The Vatican Mafia

I took to the streets on Tuesday - for the first time in over thirty years.

Those marching in the dark carrying candles with me were solidly middle-class, of all ages and both genders, and there wasn't a caftan or a set of dreadlocks to be seen. Twinsets and brollys were the go. We marched in total silence - no slogans.

We were marching to protest the removal of Bishop Bill Morris from the Toowoomba diocese. Technically, he wasn't removed, but asked to take early retirement.

Even my bride of thirty-four years was marching. She reminded me that the last time we took to the streets together was to protest the demolition of the Belle Vue Hotel by the Bjelke Petersen government in 1979. My wife became a Catholic when she married me. For the first time in my life, I feel embarrassed for being a Catholic. The church has betrayed her.

The activity was billed as a vigil, but everyone I spoke to regarded it as a protest march. There were about 500 people marching from the Bishop’s house to the Cathedral, and a further 500 at the Cathedral. On a wet and cold evening in Toowoomba, that’s a big turnout.

I’m a Catholic – but as an old mate from Longreach once said I’m not a fanatic.

But I take great exception to a few disgruntled “Catholics” who sneak about at the back of the church and make complaints to the Holy See. In the parishes these people are called the “Temple Police”.

They get their knickers in a knot if the wrong composition of altar candle wax is used, or if the priest allows a woman to deliver a homily. They get their jollies by dobbing the already overworked clergy in to the Pope for minor demeanours. They have a hotline to the Holy See, bypassing the local hierarchy.

I kid you not.

They are part of a number of organisations including CUF, most of which are the public face of a Mafia which has become very powerful since the advent of the current pope.

They operate in exactly the same way as the Mafia in that they observe strict secrecy and are embedded in parishes, but never really become part of parish life in any meaningful way. Nobody in the parishes knows who they are – they’re a kind of secret police.

They are collectively a bunch of very sad people.

The complaint against Bishop Bill Morris was that he issued a letter on 2006 canvassing the very real problem that the church has with a decline in the number of priests. This diocese extends west to the territory border and south to NSW. It’s one of the largest in the country. He suggested that the ordination of women and people already married should be considered. He didn’t advocate this – just put it out there as a discussion point. At least this is the reason put forward for his dismissal. Nobody has seen anything in print from the Vatican explaining what their objections to his activity.

Bill Morris was a great pastor. He didn’t wear a collar, and was only seen in his bishop’s regalia when it was absolutely necessary. He was more comfortable in shirtsleeves on the ground with his parishioners. This low-key approach may have been part of the church’s discomfort. He is the only bishop I have seen darken the door of a special school. He had a genuine concern for people with disabilities, as he did for all marginalised and powerless people.

The Ecclesiastical response to this phenomenon is symptomatic of an institutional malaise which is progressively destroying the Australian church.

The Catholic Church is vibrant and growing in countries where it supports progressive social justice causes. It is stagnant or in decline in countries where it aligns with the conservative clerical establishment.

If Cardinal George Pell has any courage and integrity he will intercede with the Vatican. Given Pell’s track record, I doubt we’ll see any action taken. Maybe Tim Fischer could be prevailed upon to intercede. As a Nasho and a Vietnam Vet he may recall this kind of church activity. There was no hierarchical interference back then. The army used to tell the church hierarchy to butt out.

There is enormous irony in the fact that the advocacy of the previous Pope (John-Paul II) was influential in the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, but his successor Benedict 16 has a regressive approach to liberation theology.

These Temple Police are spiritual cowards - they need to get a life. If they were Muslims they'd be advocating Sharia.

This action drives a wedge between my catholic faith and the institutional church. There are many angry and confused Catholics in this diocese.

So what to do?

I’ve been talking to a local solicitor, a very aggrieved Catholic, who is researching a class action. My notion is to play the Temple Police at their own game, and send a complaint to the Vatican.

This complaint will be bit different; it will have thousands of signatures – rather than one or two.

(The pics of the candlelight vigil were taken on my iPhone. Here is a report from the local rag. As pointed out above, there were also a further 500 at the church.)

Sent from my iPad

David Hack Meet

This meet was held yesterday, and I went along equipped with a marquee and chairs in the hope that members of the local MX5 chapter would turn up. They didn't, which probably had something to do with the fact that I didn't let them know.

This meant that I had plenty of time for photography, although I'd left my camera at home and had to make do with my iPhone. The quality of shots is therefore somewhat limited.

I concentrated on the weird and quirky.

This Renault 750 is indeed "not 750". It is in fact a 1600, with a worked Gordini motor stuffed into the rear end. It must be interesting on a wet road. I've been fascinated by these things since being whisked through Saigon traffic in a 750 taxi in 1970.

The exhaust plumbing is amazing.

This 1952 Cadilac was impressive. It must weigh about two metric tonnes, and provides an example of automotive opulence that we will never see again. It had tinted glass and a telescopic radio antenna, both ground-breaking in the day.

This beautiful Morris 6 was parked behind my car, and I had a yarn to its owner. He told me that it was assembled in Brisbane by a company called Charles Hope that made refrigerators. I remember my parents owning a Charles Hope kero fridge when I was a kid in the fifties. This particular car participated in a couple of royal tours back in the thirties although it was black back then..

There were a number of military vehicles on display. This is a 6X6 Studebaker. Again, I remember seeing them in Saigon.

As a twelve year old I used to muck about on my uncle's cane farm west of Mackay. He had one of these, an Armstrong-Siddeley ute which he used an unregistered farm runabout. He was mad enough to let me drive it, and I learnt a lot about basic car management behind the wheel of this thing.

 I never put a mark on it - lucky I guess.

There were the regulation MGBs. This is a very tidy example.

A straight eight Packard was displayed - purple in colour.

These Volkswagen Country Buggies were sold in 1968. They were a very useful vehicle, but Volkswagen Australia was in financial trouble at the time and production was curtailed.

There was an Antonov 2 giving joy-rides for $80 a throw. It was flying all day. These are a mad Russian aircraft that have been in production since 1947, although this one was made in Poland. They need about 200metres to take off.
The photo is pretty dreadful (the iPhone doesn't zoom well), so here is a link to a video.

Update -
Just for Cav - some Fords.
This one is fairly typical of the marque....

There  were lots of GT40s... Apparently they're Fords.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Getting There

It’s half the fun – according to the cliché. That’s especially true if you own an MX5. I’m always looking for an excuse to drive it long distances.

I had the option of flying, but decided to drive. These things are meant to be driven, after all, and I may not get the chance again any time soon.

The route took me down the New England, stopping overnight at Tamworth.

This time of the year, the countryside is showing its autumn colour.

There were wallopers everywhere. I was breathalysed twice, once in Queensland, and once in NSW.

I really don’t mind this at all. It’s worth the slight inconvenience to keep the drunks off the road.

I bought a couple of bottles of wine on the Granite Belt.

 There was a relatively new Vietnam War memorial near Singleton, the location of my old recruit training battalion.

And lots more colour in the country all the way to Gosford.

Reflections on Anzac Day

I’m home again after travelling to Sydney and back to march with a couple of blokes from my rifle platoon.

The fact that I hadn't seen one of them since June 1970 made it an interesting experience. They were good men then. The years have leavened them, and they're better men now. I also met other blokes, not from my section, but from my platoon and company.

They have dealt with their experiences in different ways. For some it has been a struggle.  One has done it especially tough, with the suicide of his beautiful daughter. He wasn't in Sydney, but I took a phone call from him on Anzac Day, which was an amazing coincidence in its timing, or maybe he simply knew we were together again.

Hearing this and a few other stories made me regret not staying connected - maybe I/we could have helped at the critical time. I've done enough counselling to learn that timing is everything in times of stress. Sometimes just being there is enough.

For me, the fact that all the men that I have reconnected with have had to deal with PTSD in one form or another is disturbing. I'm the only one as far as I know who is not TPI.

Enough of the darker stuff -our mini-reunion was a hoot -

1.30am - Reveille to catch the train into Sydney to join the Dawn Service at 4.30am. It poured - we had $3 transparent plastic ponchos that had been sensibly bought by one of the wives. It was a good thought, but putting them on in the semi-darkness was a drama. A voice from behind was heard - "look at these silly old buggers - no wonder they lost the war". Unkind, perhaps, but after watching us trying to get into them, not unexpected.

6.30am - gunfire breakfast. I exchanged a few words with Ray Martin - although I'm not entirely sure what he was doing there.

8.30am - Battalion commemorative church service at the little church in The Rocks. This was a solemn and uplifting occasion. As a Catholic, I was surprise at how similar this ceremony was to a Mass. Here I met that great soldier, Sandy Pearson, who when he found that I came from Toowoomba, told me a story of a digger who was swept to his death trying to push a jeep from a creek near Cabarlah in 1945. Apparently there were flash floods in the Toowoomba area back then similar to what happened on 10th January this year. The sad part about this story was that this digger was a survivor of the Sandakan death march. I hope I'm as spry as Sandy Pearson when (and if) I get to 92, and that I can recall as vividly as he still can, events from the past - a great man and an outstanding soldier.

9.30am - time for a break in a room in the Intercontinental. There are great views of the harbor from here.

10.30am - the march. A new banner had been made for the occasion, but it lasted about ten minutes. The two blokes carrying it had their work cut out from here, as they had to support the thing at shoulder level for the rest of the march. The Sydney march is on a much larger scale than anything else I've been part of before, and it has become unwieldy with much starting and stopping.

12.30pm - lunch at the Castlereagh club. Many lies told here for the remainder of the afternoon. I learned a lot about what happened and why it happened, especially after we split up all those years ago.

4.00pm - a suggestion that we go to the footy. This was knocked back on the basis that we had been on the go since 1.30am, and were probably not in the best shape for an NRL game, even as spectators. Besides, there were no Queensland teams playing.

5.00pm - we caught the fast train to back to Gosford where I was staying.

7.30pm - home again. It had been 18 hours since we set out. We'd walked (and marched) everywhere. Someone said that we hadn't walked so far in one day since patrolling in 1970. I reckon that's true.

Next day I had to drive back to Toowoomba to head for work which involved leaving there at 6am to drive to Roma. No wonder I feel buggered today.

Still - no regrets.

I should have done this 40 years ago. I missed the Welcome Home march in 1987 but this must be what it felt like.

This pic, which I've posted before, shows two five platoon blokes as they looked in 1969.

This is now – still looking good…only the hair is different.

Sent from my iPad

Anzac Day

I'm taking a break from blogging until after Anzac Day.

For the next week or so, I will have better things to do as I'm travelling down to the biggest smoke to catch up on some old mates from my section (pictured above). I doubt they look like that now.

In the meantime, below is a poem posted as an Anzac Day tribute.

Up the red rooster!

Viet 1

I remember an Ektachrome daylight

In the Binh Ba rubber.

She sat, ochred feet resting.

That old, old woman who showed me

How to wear a headband.

She was unafraid of our scout

And his outlandish burst of Armalite;

It was more important to be comfortable.

She ignored us, our costly armour

(All mud-green high-tech camouflaged nonsense),

Smiled and smoked a grudged cigarette,

Turned away and thought on soldiers and children.

Her eyes were as wise as Lao Tzu

And she quietly waited for our departure.

04.07.70

Bloody Cyclists

I'm prompted to post this after looking back over some of BOABs posts.

Some of the roadside signage appearing in his photos is bizarre, to say the least. I guess there are rich pickings when it comes to wierd signs in the urban environment where he rides.

There are big mobs of signs in Sydney, so by the law of averages some of them will be absurd. Which reminds me - does anyone know who's got the pub in Sydney now?

There's no excuse for the above example.

It's located on the Northern approach to Cunnamulla, about 20 kms out. I've been driving this road regularly since 2005, and I've seen (or at least I remember seeing) one cyclist in all that time on this road. He was slightly demented Japanese gentleman who was inspired by riding thousands of kilometers through the outback.

I think he was attracted by the contrast with his homeland. There's not much outback in Japan.

But there it is - sliently warning you to keep your eyes peeled for errant Mulga Bills.

Now if the sign had a picture of a black wallaby on it, I could understand its function. I've never hit a cyclist out there, but am averaging one roo or wallaby strike each year.

If you click on the image, you'll see a dead roo up the road a bit, and a road train in the distance. Both are slightly more of a problem than errant cyclists.

The Warrior Caste

The recent controversy at ADFA has revealed some interesting perspectives held by some inside our military, and a bunch of diehard hangers-on.

We've listened to a range of opinions, which when stripped bare of bluster and posturing, highlight a world view which to me, is somewhere on the weird side of bizarre.

It's a view expounded by people (almost all male) who have spent most or all of their lives inside the military establishment, or working in support of it.

Put simply, it goes like this - Some serving members of the ADF see themselves as a separate caste. They believe that the membership of this caste puts them outside what is considered reasonable when it comes to matters of gender or race. They also seem to believe that nobody from outside the ADF has any right to make judgements of their conduct.

On a personal level, I first became aware of this worldview when called up in 1969. The behaviour of many of the NCOs at our recruit training battalion at Singleton could only be described as bizarre. If the carry-on of some of these instructors daily in plain view on the parade ground at 3RTB had been observed on a public street somewhere, men with strait jackets would have appeared in short order.

A few of these people were borderline psychopaths. A few were also as thick as two short planks, and there were one or two who were a combination of both.

There were also some excellent instructors, generally blokes who'd seen active service in Vietnam, and didn't need to make fools of themselves to establish respect. The quality of both the instruction and the instructors improved markedly once we progressed to Corps training.

Nevertheless, it was from time to time necessary to suspend rational judgment of some of these individuals and to understand that their world view was an aberration. The problem was that whilst as recent civvies, we could see this; many of them simply could not. I guess this explains the long periods without leave that apply early in recruit training. Contact with the real world during this critical conditioning process might burst the bubble.

It's apparent that there are plenty of individuals in the year 2011 who still inhabit this fantasy world - a world in which an entirely different standard of behaviour, especially as applied to issues of gender and race, apply.

Some examples of the mindset are revealed in comments such as "if I was in a trench next to a female I'd want to have sex with her" and "the guys would be perving on the women instead of concentrating on the task at hand". The implication being that a different set of standards apply that would make the phenomenon of men and women successfully working together as they do in Civvie Street impossible in the ADF.

Mining companies and oil exploration outfits seem to get by with mixed gender employees deployed in some rough and ready situations. Some schools of my experience are tough and elemental environments, but they don't seem routinely to descend into hotbeds of sexual depravity.

All of the above, together with my short but real exposure to the soldier's life, confirm two notions.

One is that our membership of our military should always be leavened with people who are essentially civilians when it comes to their life experience. This can be accomplished by a regenerated reserve, or some form of compulsory national service. An observation I heard repeated by many regular soldiers at the time was that the average I.Q. of the ADF went up several points with the advent of National Service. Nations with a successful and respected military such as Israel know how to make this work.

The other is that civilians make the best soldiers. I base this opinion on history. Arguably our greatest soldier, Monash, brought his civilian values to the war he fought, something that brought him into conflict with the British military establishment, who were members of an officer class who regarded their working class soldiers as expendable.

War, is after all, the ultimate absurdity. This does not however justify the belief that only those who take it seriously are capable of fighting. Civilians have in this country demonstrated a capacity to suspend rationality for a while to successfully participate in the collective madness of conflict when no other option exists. They've also been coerced or conscripted when there were other options - but that's another story......

Generations of Australians who stepped out of civilian life for short periods when they were needed (or thought they were) demonstrated that they made very good soldiers, whether they were Chockos or Nashos.

In the meantime, there are some in the defence establishment who need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century. The media's over-hyping the incident, and I'm not sure that Steven Smith has gone about it in the best fashion, but it needs to happen yesterday.

The caste system hangs on in some parts of India.

It's out of place here.

Sent from my iPad