known had I remained cocooned at St Mary's. I noticed that most of Roman churches were doing what they could to give women a place in the liturgy. I noticed that in the Cathedral there was a peculiar shuffle on the communion queues as traditionalist Catholics swapped lines so as to be on one where they could take the communion host from the priest and not from a layperson - especially if they were a woman (mind you these traditionalists didn't seem to have the same scruples re receiving the cup from a lay man or woman). Women generally have a much more prominent role compared to the past. In fact in many parishes women, especially nuns, seem to have the main leadership roles due to the shortage of priests.

But most importantly I also explored non-Roman churches too. The Anglican church here in Brisbane is very liturgical, very Catholic, plus it has the advantage of women priests. I like much of the Anglican liturgy and I noticed too that at most Anglican Sunday eucharists I went to there were a lot of people around the altar, not necessarily priests. It seems that almost anyone and everyone who does anything in the liturgy wears vestments of some kind which interstingly did more to decentre the role of the priest than anything at St Mary's. It was brought home to me even more at Christmas time when I found local Anglican and Roman churches close by to where I lived with the Anglicans doing midnight mass at 11pm to finish at midnight while Romans started theirs at midnight. So I'd do both and was struck by the way in the Roman one the priest stood out as the only one vested person whereas the Anglicans had a plethora of vested people around the altar.

An atheist friend of mine who liked checking out different churches took me along to the local Liberal Catholic church. There too everyone around the altar was vested regardless of whether they were priests. The liturgy itself is very beautiful. One thing for sure, Bishop Charles Leadbetter might have been a theosophist but he understood liturgy and the eucharist. He drew on eastern liturgical traditions to revise the Roman rite in quite a remarkable way. I was particularly struck by the fact that every mass in the Liberal Catholic church includes full sacramental absolution at the start of the mass. I realised later that something similar is found in the Anglican liturgy but not at the start but after the liturgy of the word

I also discovered that there was an independent Catholic denomination in Brisbane based at the Community of the Way in Redcliffe and under a bishop based in Sydney. This denomination not only ordained women but was also inclusive of LGBT people. I had known about Independent Catholicism from the internet but it had been mostly an overseas phenomenon. The movement is fissiparous and so now the Redcliffe community is a separate denomination with its own bishop who leads a network of several communities in Australia. One of the priests I knew through the Redcliffe community has himself been consecrated a bishop in another denomination based in the US, the Reformed Catholic Church. He lives in Brisbane and is easier to get to than the community at Redcliffe. So I often celebrate mass with him.

Consequently I call myself a fringe Catholic. I don't restrict myself to the Roman communion. I couldn't, given the official positions on women and homosexuality. But I wont separate myself either. I was born and raised in the Roman church and I wont leave it to make a bunch of homophobes happy. I also believe it is essential for there to be intercommunion between the churches of Catholic Christianity. We all share in the one eucharist and the current pontiff when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger is on the record saying that wherever a valid eucharist is celebrated there is the one holy catholic and apostolic church so in a sense all these churches are united through the eucharist. Intercommunion recognises that fact and I think will do more to establish an eventual unity than all the theological discussions of a year of jubilees.

I say all this because I think that my experiences across the Catholic spectrum (and I have also made the occasional visit to Orthodox churches during this time) has helped to even more contextualise St Mary's and to provide scenarios for ways of being Catholic that are both inclusive/progressive and remain grounded in Catholic tradition. Indeed, I have come to the conclusion that the problem with many of the movements of Catholic reform is that they have taken as their model the Reformation itself. It's almost as if these movements acted on the principle that the Roman church must somehow catch up with the churches of the Reformation. I, on the other hand, think that the Reformation gave the wrong answers to the right questions on both sides of the divide, Catholic and Protestant (there was a Catholic Reformation as much as there was a Protestant one back then). So I'm not interested in turning the Roman church into a version of the Uniting church or a form of low church Jensenite Anglican evangelicalism. Nothing wrong with them, but they aren't Catholic and I don't subscribe to a form of bland syncretism that elides all differences in a merged blancmange. I respect and celebrate such differences and don't hold to the notion that they be done away with in what is always a form of imperialist takeover of one by the other.

So what could St Mary's have done? Well, lets be clear for a start - much of what's been cited in the media as innovative or shocking at St Mary's is not really so. Having Mass in the round is not an issue - many modern churches have been built putting the altar in the middle anyway. Getting rid of most of the pews is no big deal either. Most Orthodox churches don't have pews - people normally stand during the liturgy. Furthermore, none of the liturgical changes they've introduced naturally rely on any social justice theology. (and St Mary's does not have the Brisbane franchise on social justice either). Yes, they go out of their way to give women a key role in the liturgy. But so do most other Roman churches I've been to. Indeed given the shortage of priests locking women out of any sort of role is basically suicidal. St Mary's however does seem to go out of its way to cover up the scandal that women are currently denied ordination in the Roman church. While that may be laudable I think that really serves as a sugar coating to mask the bitter pill. It is a scandal and I don't think it should be mitigated. Covering up the scandal might actually work more to suppress the push for change. And, as I've said before covering up the scandal only serves to reinscribe the role of the priest more strongly. Instead, embrace the scandal and work to expose it so that it eventually will be removed. Here I think the Anglicans have set a good example by vesting everyone who does anything in the liturgy. At St Mary's the priests like to wear their stoles when they do their role. Why not have each person who does a reading or distribute communion or takes on the MC role at the start wear a stole. That way priesthood comes to be seen as a shared quality expressed in different roles. That could be made even more prominent by vesting each person at the start of their bit in the liturgy.

Again at St Mary's they have developed the practice where everyone says the eucharistic prayer along with the priest. My problem here is that it reinscribes the role of the priest while attempting to mask it. Interstingly, I understand the the current pontiff felt that Vatican 2 did not go far enough in promoting he laity as participants in the central core part of the Mass, the eucharistic prayer and that he wanted the priest's role made more interactive. Indeed, many eastern liturgies have a far more interactive eucharistic prayer than western and especially Roman ones. Laity/choir, priests, deacons all have their lines in the interactive drama of the eucharist. I remember many years ago suggesting to Peter Kennedy that it might be useful to check out eastern liturgies for models that could be explored in St Mary's. He didn't seem interested, perhaps because eastern churches weren't considered reformed? But by developing a more interactive eucharistic prayer not only would they have inscribed the role of the laity as having a celebratory role together with the priest but they would even be anticipating and providing a model for what il papa Benedict himself would like to see happen. And in terms of liturgical exploration why not draw on the variety of western rites such as the Ambrosian, Sarum, Gallican, Iberian and even Anglican/Anglo-Catholic, Lutheran/Evangelical Catholic and Liberal and Old Catholic, and even aspects of the Old Tridentine rite (I still like the last gospel John 1 as a way of rounding off the mass)? That way the comunity comes to develop a sense of the richness of its own traditions.

If St Mary's wanted to be even more radical then there are a couple more things I could suggest. Of course with these they put themselves at risk of putting themselves outside the Roman church because then the authority structures are challenged. Why not revive the minor orders? In Roman theology these aren't ordained roles but instead a person is 'installed'. Several minor orders are especially relevant - lector, acolyte, porter (or welcomer) and, from eastern tradition, possibly cantor. The people who perform these roles regularly could be ceremonially installed by the community that way highlighting once more the diversity of liturgical roles and again setting the priest's role in a broader context once more grounded in Catholic tradition.

If St Mary's wanted to be even more radical it could follow the Liberal and Independent Catholic practice of starting each mass with sacramental absolution. I personally think that's where it should be anyway - private confession is something that developed out of the monasteries and while can be important to have a confessor/spiritual guide it should not be a requirement for accessing absolution. This would put St Mary's in conflict with Roman authority which suppressed the general use of the 3rd rite of reconciliation for communal absolution back in the 90s. Like everyone else St Mary's toed the line to stay under the radar rather than push the envelope.

If you are going to be in conflict with Rome why not go the whole hog and actually start ordaining women. Not many people know this but a person can ordain up to their own level, which is why baptism does not require an ordained priest or deacon to adminster it. Indeed in the former Czechoslovakia, during the severe persecution in the communist period, the Catholic church took several extraordinary measures including authorising the ordination of priests by other priests. It was in this time too that the first women were ordained as priests in the Roman church, perhaps since the first millennium. So arguably the priests at St Mary's could ordain women to the priesthood. If they were uncertain about that they could certainly ordain them as deacons spearheading the restoration of the female diaconate in the Roman church ( the female diaconate is being restored officially in the Eastern Orthodox churches and has always continued, albeit in very diminished form, in the Oriental Orthodox churches). Of course, acting in this way would bring Roman authority down on them like a ton of bricks and the St Mary's community would have no option but to leave the Roman church. But at least they would have been both faithful to tradition and pushing the boundaries, challenging the entrenched power structures in a meaningful way. That would have been better than what has happened now where they kept below the radar so as to stay within the Roman church and its privileges while at the same time dissolving everything demonstrably Catholic such affiliation required. And when I talk about St Mary's here I refer to the priests and those who worked with them to actively bring about the currrent situation. As I said in my previoius post I think the majority of pepple at St Marys have been ill served, if not misled by those in charge there.

St Mary's 1

For the last few months people in Brisbane have been bemused, outraged, amused by the fracas at St Marys, the Catholic Parish of South Brisbane. St Mary's is an inner city parish, which over the last 20 years has etablished a reputation for being experimental, of pushing the envelope, of working out new ways of being Catholic and of being inclusive and welcoming for people who were alienated from the officla Roman church. St Mary's also provides the base where a range of social justice projects known as Project Micah operate from. Consequently St Mary's has become known as a social justice church, a place where spirituality and worship are informed by a commitment to social justice and social justice is grounded in the spiritual life of the community. St Mary's maverick reputation has meant it has been subject of regular complaints by conservatives, known as the Temple police, who for many years now have made of point of spying on Catholic parishes and reporting any breaches of conservative orthodoxy to Rome. Their biggest sucess was in getting the use of the 3rd rite of reconciliation effectively outlawed from use in Catholic churches in this country during the 90s. Before then it was commonly used at both Christmas and Easter. Last August, the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane, John Bathersby, wrote this letter to Peter Kennedy, the parish priest/administrator at St Mary's. Bathersby raisd concerns on several issues to do with faith, liturgy, governance and authority. A to-ing and fro-ing of communication culminated in the sacking of Peter Kennedy last month. The Catholic Dean of Brisbane, Ken Howell, was appointed to minister to St Mary's. However Peter Kennedy and the community would not accept the decision and the Archbishop has still not been able to enforce his decision. Peter Kennedy and his colleague, Terry Fitzpatrick, a priest not appointed or employed by the Archdiocese and whose status at St Mary's was one of the key issues raised in Bathersby's letter last August, remain at St Mary's pending the outcome of mediation.

The St Mary's story is quite a saga and one that raises several issues. These include authority and autonomy in the Roman church, inclusion/exclusion, questions of the boundaries by which community, identity and continuity are determined, the relationship of reconstruction/adaptation and tradition, as well as the questions of journalistic coverage, the understanding or, more pertinently, the failure of comprehension of he issues on the part of journalists in reporting on this saga. It's further complicated for me in that I used to attend St Mary's fairly regularly but by 2002 had effectively walked away from it as I believed that it had stopped performing any kind of eucharist that I could recognise as such. I found myself walking out of the 2003 Good Friday liturgy (which is not a eucharist) together with a friend of mine because of the appropriation of supposed rituals from a non-Australian indigenous culture, which we understood as yet another trendy new age indulgence in noble savage neo-colonialism. I have been to St Mary's twice since for a Sunday service and nothing I witnessed changed my position that at St Mary's the eucharist has been pretty much abandoned. Instead, there is a communion service which is barely recognisable as a Christian service let alone matching any Catholic (Roman, Greek, Assyrian, Ethiopian, Coptic, Independent, Liberal or Old Catholic/Orthodox) criteria of what the eucharist is. To further complicate matters, before the current dramas erupted last year I became privy to information about the two priests at St Mary's that left me wondering if St Mary's had not in fact become a Peter and Terry cult.

I won't go into that here. In this post I want to elaborate a little on my concerns about St Mary's and the eucharist and on the related question of how to be a radical catholic church working out of the heart of catholic tradition. Related to that is my experiences with Independent Catholicism. I might also touch on the role of the media in this saga. If time does not permit for this post then I will return to the question of media coverage in a later post. Warning, people who aren't Catholic might find some of the discussion rather arcane or obscure but hopefully you'll stick with it.

I'll start with the eucharist. In the Roman rite churches it's also known as the Mass, a term used by a number of Anglicans, Lutherans and by some Orthodox as well. It's fair to say that one of the defining hallmarks of Catholic Christianities is that these are sacramental and liturgical Christianities. Ritual is part and parcel of the spiritual life of these communities. Indeed ritual and sacrament could be said to be the mecahnisms of creating and maintianing the communities in space and time. When Roman Catholics and Orthodox and Anglicans talk about Tradition one of the key facets of what tradition is, the point of connection with the very earliest days of Christianity is the sacramental liturgy. And the key sacrament of that liturgy is the eucharist. The whole life of the church, indeed its very existence is grounded in the eucharist. Without the eucharist there is no church period. That's why Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics regard most Protestant churches as deficient because there is no eucharist in a form that is consonant with Catholic liturgical tradition. The centrality of eucharist for church is demonstrated in Greek theology which regards baptism as a rite of ordination rather than a sort of magic wash away original sin thing that is so prominent in western christianities. In that sense everyone who particpates in the eucharist does so as a celebrant with a specific role by virtue of their ordination in baptism. And what are the features that define a eucharist in Catholic theologies? Most crucially, the notion of the sacrificial Real Presence of Christ is fundamental. The eucharist is a rite of sacrifice celebrating the Real Presence of Christ in the community, sacramentally in bread and wine. As part of this celebration the eucharist is both an instantiation of the events of the Good Friday and Easter/Pascha, including the Last Supper and is the new age of the heavenly eschatological banquet made present in real time and space. Westerners have a very linear concept of time and find the time trancending nature of the eucharist hard to grasp. But the eucharist exists in an eternal now which collapses past present and future. Thus for Catholics the Second Coming of Christ happens again and again in each and every eucharist. The Rapture and associated end time speculations are irrelevant to Catholics (or should be) because of Christ's presence in the eucharist. The eucharist is a ritual of healing and reconciliation, personal, communal and cosmic. I'm more and more convinced that the origins of the eucharist lie in the ancient Day of Atonement rituals of the Jewish Temple. Atonement was the annual healing of the cosmos with the life energy of the Lord as symbolised by the blood of the sacrificed goat (Leviticus 16:15-19). Likewise the eucharist is a ritual of atonement deploying the sacramental body and blood of the Lord. Atonement restores community between heaven and earth. In the medieval church, the annual Easter communion marked the solemn restoration of community bonds.

What makes a eucharist a eucharist, then, is the celebration of the sacrificial Real Presence of Christ through the eschatological recollection/invocation of Last Supper, Cross and Resurrection and Kingdom of God. Robes are not necessary, bells and smells are not necessary, the very words of institution (this is my body/this is my blood) are not necessary - one of the oldest extant eucharistic liturgies, the Liturgy of Sts Addai and Mari of the Church of the East, does not contain the words of institution in its anaphora or eucharistic prayer. And finally men are not necessary - I support the full ordination of women to every priestly office of the Church.

I began attending St Mary's when taken there by a friend in the AIDS Council back in the late 80s. I used to enjoy it, especially the willingness to experiment. A child of Vatican 2, I've participated in all sorts of eucharistic celebrations, in churches, in homes, in the open air. They've been celebrated with current priests and ex priests. Once or twice they've been celebrated without priests at all. There have been times when I've celebrated the eucharist on my own with bread or crackers and a glass of wine. So I'm not one who is going to insist on inconsequential things like what robes the priest does or does not wear or anything like that. In the old days of the early 90s my main complaint at St Mary's was with a different priest who had the appalling habt of workshopping the Mass. He couldn't resist his running commentary on everything, putting himself front and centre. My friend and I would often leave and go for a coffee if we found he was the celebrant.

He himself left the priesthood in the mid-90s and moved on. Terry Fitzpatrick appeared in his place. I always assumed Terry was a priest of the archdiocese so it was a real surprise to learn last year befroe all this drama broke out that he, in fact, wasn't but came from Toowoomba instead. But it also seemed that Terry was more and more Peter's successor. Terry led the eucharists and Peter stayed in the ranks. I also noticed that the eucharistic prayers began to change. More and more it seemed that St Mary's had developed its own anaphora or eucharistic prayer. More and more these prayers began to abandon the standard characteristics of what made a eucharist a eucharist. In the end the only thing eucharistic about it the was the words of institution. But the prayer as a whole lacked any explicit reference to Christ let alone to anything of the sacrificial real presence. Without the words of institution it could have been used in any sort of religious setting Christian or non-Christian with no problem whatsoever. In other words it had been evacuated of any meaningful content whatsoever. Hence I walked. It's a bit like turning up for a vegan feast and constantly being presented with spare ribs. What was happening at St Mary's was a communion service of some sort but not a eucharist.

But they, or Terry, kept the words of institution like some magic incantation, abracadabra. It indicated to me that St Mary's did not understand their own tradition, a view also expressed to me not long ago by a non-Catholic person who attended St Mary's recently. The worst offenders are the priests themselves. But then ironically, everything at St Mary's keeps re-inscribing the role of the priest. I've never seen them give the cup at St Mary's. I was surprised to go to another Catholic church and find the cup given at Communion along with the host - it's pretty much the norm. But at St Mary's it seemed to have been reserved for the priest. When they celebrate the communion at St Mary's too, the priest dons a sort of stole so even though the whole congregation recites the prayers they make sure they have a priest there just to be sure. They'd be better off getting rid of the priests and of course there's no reason why not except then they'd definitely be crossing the line and stepping out of the Roman communion. And besides, the priests themselves wouldn't want that either. In this article by Andrew Fraser in the Australian, probably one of the few good pieces of reporting I've seen, Kennedy is quoted thus

Kennedy insists that while St Mary’s is about the community rather than him, his presence there is vital. “This community will die when I leave,” he says. “After that, they will either appoint a priest who’ll toe the line and deliver exactly the Mass they want, which will mean a lot of people will leave, or it will be absorbed into another parish.”

It's 20 years since I first started attending St Mary's and I confess to being shocked by this statement. Kennedy is in his 70s. I believe he must retire at 75. In fact I think Bathersby had been hoping that the situation would be resolved by retirement of both himself and Kennedy in the next 2-3 years.

Kennedy himself has done a disservice to the community there. In all my time at St Mary's I don't recall Terry's status being clarified. I wonder how many people assumed that Terry was part of the archdiocese and might even succeed Peter Kennedy. And if Peter Kennedy really thinks that the community depends on him that much ,what does that make of the pretence that the priests are just the same as everyone else. Clearly in his case they aren't. And so everything about dissolving the priest's liturgical function was just play-acting.

I also think Bathersby has handled the situation badly. In part it's the old Roman problem with authority. It's expected that when the word has been laid down everyone will submit. Appointing Dean Howell to St Mary's was a mistake although I appreciate the archdiocese is strapped for priests. But, while he might have a good singing voice, as Dean of the Cathedral Howell has an enforcer role to him whether or not that's the actual case.

In a later post I'll talk about some of the issues of how to do a radical Catholicism from the heart of tradition but I just wanted to make a brief observation re the silly kerfuffle over whether there was a statue of the Buddha in St Mary's church and its appropriateness. Not many people know that the Buddha is a Christian saint. He got sainted in the Orthodox Church as St Josaphat. You can read all about it here. One good reason why tradition can be so important - it's amazing what you can find there.

Update: Mark Bahnisch has some comments on this post and St Mary's situation over at LP