BRISBANE CATHOLIC Priest Peter Kennedy was sacked by his Archbishop for contravening aspects of Catholic doctrine in February 2009.
This was a crisis that had been brewing for several years and was as much about Peter’s shedding of Church formalities as it was about his personal struggles with the relevance of a heavily doctrinal church.
Kennedy was accused of not wearing vestments at Mass, of allowing lay women to preach and of using alternative Eucharistic prayers. More concerning for the dogmatists is Kennedy’s worrying out loud that Jesus was a human being rather than a divine one.
Peter Kennedy has been strongly supported by his articulate congregation at St Mary’s Church in South Brisbane. Following Kennedy’s sacking they became St Mary’s-in-Exile and re-located to the Trades and Labour Council building also in South Brisbane.
Journalist Martin Flanagan has assembled a number of commentators who reflect on Kennedy’s personality, the people who worked with him, his social justice work with the disadvantaged in Brisbane, and the complexity of his doctrinal fight with Catholic hierarchy that went all the way to Rome.
Broadcaster Paul Collins is clear on what side of the line he stands -”the temple police seem to be the kind of people who psychologically can’t tolerate the fact that others may have different approaches to faith to them…”
The specific combatants were Kennedy and Archbishop Bathersby who was once Kennedy’s friend, and Collins now sees the clash of two pretty big egos. He puts the blame for the sacking on Bathersby who he sees as having ‘a very narrow view of the nature of ecclesiastical communion’.
Age journalist Martin Flanagan’s sensitive portrait is of Kennedy the lonely but determined and charismatic man.
That charisma was felt by Millie De Conceicao a Timorese migrant who was the community garden coordinator at
beliefs.
History professor Ross Fitzgerald goes further to suggest that, ‘Fr Kennedy is the victim of an institutionalised Church more concerned with papering over the cracks than in cleaning up its own act as a force for good in the world.’
Catholic nun, Veronica Brady takes up that theme and is worried that the Catholic Church is bureaucratic and follows the model of the old Roman Empire. “The Law seems more powerful than the Spirit and prophets are regarded with suspicion”, she says.
A differing point of view comes from theology professor Neil Ormerod who says that when Kennedy brings into question the divinity of Christ, he can’t then call his beliefs Catholic or Christian. He frowns on the schism caused by Kennedy and says that ‘notoriety is almost guaranteed to produce St Mary’s. A strong Catholic, Millie is deeply saddened by what has happened at St Mary’s. ‘It’s taken a lot of people’s home away’, she says conscious of the homeless people who came to rely on the community garden and the church grounds. ‘The church without Peter … is nothing’ she adds.
Like Millie there are a number of short contributions in the book by St Mary’s supporters and a wide range of thoughtful people who were drawn to this vibrant church community.
Some are concerned at being ‘out of communion with Rome’, still others are angry at conservative church vigilantes who secretly reported on Kennedy’s wayward interpretation of church doctrine. Kennedy is said to have ordered one vigilante out of St Mary’s for taking photos at an unorthodox Christening.
Michael Morewood, a former Catholic priest believes what has happened to Kennedy is symptomatic of the wider view of Christians who don’t see relevance in orthodox theology or Catholic sacramental practice. He says these people are not being unfaithful, they just want their religion to shift to more contemporary views of men,
women and their relationship to each other and their
popularity’. In the end it comes down to whether Kennedy’s parish can claim to have upheld central Christian and Catholic beliefs.
Australian songwriter Shane Howard has sung at St Mary’s. He attempts to analyse the dilemma that caused Kennedy’s sacking and like many essayists in this book, sees an inflexible Church unable to embrace a modern world.
He concludes with what the Church has perhaps forgotten, that they and Father Peter Kennedy are on the same side: “Fr Peter Kennedy and St Mary’s ‘crime’ was to lean toward a modestly different kind of Australian Catholicism. It’s not a foreign country. ‘All are welcomed, none are turned away’.
June 30th, 2010 at 12:32 pm
With the soaring cost of living today for many the struggle to continue has become an act of faith. In a lifetime of dealings with nuns, priests, and devout practicing catholics, I have witnessed some suffer severe jealousy when one of their own actually really are Christian and help those who have suffered tragedy, trauma, abandonment, homelessness, pauperisation and impoverishment, and to do good despite their predicament.
We are the vehicle for the expression of God and we get counted for our willingness to say yes to challenges that are truly good and asked of us because true faith in God is believing that what we need will come to us no matter how difficult the task and our goodness is measured by our intention to truly do good for the whole community, not whether we achieve.
It is antithetical for the catholic church to hold to harmful or unjust “ideologies” when diverse peoples come together and catholics should pray for any of their own who have tried to take any good away from Father Kennedy, and alike. The process of sainthood demonstrates the church has robbed some very good people of their spiritual virtues, like Mary McKillop, but the wise know G O D means Giving Out Daily to anyone needing help or asking for spiritual guidance.
Just imagine for an instant that you were God looking down on humanity, you would weep at people in black shiny shoes going about exerting their catholic corporate muscle, thwarting those who do good, simply to control who is allowed recognition for doing God’s work. Particularly, when at the same time it appears the vulgate conspire to commit a crime every time they condone the staining a child’s soul and enabled a priest to escape the criminal penalty for sexually assaulting children and vulnerable women, every time they allowed a nun to overwork, or beat a child, every time the catholic church took financial advantage of the old, impaired , or dying.
Its no secret the catholic church is mired by hypocrisy, has a proliferation of symbols, and interpretations of the commandments show wide ranges of variation, with little evidence of consensus. Indeed, each year our society commemorates those catholics, in the RSL, who were made to break the 6th commandment, or suffer gaol and social exclusion because one of the oldest canons of the catholic church is that civil legislation prevails where there is an inconsistency in church dogma.
The real question is why didn’t civil legislation prevail when the catholic church sacked Father Peter Kennedy and why are they allowed to continue to operate outside employment law and anti discimination legislation, and criminal codes? The church is a corporation getting tax benefits, the Vatican Bank is one of the richest banks, looks like it is using the confessional as its market research. Sadly, it seems that the catholic church appears to care more about what is going on in peoples bedrooms, and is more interested in acquiring land and money and less concerned about work ethics and people’s souls, than their charter purports.
The Catholic church doesn’t own a right over the ‘living saints attempting to heal the walking dead’ and it looks like those who supported the sacking of Father Kennedy are idolising an organisation, because it gives them power and status. They all fight over the same book , the Bible implies that God would be deaf to their prayers and if God meant an Archbishop, or a Pope to be the conscience for others, God wouldn’t have bothered giving everyone else one.
Land invading missionaries are no longer socially acceptable and Father Kennedy is a social cultural missionary in a church that desperately needs cognitive reform. For that to be referred to as a “rebellion”, in a world where memetics is the final frontier, would appear to be infantile.
The spiritual and emotional pain the catholic church has enabled some priests and nuns to inflict on ordinary people, is a result of an obsessive exclusive claim to God, where many of the hierarchy seem to have an over inflated sense of self as ‘holy’, without any real evidence of it but apparently much to contest it. Some people view this as a yet to be named mental condition.
As a recovering catholic, I and many others , would like the catholic church to recognise Father Kennedy’s lifetime of selfless service to all in his community, to acknowledge his cultural proficiency, and his upholding of anti discrimination laws, and to reinstate Father Kennedy to his former position, as a tribute to his willingness to counter the church’s conduct , which purportedly has stopped so many people from participating in Catholicism for generations.
July 7th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
where is Fr Peter kennedy now? is he still doing baptisms?