Ted Kennedy, Who is Worthy? The role of conscience in restoring hope to the church.
Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000. pp. 151. $27.95, paper.

One of the many stories in this small book tells of an exchange between the author and the Sydney Archdiocesan secretary in 1968. Kennedy had failed to insist that the Protestant partner in a forthcoming mixed marriage promise to raise any children from the marriage as Catholic. This was less an act of defiance than a response to the fact that the bridegroom was 75 and his new wife 67. But the Archdiocesan secretary, with the unmild manner of a snappy Pomeranian', insisted on a signature. When Kennedy relayed this, the Protestant partner responded with 'admirable courtesy and tolerance', assuring Kennedy that were he able to have a child he would be delighted to have it baptised a Catholic. The form remained unsigned. The secretary did not accept it. Never before, Kennedy comments, had he forged a signature.

St Mary's Church in South Brisbane is well known for pushing the boundaries of convention in theology and politics. On Tuesday, 22 August, the church filled with the curious, the converted and the faithful to celebrate the Brisbane launch of Ted Kennedy's book, Who is Worthy?

Ted sat among many Murri friends. The Watson family, singer Dermot Dorgan and the Brisbane Lesbian and Gay Pride Choir combined for an evening of storytelling song and celebration.

Tony Robertson, a self-styled holy irritant and host for the launch invited Ted to cut a cake baked for the occasion. The rousing chorus of For He's a Jolly Good Fellow was a community tribute to a man many admire as an advocate for the poor and a voice that challenges the structure of the church.

Speaking as a gay Catholic, Robertson says that Kennedy's book will stand as a classic of pastoral theology in Australia because it speaks out for two marginalised groups, gay-and-lesbian people and the Aboriginal community. The theology of the book is directed at the public positions of Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne: it focuses on the role of conscience in the future of the Church.

This completes a tour of the three east-coast capital cities by the 68 year-old parish priest of Redfern. His book was launched with great enthusiasm at his parish church on 16 April where speakers included Judge Bob Bellear and Sister Veronica Brady, and Peter Kearney was among the singers.

On 17 July, Kennedy's Melbourne launch was held at Saints Peter and Paul's Church in South Melbourne where Father Bob Maguire is parish priest. Lois Peeler welcomed people on behalf of the Bunurong and Woiworung people. Naomi Meyer, vice-president of a peak national Aboriginal medical body, praised his lifetime's work in solidarity with Aboriginal people while Dave McKenna, lawyer and member of the Rainbow Sash group, celebrated Kennedy's contribution to turning around an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Jan Coleman thanked him on behalf of parents of gay and lesbian children. In formally launching the book in Victoria, Professor Tony Coady combined learned comment and joking stories of his long friendship with Kennedy. Jadyn Lillyst sang They Took the Children Away and a series of powerful numbers. Brendan O'Dwyer represented the publishers, Pluto Press. Ted Kennedy's address was printed in Tain no. 8. Val Noone was master of ceremonies. Bob Maguire remarked that as he walked over to the church for the launch he noticed a rainbow over the building. Some 350 people attended the function which marks a new stage in developing alternative forums in the Melbourne Catholic Church.

On 21 July, at the Melbourne launch of his book about radical Christianity and the views of Archbishop George Pell, Who is Worthy?, Ted Kennedy, parish priest of Redfern in Sydney's inner city, gave the following address. From Tain Volume 8, September 2000.

I remember as a boy making a trip to Melbourne to visit my aunts, getting off the Cotham Road tram at Studley Park Road, Kew. At its lower end I would see what seemed even then an anachronism - an old cabman with his horse drawn Hansom Cab waiting for a fare to the Kew Asylum. To this teenage boy it was suggestive of a set from an Oscar Wilde play or a Conan Doyle scene, a reminder of Matthew Arnold's phrase "Poised between two worlds, one dead, the other waiting to be born."

Melbourne aunts

I would walk up the road to Merrion Place where the extraordinary woman I called Aunty Nance lived. She was the Contessa Nance Filippini. She had attended Sydney University with Frank Sheed and remained his close friend. She herself was no mean theologian and she was the conductor of St Patrick's Cathedral Boys' Choir.
By perusing a boy's hands, her expertly practised eye could tell the precise day on which his voice would break. It was then only twenty years since the death of the last of the Italian castrati, Alessandro Moreschi, leaving behind him a legacy of seventeen primitive gramophone discs. So he lived into the age of the gramophone, dying in 1922. He had once been the director of the Sistine Chapel Choir in the Vatican and their soloist. So two centuries of the Roman tradition of castrati was not long ended. The expressed need for the castration of little boys was to close off the possibility of allowing women sopranos being admitted to the liturgical choirs, very much the same sort of reason that Cardinal Ratzinger has for the closing of the entry of women into the ranks of the priesthood. The castrati were, by and large, young boys from the desperately poor classes. The phenomenon is a reminder of what male clerics have been prepared to do to keep women out.

At the other end of Studley Park Road was the Good Shepherd Convent which was like a walled city with hundreds of inhabitants. Three of my mother's sisters had entered there. All in all they gave a cumulative one hundred years in vowed service to this archdiocese, at Abbotsford and Oakleigh. Looking back through the eyes of experience, the Good Shepherd Convents represented a lot of love and dedication and self-sacrifice on the part of those nuns as well as the consistent standing for the dignity of women. There was also an institutional factor that tended to suppress the finer points of responsible living for all who were enclosed within the walls. As Brendan Lovett, an Irish Columban priest who works in the Philippines, once said, "Institutions exist to suppress meaning."

I mention my family's contribution to the archdiocese of Melbourne with some pride but also in a spirit of reconciliation acknowledging that the colonisation of Aborigines continues to occur through institutional power and has helped to push them down rather than act as a liberating factor. These pluses and minuses I would suggest have been the case in Naomi Mayer's life as also in Beverley's, her sister, and made them the extraordinary people of leadership in the Aboriginal community that they have turned out to be. [Naomi Myers (nee Briggs), chief executive officer of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service, spoke at the Melbourne launch of Ted's book.]

I have been hearing whispers of complaint coming, I think, from people who have not read my book, that I have no right to stick my nose into another state and another diocese. But the phenomenon of globalisation pays no heed to such attempts at containment. The national media has its impact on the whole of Australia. It refuses to be localised.

Celtic rupture

One of my major complaints about the Catholic Church in its Australian form is that it lacks imaginative expression. I believe a lot of this blandness has its roots in Ireland itself after the famine when Cardinal Paul Cullen took enormous control of the Celtic Church typified by his influence over the Synod of Thurles.

The Irish theologian and Galway parish priest, Leon 0 Morchain, has this to say about the rupture in the cultural tradition of Celtic piety and liturgical prayer: "What is truly unbelievable is that a liberated church should so turn its back on a wealth of tradition. What is difficult to understand is that this should happen in a country whose initial evangelisation was so complete, precisely because its early apostles had accepted the existing pagan culture and Christianised it. By a curious turn of events it has been alleged that our own Irish missionaries into African and Eastern cultures had forgotten the Patrician model and tried to Europeanise their converts in order to Christianise them. Were they also conditioned by the recent history of the church at home? An annoying aspect of the change of direction is that it was undoubtedly undertaken with the very best of motives. The figure of Paul Cullen looms large in the story of the change of direction. Just when a strong leader could have undone the gradual decline of 1829-1850, Paul Cullen was sent to Ireland from Rome. Truly Roman in thinking, he set out to reorganise the Irish Church on Roman lines as well as to correct some undoubted abuses. This he did mainly at the Synod of Thurles in 1850. With hindsight it is hard to credit some of the measures that were taken by that synod. In the new programme for reform housestations [home Masses] were to be done away with.

"The entire corpus of traditional prayer was, for whatever reason, pushed aside and a plethora of continental-type devotions recommended to the faithful. Sodalities, novenas, processions, benedictions, medals, confraternaties and other such societies, were presented to a people for whom they were insipid compared to the salty Celtic flavour of the religious sustenance that they had known. It was a bad century for Irish spirituality, one from which we have not yet recovered. True, the many famines took a severe toll on the members of God's people in Ireland, but there was an invisible famine which was gradually starving the Irish soul of what was its life... It was fortunate indeed for the West that McHale of Tuam did not succumb. He withstood the change at every stage: his own catechism, his disregard for many of the Thurles decrees in practice. So, for instance, the house-stations have survived, pre-dominantly in the West." (Enda McDonagh, Faith and the Hungry Grass: A Mayo Theology.)

The strangulation of Celtic prayer forms had a lot to do with the closing off of the Celtic language and that loss was reflected in the Church in Australia. It was an extraordinary piece of luck that the same John Mc Hale, "the lion of the West" and archbishop in Mayo, should have translated the Greek Illiad into Gaelic in the 1820s. It allowed Francis McNamara to extemporise what Les Murray has described as the first great poem written in the English language in Australia, The Convict's Tour of Hell: and it allowed a group of Irish convicts in New South Wales in 1839 to understand and memorise it. With later cultural absorption, that language was to dry up and be replaced with a Church language following the Roman pattern. The church we are in this evening received its title, Saints Peter and Paul's, at the end of the 1860s, a high water-mark of Roman centralism.

One of my own forebears, I am proud to say, was an Irish convict, sent to Australia for life in 1831. At least we are now indebted to the British Government for meticulous convict records. There is evidence that tattooed on his right arm was the Penal Cross, redolent with the ancient Celtic poetic expression of the God of the sun, moon and stars. The same Cornelius Wholohan is mentioned in a new book on the pioneer priest John Joseph Therry by Sydney priest John McSweeney.

In the Christian Celtic tradition, according to Esther De Waal, "they hailed the morning sun as they would a great person come back to their land, and the new moon 'the great lamp of grace', with joyous acclaim."
It has been no accident that our Australian Catholic school tradition has taken on board all the Catholic poets who have shown their hands as baptised Catholics, while neglecting those fine poets that do not share this tradition, e.g. John Shaw Neilson, Oodgeeroo Noonuccal, Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert. Too often the poem was used as a piece of apologetics rather than for its own sake. This is how Frank McCourt explains how his Catholic schooling ignored the non-Catholic Sean O'Casey, the playwright who could conjure up the sounds and sights and stench of Dublin poverty.

Judith Wright's insights

Judith Wright, whose death occurred this month, had a way of writing poetry that could reverse the meaningless platitudes and expose the smug male self-congratulation which pretended to be called God-language. I quote her in my book in the context of arrogant human claims pretending to fill the place of God. "I must say I cringe when I remember, well before the crisis of Humane Vitae, those old pious women, their rosary beads rattling against the confessional grille, desperately anguished over what were really the man-fabricated clerically controlled 'sins' like sewing on Sundays. Judith Wright talks about that in her poem, Eli, Eli:
Tim Bonyhady, an art historian, asserted (Sydney Morning Herald 15/7/00) that Judith Wright's poetry suffered in her distraction into activism. I found what he said disappointing, in that nowhere does he credit Judith herself with any opinion at all about the debate over the so-called tension between poetry and her impulse to fight social causes. It appears to me a tribute to the accuracy of her own self awareness that she could accept that her capacity to write poetry could not be divorced from her need to express shame and responsibility regarding Aborigines, and for the destruction of the environment. She saw herself as now "grown up". In her maturity she developed a real concern for Aborigines and what whites had done to their race. She saw her activism as the expression of the one poetic sensibility where the same sensual passion was at work and all the different levels of concern played the same tune. "It's communication and memorability that make a good poem. It's got to be memorable enough to keep it with you," she said.

There is in her early poems a marvellous innocence which soothes but also stuns the mind. So evocative of that high New England tableland where she was born, "South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country/ rises that tableland, high delicate outline,! Of bony slopes, wincing under the winter." (South of My Days). And "Grass is across the wagontracks/ and plough, strikes bone across the grass/ and vineyards cover all the slopes/ where the dead teams were used to pass." (Bullocky).

Keen eye for the land

A pivotal change occurred in her life when she realised that much of the landscape she had been celebrating was in fact tailored to a foreign shape. She, with a henceforth more keenly penetrative eye, learned to understand the blending of the land with its people and so to love and revere them both, "I've no wish to chisel things into new shapes.! The remnant of a mountain has its own meaning." (Rockface).

In South of My Days, Veronica Brady quotes her: "The language and culture I was brought up in had nothing to do with the land my relatives had taken. It was wholly imported, a second skin that never fitted, no matter how we pulled and dragged it over the landscape that we live in. Nor, of course, did we ourselves fit. That fact was growing more obvious as the land changed under our hands."

Look at the voluminous amount of effort Judith Wright put into reconciliation with Aboriginal people. In her letter to Kath Walker - Oodgeroo Noonuccal she wrote: "I am born of the conquerors/ you of the persecuted." In her For a Pastoral Family she called to her brothers for their awareness:
It is hard not to be impressed with the spirit that set her apart from so many Australian poets who have been spectacular in their neglect of white racism, or quite explicit in their own racist feelings. I am thinking of Henry Lawson and Henry Kendall and also the ugly poem of James Brunton Stephens To a Black Gin. Judith Wright's efforts to call white Australia to account in her book We Call for a Treaty, her impassioned warnings over the threat to the environment, her incredibly honest and painstaking classic family history, Cry for the Dead, where she acted as her own revisionist - all of these show the full flowering of a poet's soul. In his introduction to We Call for a Treaty, Charles Rowley said that "those who seem to threaten the social order from below become objects offear and envy". This has been the effect of Judith's life on the complacency of the average Australian.

However, Judith Wright will surely stand in history as sharing the grandeur of Mary Gilmore and Nugget Coombs. She was able, with no "theology" at all, to cherish the natural world with a tenderness and hopefulness that would reduce to fumbling ineptitude most Christian preachers. I am not suggesting that they should become poets themselves, just that they should be aware of the constitutive role of poetry in the formation of a social conscience. The same tap-root that transmits life to the summer blossom also provides the quiet sap for winter growth. "it takes emotional energy to write a poem", she said. When the vitality of youth became dim, she stopped writing poetry. But love persevered when passion faded. Hope for the land and for its people brilliantly survives. "A poetic sensibility is one that responds to the world with kindness and hope," she said.

"Every tree, " she once said, "has a right to exist." In one of her last poems she wrote, "I sit here now intent! on poetry's ancient vow to celebrate lovelong/ life's wholeness, spring's return, the flesh's tune/ . ..there's an essential music still, a moon! where no man's walked." She died two weeks after participating in the Reconciliation Walk in Canberra.

Speaking against bonds

Finally, to quote from the last page of my book: "Today I can offer the one lesson gained through the enduring years, the poet Keats' own: 'I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of the imagination' (Letter to Bailey, 22/11/1817).

"Dom Helder Camara was advised in his youth to mistrust imagination as it could compromise his priesthood: 'But,' he said, 'I am not afraid of imagination. Imagination is like a sister: a sister that can help us immensely. It helps me see things, to understand creation, to understand God.'

"Our Church will remain dysfunctional while ever it remains lop-sided. When the people of imagination take up their rightful voice, then it will be revealing fidelity to a true incarnational focus. A spirit of imagination and adventure will be required in the future for the paradigm shift to centre our theology on a wholesome environment for the whole of humanity. It will have entered into that deeper ecumenism calling us all to denounce as perfidious those fatal technologies poised to 'pull out the very soil from under the feet of humanity' (Ivan Illich).

"In the words of Ezra Pound:

What is modern? what is traditional?

Editor’s comments from Tain Volume 5, June 2000

A wise person will be both modern and traditional, as Terry Eagleton pointed out. While reevaluating the tradition, one can also insist on assessing the latest developments in the light of ancient wisdom. Those who have a strong knowledge of their traditions are equipped to analyse and assess the various developments of the modern world. We are not rootless, we have some points of reference.

Three contributions in this issue point towards some of those anchors, the article on the Tain, that on the Book of Kells, and the review of Ted Kennedy's book. While it is modern to give priority to making money and self-promotion, the words enshrined in the gospels suggest that it is traditional to be concerned with the common good, to take seriously suffering and need, to live in the shadow of death and hope of resurrection.

In supporting the Rainbow Sash movement for gay rights in the Church, and in calling for defence of aboriginal rights, Kennedy argues that his view is a traditional one. On these points, he challenges Archbishop George Pell's claim to be a traditionalist. Obviously more writing is needed to give adequate coverage to such matters but we are making a start.

Who Is Worthy?

Sydney priest challenges Archbishop George Pell

A key person in the web of Australian Irish links is Ted Kennedy, parish priest of St Vincent's, Redfern, in inner Sydney. Last month he published a red-hot book called Who is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in restoring Hope to the Church. This small but demanding book is an important contribution to the current rethinking and adaptation of Australian Irish values and practices.

Kennedy confides his passionate concerns over the treatment of gay people and the Aboriginal community by a key leader of the Australian Catholic Church, namely Archbishop George Pell. Speaking as a pastor of many years' experience and, at the same time, as a patient scholar of theology, he is angry about what he sees as a dangerous return to the closed mentality which he experienced in his youth.

Those who are concerned about the issues he raises, or with the debate about the future of Catholicism and Christianity, will find here food for thought. Indeed, what he has to say is of interest to all, believers and doubters, who are concerned about the vacuum in public discussions of morality.

Three distinctive features of Kennedy's response to Pell's policies deserve mention. The first is that he draws on the striking but neglected writings on conscience by John Henry Newman. The second is that, in the end, he bases his case on the radical teachings of Jesus Christ and a selection of radical theologians down the ages.

The third is his sample history of relations between the Catholic Church and Aborigines. Such features are relevant to our day and deserve wide discussion.

Some elements of Kennedy's views are simple while others are complex. For instance, you will see that he is not opposed to authority as such but rather to a particular use of it. Further, while he is critical of Vatican policies on sexual morality, he praises Papal initiatives in support of Aborigines. While Kennedy criticises Pell over his teachings on sexual morality he seems not to have noted that Pell has supported some of the positive Papal positions on Aboriginal issues. Pell, indeed, publicly opposed the racism of Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

Ironically, Kennedy's strong argument for the rights of conscience applies also to his opponent. The mystery of human freedom is such that by following his conscience the archbishop too contributes to the common good. However, as the archbishop himself implies, being sincere is not the same as being right.

Since all humans are fallible, public debate is needed when evaluating issues of public morality. Thus, each of us, also, is called to contribute to the continual enquiry and reasoning needed on issues such as homosexual rights, Aboriginal rights and the role of conscience. As we seek to forge a path forward, we are in Ted Kennedy's debt for sharing with us these heartfelt, challenging and relevant insights.

Ted Kennedy, Who is Worthy? The Role of Conscience in Restoring Hope to the Church, Sydney, Pluto Press, 2000. $20.

Summary

Stephen Crittenden speaks with Father Ted Kennedy - Catholic Priest at St Vincents Redfern, longtime agitator for aboriginal justice and author of 'Who is Worthy?'