CANBERRA has been so long without a Catholic archbishop, and The Canberra Times so long without our former God correspondent Graham Downie (which has been much the same thing) that I have decided, reluctantly, to attempt to step into the void and be the national capital's chief spiritual adviser.
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But I do so reluctantly, I must confess, if only because I have become besieged by doubt. Not since Nineveh have I seen politicians so obviously flirting with obliteration. But where is our Jonah?
No one, of course, doubts the existence of God or the essential verities of the Catholic faith - for, as someone or other remarked, the very continuity of the Catholic Church is a proof of the existence of God, just as the idea of the apostolic succession is proof of God's sense of humour.
Only if both prevailed could such a collection of scallywags, sinners and scoundrels and other humans as the church has had - here and abroad - over the years have survived as an institution for as long as a day.
Its survival, in spite of the very poor example of its leaders, has been almost as miraculous as that of News Corporation, another organisation, along with the Chinese Communist Party, which claims infallibility, and the power of excommunication and canonisation.
It is surely not beyond coincidence that the representative upon earth of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, is so close to all three organisations, and has been made a papal knight, both as a means of demonstrating that the church, like News Corporation, has a latitudinarian view of toadying to earthly powers, selling quasi-religious favours, and buying one's way into heaven.
There's a school of thought that thinks every discovery of a drunken priest, a pregnant nun, or, heaven forfend, a bishop, cardinal or pope who has failed to give a good example of Catholic chastity represents some sort of epic defeat for the faith, and proof of the fundamental wickedness of the church.
We, in the good old days, were strongly inoculated against this idea. Clerics as much as - perhaps more than - other Christians were human, fallible and prone to sin, we were told. It was our duty to resist temptation, but frail and human as we were, we would sometimes fail. God in His everlasting mercy understood that; indeed Jesus, the son of God, spent rather more of his time consorting with sinners than he did with the pious, the prudes and the clergy.
It is generally well understood that Jesus would not be seen dead with most of the hierarchy of the church he helped create - though I imagine that he would have a special affection for the new Bishop of Rome, who is, as it were, up his street on humility matters.
Were he to engage the average cardinal in religious disputation, he would be handed over to the Holy Office and thence to the civil power for a good flogging. This proposition is accepted by a good many defenders of the church, who regret that many in positions of leadership neither teach nor encourage, nor set an example of their faith (or their charity) in action. Some also seem to regard the church as some sort of exclusive club to which they alone have the keys. The true position is that in the Christian church - the mystical body of Christ - there are no gradations of rank or outward merit, and that organisational apparatus and authority are - at most - necessary evils so as to promote the love of God and one's neighbour.
In much the same way, good Catholics were once taught that the figure of Christ they should imagine is of the beggar, the prisoner, the woman with leprosy, and the refugee. It was by our treatment of such people that we would all be judged, Jesus said.
In Matthew 25, when the figurative goats are being separated from the sheep, Jesus will say to the sheep, ''come ye blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you … For I was an hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in. Naked and ye clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison and ye came to me.''
The foolish might imagine that Labor and Liberals - and their leaders on refugee matters - are in the goat category. But Jesus was, of course, speaking in a different time, and perhaps had no idea of Australia's special problems. That's why we revere the guidance we get from Tony Abbott - even if it is different from that of Pope Francis, who explicitly does not think Australia faces special circumstances. Abbott, himself of Jesuit and seminary education, has pointed out that boat people are being very un-Christian by coming uninvited.
''I don't think it's a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door,'' he said. ''I think the people we accept should be coming the right way and not the wrong way … If you pay a people-smuggler, if you jump the queue, if you take yourself and your family on a leaky boat, that's doing the wrong thing, not the right thing, and we shouldn't encourage it.''
I assume that Kevin Rudd and some of his fellow Catholic ministers feel much the same. Why, otherwise, would they be preparing for these un-Christian intruders a life of everlasting fire and punishment on Manus Island?
Has a Catholic - a Christian - the right to politely disagree? In the manner say, of those schoolboys from the very Jesuit college Abbott attended?
Speaking for myself, I am not sure a Catholic can, in good conscience, give a vote, or even an effective preference, to either the Liberal Party or the Labor Party. It is possible that on refugees one is slightly more wicked than the other - opinions will differ about which - but the approach of both is fundamentally and morally wrong. One can disapprove of many a thing that a politician - an ordinary human being - does, but letting it go by is not usually actually sinful.
But one should not assist him or her in performing objective evil. Nor can one escape the moral dilemma by the sickening, lately invented, charade of pretending that the evil policy is not about repelling borders, but something devised for their own good because it saves them from drowning.
But perhaps it is not a time for plain speaking. I have, for example, yet to hear the cardinal on the subject. Perhaps my ear is in the wrong direction, for there are others who have spoken up.