Recently recently attended a personal development session in New Zealand designed for diocesan priests, where the person leading the training said that in every relationship, the priest has power over everyone else.
Grayland thinks the analysis is a little limiting.
“I actually thought it was a little bit clericalist list as well.
“But apparently, even if I go to my dentist, and if the dentist fiddles inappropriately with me, I’m still to blame,” Grayland told Flashes of Insight.
The reason given is that I’m either the dentist’s parish priest and therefore I have that authority or I’m just a priest, and “as a priest, I trump a dentist,” he said.
Finding the training analysis a little bit bewildering he asked Tom O’Loughlin, James Alison and Sande Ramage about who they thought had the power while the priest was in the dentist’s chair.
This Flashes of Insight conversation looks at the sexual abuse crisis from the perspective of restorative justice.
It asks whether the experience for Church ministers is an opportunity for the theology of reconciliation to grow into change?
It considers whether restorative justice a matter of putting things back together as they were, as it were by plastering Humpty Dumpty back together? Or is it actually a way of going forward to something new?
Key issues in the discussion include
is whether ‘putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is actually desirable?’
how to go about restorative justice
how well do we do restorative justice when as ministers, we may not have the capacity to reconcile
how as ministers do ‘we do wrong’
ministers and a capacity for empathy
whether the theology of reconciliation is up to the task of facing restorative justice
The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the risk elements in the Church’s sexual abuse response, says Fr Hans Zollner SJ.
Zollner is the leading Rome based specialist in addressing the scourge of sex abuse in Catholic institutions.
With less money in circulation, he is urging civil and church societies not to blur their focus nor cut expenditure on safeguarding.
“I do hope that we in the church will go another way and really keep on investing in safeguarding because this is for the safety of those who need most protection”, he told Michael Kelly SJ.
“I think it is quite evident to many who are working in this field of safeguarding of minors and vulnerable adults that safeguarding has been relegated down the line because now the almost single focus is on health and the economy”, he said.
Zollner said that we all know that abuse is happening in all quarters of society.
Zollner said that unfortunately during the lockdown, society is seeing an increase in those reporting violent behaviours at home and that we can only presume that these behaviours are not only physical violence but sexual and physical violence too.
The very moment when these vulnerable people need more help the social systems can’t intervene and those who have been hurt have no place to go, he said.
Zollner told Michael Kelly that while the response varies from country to country, the most important thing the Church has learned is that in order to bring about justice it is important to listen to victims and that listening to victims helps change their attitude to life and helps people to heal.
“We cannot work in the area of safeguarding if you don’t really take seriously the concerns of victims”, Zollner said.
However, he says that these days every year the Catholic Church trains hundreds of thousands of people around the globe in safeguarding and that it is something that even in an economic downturn we really need to commit to seriously and persistently.
As Professor of Psychology at the Gregorian University in Rome Zollner is also a member of key Vatican committees and consults to national churches throughout the world.
Zollner has an unmatched body of experience and competence to say how the Church is handling the whole catastrophe of sexual abuse.
The Hans Zollner interview is the first in a new video series, “Flashes of Insight”, which features key personalities on issues that matter to Catholics.