Editorial
The Catholic Church has done magnificent work with Indigenous Australians for many years but that proud history brings the failures in one particular case in Sydney into sharp relief.
The Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS) partly operates out of a small former Redfern primary school, owned by the archdiocese of Sydney. The service has treated the city’s sickest and most disadvantaged and is recognised globally as a pioneer in Indigenous healthcare. Now, after 55 years, it wants to acquire the property.
However, the Herald’s Bevan Shields has revealed that the archdiocese has rejected repeated requests to transfer the Turner Street building.
Shields writes that owning the site would provide the medical service with a healthier balance sheet, certainty of tenure, operational autonomy and better capital funding. The building is in urgent need of renovation and has been identified as suitable for an expansion of mental health services.
For the church, it is not as though handing property over is unprecedented.
The Sisters of Mercy gave neighbouring property to the AMS in the 1970s, and although the archdiocese continues to shelter behind a canon law provision, stable patrimony, that aims at protecting assets to fund church work, an archbishop can decide to transfer ownership.
The church is notoriously secretive about, and protective of, its wealth. Church leaders have repeatedly publicly underestimated church wealth and resisted greater financial accountability.
Documents provided to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse show that the Sydney archdiocese valued its properties at historic cost, that is, the amount paid for properties when originally bought, often in the 1800s or early 1900s.
For more than 25 years AMS leaders have worked to seal an agreement on the Redfern property but have been rebuffed by the late cardinal George Pell and his successor as the archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher. The last was less than a year ago, when a 13,200-word document on owning the property was dismissed by a chancery official with a curt 300-word email.
Now, following Shields’ revelations, Australia’s most senior Indigenous leaders have issued an urgent moral plea to the archbishop, warning that the Catholic Church risks looking greedy and out of touch unless it steps in to help secure the future of a groundbreaking Redfern health service.
“Father of reconciliation” Patrick Dodson, academic Marcia Langton and former federal minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney rallied behind the AMS and its much-needed expansion. So, too, did federal cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek and prominent business figure Catherine Harris encourage the church to help.
But NSW’s two most senior Catholic political leaders – Premier Chris Minns and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – looked away and declined to express a view.
That powerful Catholics seem unwilling to challenge the archbishop, publicly at least, is testimony to Fisher’s apparent influence, and a fear of upsetting the faithful. However, lesser mortals may weep at the shadow that falls between good intentions and good works in the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.
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