Chapter 43 — Who Gets to Speak for Authority?

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How people enter religious authority, how hierarchy shapes responsibility, and what encounters with clergy, survivors, advocates and communities can reveal about power, empathy, institutional loyalty and the difficulty of confronting abuse from within a system.

Who Gets to Speak? ↑

Authority is one of those words that can hide what is actually happening.

A person speaks.

Another person listens.

But the two people may not be standing in anything like the same position.

One may carry a title.

A uniform.

A collar.

A degree.

A judicial office.

A diagnosis.

An institutional letterhead.

The other may carry only an experience.

Yet the person with the experience may know more about what happened than the person with the title.

That difference has interested me for much of my life.

Authority Is Not Knowledge ↑

Authority can be useful.

We cannot personally become experts in everything.

We rely upon people who have studied medicine.

Engineering.

Law.

History.

Psychology.

Science.

But authority and knowledge are not identical.

A person may possess authority because an institution appointed them.

They may possess knowledge because they studied something carefully.

Sometimes those things overlap.

Sometimes they do not.

Religious Authority Is Particularly Interesting ↑

Religious authority adds another layer.

The authority may be presented not merely as professional or administrative.

It may be described as sacred.

The priest is not simply another man.

The bishop is not simply another administrator.

The office may be understood as carrying spiritual authority.

For the believer, that can radically change the relationship.

Disagreement is no longer merely disagreement with another human being.

It may feel like disagreement with the Church.

With God.

With salvation.

With eternity.

That is an extraordinary amount of weight to place behind a human voice.

How Does a Man Become That Voice? ↑

I began asking a simple question.

How does somebody become the person who is permitted to speak with that kind of authority?

He begins as a child.

He grows inside a family.

A culture.

A school.

A religious community.

Perhaps somebody tells him that he has a vocation.

Perhaps he believes that himself.

Perhaps the priesthood offers purpose.

Education.

Status.

Community.

Certainty.

Escape.

Belonging.

Or a life he cannot yet fully understand.

Then the institution begins to form him.

The Institution Forms the Authority ↑

The Catholic Church does not leave the formation of clergy to chance.

Its own canon law says that the Church has the duty and the proper and exclusive right to form those designated for sacred ministry.

It provides for seminaries, formation programs, spiritual direction, discipline, doctrinal instruction and oversight by bishops and rectors.

The person who later speaks with institutional authority has therefore been shaped within a system which has its own theology, hierarchy, language, expectations and structures of obedience.

That does not make the person bad.

It does mean the formation matters.

Obedience Is Not a Small Detail ↑

Canon law also places clergy under obligations of reverence and obedience to the Pope and to their own ordinary.

That fact does not automatically tell us how any individual priest or bishop will behave.

But it tells us something about the structure within which authority is formed.

A system can teach compassion.

It can also teach loyalty.

It can teach service.

It can also teach obedience.

It can teach moral courage.

It can also make dissent difficult.

What the Royal Commission Found ↑

Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse examined those structures in unusual depth.

Its findings did not say that every priest was an abuser.

They did not say that every religious person was corrupt.

They did identify recurring institutional conditions which mattered.

Among them was clericalism.

The Commission described clericalism as involving the idealisation of the priesthood and, by extension, the Church.

It linked clericalism with entitlement, superiority, exclusion and abuse of power.

It found that the sacred status attached to priests could contribute to unregulated trust and power.

It also found that the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church created a culture of deferential obedience in which inadequate responses to child sexual abuse could go unchallenged.

Formation Matters ↑

The Commission also examined how priests and religious had historically been formed.

It concluded that past formation practices, particularly before the 1970s, were often inadequate.

It described training environments as segregated, regimented, monastic and clericalist, with strong emphasis on obedience and conformity.

The Commission considered that such environments could be detrimental to psychosexual maturity and could contribute to cognitive rigidity.

That finding interests me for reasons extending beyond sexual abuse.

If an institution trains people to carry extraordinary moral authority, then the way it teaches them to think about obedience, uncertainty, sexuality, dissent, evidence and institutional loyalty matters.

The Ladder Changes What Can Be Said ↑

I have sometimes wondered whether the further a person rises inside a hierarchical organisation, the harder it becomes to separate the interests of the institution from the meaning of the office.

That is an observation and a question.

It is not something I can simply declare true of every institution or every leader.

But the mechanism is worth examining.

Promotion often requires demonstrating that one can operate within the system.

A person who persistently rejects the assumptions of the institution may be less likely to rise within it.

A person who rises may therefore arrive at the top having spent years learning which conflicts can be survived, which loyalties are expected and which questions are dangerous.

That does not require conspiracy.

It can happen through ordinary organisational selection.

Who Selects the Leader? ↑

The Royal Commission made another observation which deserves attention.

It reported that some Catholic leadership candidates appeared to have been selected because of their adherence to doctrine and their commitment to defending and promoting the institutional Church rather than because of their capacity for leadership.

The result, the Commission said, was that some bishops were poorly equipped for the challenge of responding to child sexual abuse.

That is an extraordinary finding.

It raises a question much larger than religion.

What qualities does an institution reward in the people it allows to speak for it?

Institutional Loyalty Can Look Like Virtue ↑

Loyalty is usually described as a virtue.

Often it is.

People need colleagues who do not abandon them at the first difficulty.

Families require commitment.

Communities require trust.

But loyalty becomes dangerous when it changes the direction of moral attention.

When the first question becomes:

How do we protect the institution?

rather than:

Who has been harmed?

What happened?

What evidence exists?

How do we stop it happening again?

My Interest Was Never Only in Bad Priests ↑

For a long time public discussion of clergy abuse seemed to circle around the individual offender.

A bad priest.

A deviant priest.

A criminal priest.

Those people mattered.

But I became increasingly interested in the people around them.

Who knew?

Who suspected?

Who transferred somebody?

Who received the complaint?

Who doubted the child?

Who remained silent?

Who wanted to speak but believed they could not?

Who decided that reputation mattered more?

Who believed the institution was capable of investigating itself?

The individual crime was one layer.

Authority was another.

The Men I Met Were Not All the Same ↑

My own encounters with religious people complicated any simple picture.

I met people who defended institutions.

I met people who appeared unable to move beyond doctrine.

I met people who listened.

I met people who had themselves struggled with what their institutions had done.

I met survivors whose faith remained important to them.

I met others for whom institutional religion had become impossible.

That variety matters.

If I turn every person with a collar into the same character, I reproduce the kind of thinking I am criticising.

A Bishop I Knew ↑

One religious figure I came to know did not fit easily into any category.

His name was Gregory Karl Davis.

I spoke with Greg on a number of occasions.

He was a remarkable man.

That does not mean he was always an easy man.

He could be abrupt.

Gruff.

And at times I heard him speak down to people in ways I did not agree with.

I did not have to turn him into a saint in order to value the conversations I had with him.

That is another lesson authority has taught me.

A person can be interesting, difficult, compassionate, abrasive, knowledgeable and wrong in different combinations at different times.

Gregory Karl Davis ↑

The public record now allows me to say more confidently who Greg was.

He was the founding bishop of the Universal Orthodox Diocese of Georgia in the United States.

His religious world drew upon several Christian traditions rather than fitting comfortably within the conventional image I had grown up with.

Cannabis also formed an unusual part of his ministry, research and public advocacy.

I remember discussions around what I knew as kaneh-bosm, a Hebrew term which some writers have associated with cannabis in ancient anointing oil.

That identification is disputed.

I also remember Greg having a doctorate connected in some way with that area of study.

I have not yet recovered the exact title of the qualification, so I leave that detail open rather than making the memory more precise than the record presently allows.

The Conversation I Will Not Reproduce ↑

Some of my conversations with Greg moved into adverse childhood experience.

We spoke about ACE scores.

That discussion led him into matters which were extraordinarily personal.

Those were not conversations I understood as material for later publication.

They were given to me in confidence.

His death does not cancel that obligation.

I can say that those conversations changed some of the way I understood the person behind the office.

I do not need to disclose what he trusted me with in order to say that.

Confidentiality Is Not the Same as Secrecy ↑

That distinction became increasingly important throughout my survivor work.

I have criticised secrecy many times.

Institutional secrecy can conceal harm.

It can protect reputation.

It can keep information from victims, police, courts and the wider community.

Confidentiality can do something quite different.

It can create enough safety for a person to speak.

Over the years people told me things because they understood that I would not immediately turn their private experience into public material.

Some were survivors.

Some were advocates.

Some worked inside institutions.

Some carried religious authority themselves.

The obligation created by those conversations does not disappear because years pass.

It does not disappear because somebody dies.

And it does not disappear because I later decide to write a book.

Secrecy imposed by an institution can protect power.

Confidentiality freely entrusted by a person can protect the vulnerable.

From outside they may sometimes look similar.

Morally they can be almost opposites.

That means this book has another boundary.

I have to ask not only:

Can I prove this?

But also:

Was it mine to tell?

The Office and the Person Are Different Layers ↑

Greg reinforced something important for me.

A bishop is both a person and an office.

The person may possess empathy.

Curiosity.

Doubt.

Private knowledge.

A history of his own.

The office carries something else.

Doctrine.

Hierarchy.

Expectations.

Institutional memory.

Obligations.

Sometimes those layers sit comfortably together.

Sometimes they do not.

After Greg died, I encountered descriptions, associations and connections around him that I had either not known or not understood while he was alive.

That gives me several Gregorys to consider.

The man I actually spoke with.

The public record.

The religious identity surrounding him.

And the later stories other people told.

They are not automatically the same thing.

Kevin Dillon ↑

Another religious figure who complicated any simple view I might have had was Father Kevin Dillon.

Kevin stands out in my memory because he used the position he had inside the Church in a very different way.

I respected him.

I enjoyed our conversations.

And I watched him support people who had been harmed by clergy and religious institutions.

He founded Lifeboat Geelong to provide practical and pastoral support to survivors of church-related sexual abuse.

He also spoke publicly and critically about the way the Church had responded to victims.

That mattered to me.

Here was somebody whose religious office did not require him to pretend that the institution had behaved well.

He could remain a priest and still say that victims had been failed.

He could use access created by the institution to assist people damaged by that same institution.

I learned of his work assisting survivors through the period of the Royal Commission.

There were others who moved into survivor work as well.

Some came from inside religious institutions.

Some came from law.

Some from psychology.

Some simply came because somebody they loved had been harmed.

They remind me that institutions do not act with one mind.

People inside them can reproduce the institution.

They can also challenge it.

Knowing About Abuse Is Not the Same as Knowing What to Do ↑

I encountered religious people who appeared genuinely disturbed by the sexual abuse of children and women through unequal power.

But moral distress and institutional capacity are not the same thing.

A person can know that something is wrong and still be unable to imagine how to challenge the structure which gives them their own authority.

That may be one of the hardest conflicts inside a hierarchy.

The institution gives the person a voice.

Then the person discovers something which may require them to use that voice against the institution.

What Would It Cost to Speak? ↑

That question became increasingly important to me.

Not simply:

Why did you not speak?

But:

What would speaking have cost you?

Position?

Belonging?

Career?

Community?

Faith?

Friendships?

Housing?

Income?

Identity?

The answer does not excuse silence which allowed harm to continue.

But it may help explain why systems can reproduce silence even when some individuals inside them know that something is wrong.

Authority Outside the Institution ↑

Some of the people who taught me most about institutional abuse had no formal authority at all.

They had experience.

Memory.

Documents.

Persistence.

And sometimes a willingness to say things which institutions preferred not to hear.

That kind of authority is very different.

Nobody ordains it.

Nobody issues a certificate.

It is earned through engagement with reality.

Ken Found Me ↑

Ken Kosiorek entered my life differently.

He found me.

My memory is that it was within days of my publishing the video which included my eight minutes of democracy with then Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson.

I could not have known from that first contact how many other people Ken would eventually bring into my world.

On Trauma in Religion I wrote about him as Baja Turtle and as the “shunned left-handed molested Catholic.”

But those descriptions capture only one layer of him.

Ken was proactive.

International.

Argumentative when he thought argument was needed.

Funny.

Creative.

And extremely capable of making himself noticed.

He was also an accomplished welding artist and engineer.

The survivor was never the whole man.

Building Ways Around the Gatekeepers ↑

I put together several websites for Ken.

Much of that work eventually became associated with domains such as MolestedCatholics.com and MolestedCatholic.com.

At the time, the internet was a very different environment.

We were learning what a website, a mailing list, a search engine and a network of survivors could do when the institutions themselves controlled most of the recognised channels.

Some of the old code may still exist.

I remember using a spider or crawler originating in Germany which could crawl public web pages and collect email addresses.

That was a technique of its time.

Law, privacy expectations and anti-spam rules later changed substantially.

If I recover that code now, I would preserve it as an historical artifact, not as a tool to reactivate.

What interests me is what we were trying to solve.

We did not have institutional authority.

So we tried to create reach.

Reach Instead of Office ↑

Websites gave us reach.

Email gave us reach.

Videos gave us reach.

Survivor networks gave us reach.

T-shirts gave us reach.

Even a motorcycle could give Ken reach.

He took particular pleasure in riding his BMW slowly enough on the freeway for people to read what was written across his shirt.

I had my own experiences wearing the corresponding shirt in Toowoomba.

At one Carnival of Flowers parade I remember wearing it in front of a crowd of tens of thousands.

The exact year and crowd figure belong on the CHECK list before I publish them as precise facts.

But the memory of standing there in that shirt is not difficult to recover.

The Shirts ↑

Ken and I even turned advocacy into a kind of competition.

Around the period of a papal visit to Australia we developed competing T-shirt ideas.

Ken won.

His design used colours and language deliberately calculated to be seen.

The humour was black.

The subject was not.

Those shirts allowed two survivors with no formal office to carry a message into places where nobody had invited us to speak.

From One Survivor to a Network ↑

Ken's connections widened my world.

Through him, directly or indirectly, I encountered survivors, advocates, lawyers, clergy and researchers in the United States, Ireland and elsewhere.

Some of those relationships became public.

Others depended upon confidentiality.

That distinction matters when I return to them now.

Asher Lipner ↑

One of the people I came to know during that period was Asher Lipner.

He was a psychologist, an ordained rabbi and an outspoken voice about sexual abuse within Orthodox Jewish communities.

I first remember encountering him in the middle of conflict.

He was being attacked online.

I stepped in.

That led to many conversations.

There is a particular campaign from that period which I remember clearly enough to know that it matters, but not yet with enough recovered documentation to publish the accusations in detail.

It involved survivor stories, fundraising and my use of mass email to put the issue directly before a very large community.

My memory includes tens of thousands of emails.

Before I turn that memory into a factual account, I want the contemporary records beside me.

The important point for this chapter is simpler.

Again, people without recognised institutional authority were using new technology to force an issue into spaces from which it might otherwise have been excluded.

Ken in the United States ↑

Ken also spoke publicly in the United States.

I remember us speaking around the Ending Abuse show, although I need to recover the exact program title and location from the records.

Ken was a hit.

He was also controversial.

Those two things often travelled together with him.

The appearances brought him into contact with more survivors and widened the network again.

There were campaigns in San Diego.

There were mass-email interventions.

There was one episode involving Las Vegas which Ken enjoyed enormously.

I remember the substance of it.

I also remember that the details are serious enough that I should recover the emails before naming the organisation involved.

Kay Ebeling and Other Voices ↑

Ken introduced me to Kay Ebeling and to the City of Angels work in California.

Kay was extraordinarily frank.

She wrote as a survivor and as somebody reporting what she saw unfolding around the California investigations and litigation.

I remember conversations and stories from her which belong to this period.

Some details I remembered later have already shown me why the record matters.

Memory can preserve the shape of an encounter while attaching one detail to the wrong person.

That is not a reason to throw the memory away.

It is a reason to put the layers beside one another.

Lawyers, Researchers and People Who Crossed Borders ↑

The network also brought lawyers and researchers into view.

Ken was in contact with people around the Zalkin law firm in San Diego, which became prominent in litigation involving Catholic clergy abuse.

I became aware of Jeffrey Lena through the legal strategies surrounding the Holy See in the United States.

There were also researchers and church insiders whose names I am only now bringing back into focus.

Patrick Wall.

Thomas Doyle.

Richard Sipe.

I remember a small group writing about abuse and taking their findings directly towards the Vatican.

There are details around those contacts which I will not make precise until I have recovered the material.

This is exactly the sort of place where memory should open the file, rather than close the case.

Ken Was More Than the Campaign ↑

There is another part of Ken which I do not want the abuse story to erase.

He was an accomplished welder and metal artist.

I remember a substantial commission associated with the car collector Jay Leno.

There are photographs and public traces of Ken's welding work which I want to bring back into this chapter later.

That matters because survivors can become flattened by the subject which brought them into public view.

Ken had skills.

Work.

Art.

Machines.

Humour.

Friends.

Arguments.

The abuse mattered enormously.

It was not the totality of him.

Public Action and Private Trust ↑

That period contained a contradiction which I understand better now.

Some of what we were doing was deliberately public.

Websites.

Videos.

Emails.

Shirts.

Campaigns.

At the same time, many of the relationships behind that public activity depended upon private trust.

People spoke because they believed the conversation would remain where they placed it.

Some people's employment could be affected.

Some people's standing inside a religious community could be affected.

Some had families to protect.

Some had not told their own stories publicly.

Speaking with me did not automatically give me ownership of their story.

That remains true now.

What the Network Changed in Me ↑

By then I was actively arguing for a Royal Commission in Australia.

At the same time I was looking more deeply into my own history.

Those processes were not separate.

Listening to what had happened to other people changed the questions I was prepared to ask about what had happened to me.

Research opened memory.

Other people's courage made some questions possible.

My own memories made some of their questions feel less abstract.

The network did not give me one grand explanation.

It gave me more layers.

The Survivor Can Also Become an Authority ↑

There is another danger here.

A person who has been repeatedly silenced can understandably become attached to finally being heard.

The survivor can then acquire an audience.

Followers.

Status.

A platform.

The same question has to follow us.

What happens when we are wrong?

Can we be challenged?

Can we correct ourselves?

Can somebody with less status tell us that our explanation does not fit the evidence?

Survivorship cannot become another form of priesthood.

People I Need to Return To ↑

There are other people whose conversations belong somewhere in this story, but whose records I have not yet recovered sufficiently to write with the precision I want.

One woman Ken introduced me to needs particular care.

I will not use her real name here.

Through her, other people and other communities entered the story, including contacts connected with Inuit people.

If that material returns to the book, her identity should remain protected unless there is a very good reason to do otherwise.

There was Eagle Strong Voice.

There were people from Ireland.

There was Nora.

There were discussions around the laundries and around Irish inquiries.

There was material connected with the Ferns Report.

There was also Paul Hart, whom I came to call My Friend the Policeman.

His visits belong to another story I have never properly told.

There was Michael Mormina — MiMo — from an earlier part of this network.

There are also names in my records which presently return before the full context does.

James T.

Gary Hughes.

And a South Australian report which I remember being important enough to keep.

For now those names are markers telling me where to look.

I do not yet have enough of the record in front of me to say more responsibly.

I believe there may be transcripts or recordings of at least some of those conversations.

I want the record beside me before I attempt the full account.

Not every absence in a draft means the person was unimportant.

Sometimes it means I am waiting for the record.

Sometimes it means I am protecting a confidence.

And sometimes I still have to work out which of those it is.

The Institution Has Archives; the Survivor Has Fragments ↑

This imbalance has followed survivors for a long time.

Institutions keep personnel files.

Appointments.

Correspondence.

Minutes.

Legal advice.

Property records.

Insurance records.

Archives.

The survivor may have a memory.

A name.

A room.

A fragment of a letter.

A conversation remembered decades later.

Then the institution's record can be treated as inherently authoritative while the person's memory is treated as inherently suspect.

That asymmetry deserves examination.

Who Gets Believed? ↑

Authority influences credibility before anybody examines the evidence.

A bishop speaks.

A child speaks.

A psychiatrist speaks.

A patient speaks.

A police officer speaks.

A complainant speaks.

Even before the facts are tested, the titles change the room.

That may be unavoidable to some degree.

Expertise should matter.

Experience should matter.

Records should matter.

But status should not be allowed to decide truth before the evidence is heard.

Authority Can Alter the Person Standing Before It ↑

There is another complication.

The person in authority does not merely observe.

Their presence can change the behaviour of the person they are assessing.

A frightened child may become compliant in front of an adult.

A patient may become cautious in front of a psychiatrist.

A survivor may become confused under hostile questioning.

A witness may lose access to words while being pressed for certainty.

Then the authority may interpret the behaviour which their own presence helped produce.

Quiet becomes evasive.

Fear becomes instability.

Compliance becomes consent.

Anger becomes aggression.

Uncertainty becomes unreliability.

The Question Is Not Whether We Need Authority ↑

I do not think a society without authority is either possible or desirable.

Children need adults.

Patients need clinicians.

Courts need judges.

Organisations need people able to make decisions.

Complex societies require expertise.

The question is different.

What makes authority legitimate?

How is it checked?

How is it corrected?

What evidence can defeat it?

What happens to the person who challenges it?

Authority Must Remain Permeable ↑

The kind of authority I can trust is authority which remains permeable to reality.

It can hear something from below.

It can receive evidence from outside itself.

It can admit error.

It can distinguish criticism from betrayal.

It can recognise knowledge in somebody who does not possess the approved title.

It can say:

You know something I do not.

Show me.

The Person Behind the Title ↑

Every authority remains a human being.

That sounds obvious.

History suggests we forget it repeatedly.

The priest is human.

The bishop is human.

The doctor is human.

The psychiatrist is human.

The police officer is human.

The judge is human.

The scientist is human.

The survivor is human.

Every one of them can perceive something accurately.

Every one of them can misunderstand.

The title changes the consequences of the misunderstanding.

The Authority to Ask ↑

Perhaps that is the authority I have been trying to reclaim throughout this book.

Not the authority to command.

The authority to ask.

What happened?

How do you know?

Who checked?

What evidence would change your mind?

Who benefits if this explanation remains?

Who bears the cost if it is wrong?

Why is this person believed?

Why is that person not?

Those questions should not require ordination.

The Next Problem ↑

But there is one more layer.

Authority does not merely answer questions.

It changes the conditions under which questions are asked.

The judge changes the courtroom.

The doctor changes the consultation.

The psychiatrist changes the assessment.

The priest changes the confession.

The police officer changes the interview.

The observer becomes part of what is being observed.

And sometimes the behaviour created by that relationship is then used as evidence about the person being observed.

That is where I want to go next.