Rage

Chrissie Foster, with Paul Kennedy: Hell On The Way To Heaven (Bantam 2010)

There can be no excuse for paedophilia. There can be no mitigating circumstances. I share the visceral disgust at serial paedophilia by priests, teachers, social workers and others who have had power and privileged access to children. It is important for me to state this clearly at the outset, and to add that I am far from being an admirer of aspects of Roman Catholicism in which this vile culture has thrived. I will come back to that...

Two of Chrissie and Anthony Foster’s three daughters, Emma and Katie, were repeatedly abused as little girls at their Catholic parish school in Melbourne. The abuser was the parish priest, Fr Kevin O’Donnell, who turned out to have been a lifelong paedophile. He had many child victims, some of whom were emboldened in later years to come forward. Nobody knows how many more were still too frightened or traumatised.

After some 13 years of anorexia, mental crisis, alcohol and drug abuse, after countless hours of counselling, psychotherapy, rehab treatment, Emma died of irretrievable despair and a medication overdose, in her 20s.

Katie too plunged eventually into alcoholism. Then she sustained serious brain damage after being hit by a drunken driver -- Katie had walked blindly out into the roadway. She is now terribly handicapped and in care.

The Foster family has indeed been to hell and back. As Emma deteriorated as a young teenager her parents realised the horrifying truth that she had been one of O’Donnell’s victims. They found out about Katie later. The book chronicles Chrissie, the mother’s deep, developing, ineradicable and abiding rage -- against O’Donnell, against the priesthood and the hierarchy, and I think also against herself. Chrissie, she relates in various ways, had failed her daughters because as their mother she had not kept them safe.

She embarks on years of hammering on the doors of the church hierarchy, researching, writing, forming protest groups -- all while carting her daughters to clinics and consultations and battling with psychologists, psychiatrists, GPs, care-givers. Anthony her husband is trying to keep them financially afloat, while grieving for his daughters and the destruction of their family life.

And indeed, they meet little but stonewalling, lies and hypocrisy at the hands of the Catholic hierarchy. Archbishop George Pell, at that time still in Melbourne, emerges as implacable and duplicitous. It is like a little waft of fresh air when occasionally they meet some official who understands and cares. The crime against these children over so many years is almost impossible to comprehend -- yet the church, committed to the way of Christ, seems totally concerned with damage limitation, avoidance of responsibility, protection of its priests, and refusing to engage in serious discussion with mere laity.

It reflects a culture which puzzles and horrifies me. While of course there have always been priests and bishops who were primarily pastors in the best sense, there have been too many who assumed that they had the power, would call the shots and the laity’s role was to listen and obey. Women especially must not emerge from their God-given subservient roles.

O’Donnell seems to have been a priest simply unable to cope with any child or adult with questions about the way things are done.

At the same time, we have Chrissie’s account of her upbringing as a loyal Catholic to whom the priest was the representative of God and His Church. You had to know how to genuflect and shut up.

Of course it’s changing now. And one of the many effects of change is this relentless exposure of the church’s wickedness, woundedness and sinful hypocrisy. Pell, now Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, must have been very glad at the huge diversion handed him by the canonisation of Mary MacKillop and all the excitement among the faithful. But the huge scandal in Australia, Ireland, USA, and many other places, from priestly paedophilia, remains. It was interesting that St Mary of the Cross MacKillop herself, in the 19th century, was excommunicated by the bishop for contumacy or something, right after she had presumed to report a priest for sexual abuse of children.

This book is informative, but it is mainly about Chrissie Foster’s rage. The church she loyally served turned out to be the destroyer of her motherhood and two of her children, she thinks... It is by no means clear that Emma’s or Katie’s problems may be laid at the feet of O’Donnell. It may be so. Chrissie simply assumes that is so. But plenty of young adults with anorexia, drug addiction, and eventually suicide, have not been abused in their childhood by anyone -- and plenty who have, have come to terms with it and have become balanced and happy people. It is a cruel world.