What I was supposed to say. What I said. What I should have said.

This year's Parliamentary Interfaith Breakfast was again sponsored by the Australian Catholic University, but was held in Sydney this year rather than Canberra. The plan, as I take it, is to take the event around each capital city in turn, wherever the ACU has a campus and thus the support staff to organise it.

NSW Premier Berekjilian at this year's event

Each year, faith leaders are invited to write a prayer from their tradition, and these are printed in the event program. Of these, a few are selected to be read at the end of the event as a kind of pluralist benediction. The meat of the event itself is not these prayers, nor even breakfast itself, but speeches from the Premier or PM, the Leader of the Opposition, and a special guest to what is essentially, a self-selected focus group. This year the focus group represented 120 faith traditions. Who knew there were that many?

So I wrote another prayer, but this year I was contacted by the event organiser:

"Wow, what a beautiful prayer! Would you care to read it at the event along with a few others?"

Ever susceptible to flattery, I accepted. Here's what I sent them, and what was published in the program.

A Unitarian Universalist Prayer for the 2018 Parliamentary Interfaith Breakfast

Spirit of Life and of Living, known by many names and beyond all naming, known in many ways and beyond all knowing:

May You, who illuminates our sacred land with the dawning of this morning, illuminate us.

May Your eternal and loving light guide the steps of our leaders, that they may envision and fashion a social order both peaceful and free.

The lamps we see by may be different--Catholic and Jew, Muslim and Buddhist, Christian and Humanist--but Your light is the same:

Yours is the light of universal compassion, shining as the sun, not on some of us, but on the sum of us;

Yours is the light of justice, a beacon of equality and justice for the lost and searching;

Yours is the light of life’s renewal, a dancing morning star of hope through forgiveness and reconciliation.

Oh You who illuminate the world, shine through our different lamps with the one pure light of Your grace.

This we pray in the name of all that we hold sacred, holy, right, good, and true. So may it be.

However, my host, the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, has repeatedly and publicly refused to abide by new mandatory reporting laws in the wake of the Royal Commission's findings into institutional child sexual abuse, I felt this was rather letting them off the hook a little, despite the atmosphere of cozy tolerance engendered by the event. There are some things that are intolerable, and the Catholic Church's insistence on exempting the seal of confession from civil law is intolerable.

I was scheduled to be the last prayer, following, in order: a Mormon, a Hindu, a Ba'hai, and a Catholic bishop.  This was too good an opportunity to miss, so I hastily re-wrote the prayer at the breakfast table, and this is what I in fact read, the change in boldface:

A Unitarian Universalist Prayer for the 2018 Parliamentary Interfaith Breakfast

Spirit of Life and of Living, known by many names and beyond all naming, known in many ways and beyond all knowing: 

May You, who illuminates our sacred land with the dawning of this morning, illuminate us.

May Your eternal and loving light guide the steps of our leaders, that they may envision and fashion a social order both peaceful and free.

The lamps we see by may be different--Catholic and Jew, Muslim and Buddhist, Christian and Humanist--but Your light is the same:

Yours is the light of universal compassion, shining as the sun, not on some of us, but on the sum of us;

Yours is the light of justice, a beacon of equality and justice for the lost and searching;

Yours is the searching and cleansing light of truth, oh shine this light into the dark recesses of the sealed sacrament of confession that has enabled the suffering of so many innocents, and into those frightened hearts that would shrink from transparency and accountability;

Yours is the light of life’s healing renewal, the dancing morning star of hope that rises in forgiveness and reconciliation.

Oh You who illuminate the world, shine through our different lamps with the one pure light of Your grace.

This we pray in the name of all that we hold sacred, holy, right, good, and true. So may it be.

I was pretty nervous, and even stumbled reading it in a couple places--not like me at all. Still, you could have heard a pin drop. 

Did it land? Would my hosts be resentful? Will I ever be invited back? I don't really know the answers to these questions. The only response I had was from a Catholic Bishop who shook my hand and said, "Nice prayer." Then sotto voce in my ear: "I bet you think you're pretty clever."

Ouch.

Well, it landed on him, I guess. 

We used to believe that God heard all prayers. And that sometimes his answer is 'no'. Well, he's God, so that's just tough. You can't always get what you want from the boss, no matter how earnestly you pray for it.

God's emissary, the Archbishop of Adelaide

But given that here in SA, our local Archbishop Greg O'Kelly has recently doubled down on refusing to subject the rite of confession to mandatory reporting, I am reminded that God's supposed emissaries are just as brutal in their total-lack-of-giving-a-damn about genuine human suffering they could easily help to ease. The heart-heartedness of clergy like the Archbishop (to say nothing of the foul mafia of church-protected paedophiles) has ruined forever the product called 'religion' as surely as cancer research has ruined the enjoyment of a good cigar.

Here's what I should have said, if I only had the guts:

If the Catholic Church in Australia were any other organisation housing and hiding a culture of child sexual abuse, it would have been wound up and its considerable assets sold off for compensation of the victims.

The Catholic church in Australia has proven itself to be nothing more than a long-standing criminal conspiracy.

The Catholic Church in Australia is morally bankrupt.

And if there is a hell, and it has special circles for those complicit in enabling its abuse of power in the suffering of innocents, like the ACU, I do hope to see you all roast for it, and may your eternal, piteous, shrill prayers and scalding tears for release be ignored by the almighty brute you claim to worship. 

Now that's what I'd call divine justice.

But as a UU Minister, and especially as President of ANZUUA, you come to know futility and irrelevance on a first name basis. Breaking the seal of confession seems to be a lost cause, an exercise in futility. Why stick your neck out and risk shaming your own tradition?

Because lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for, as someone said. 

Futility: a still life