From The Australian.

LAST Friday the Prime Minister again restated his commitment to do more on mental health, calling it the “next cab off the rank”.

While some more argue that there are a lot of cabs parked at the Rudd government’s rank, we in mental health have yet to see any cab at all yet, let alone a driver with any idea of where we are going.

On December 7 last year, aptly while speaking at the John Curtin School of Medicine in Canberra, Kevin Rudd provided the first detailed response to the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission report, what the government termed the Bennett commission because it was chaired by Christine Bennett.

The Prime Minister said that “a lack of early identification and intervention forces people suffering from acute mental illness to turn to hospitals . . . as their only option for help”.

He was correct in identifying that systemic problem.

He went on to ask: “Why is it that mental health problems are so often picked up by police and drug workers, not our health services? This is the problem today, but it will become a greater problem in the future.”

The reality is that mental health services across Australia remain in crisis. The damning statistics are that every day on average:

• About 330 Australians present to emergency departments with serious mental illnesses, only to be turned away, with less than one in 15 referred to any other service.
• More than 1200 Australians are refused admission to a public or private psychiatric unit.
• At least seven people die of suicide in Australia (whereas road accidents account for less than four deaths a day), with more than one-third involving people discharged too early and/or without care following hospitalisation.
• Another 180 Australians attempt suicide (one every eight minutes), and of these 84 are hospitalised.

Annually, mental illness:

• Costs the Australian economy an estimated $30 billion.
• Accounts for more disability than any other cause.
• Is the third highest burden of disease, after cancer and cardio-vascular diseases.
• Receives 6 per cent of healthcare funding, while representing at least 13 per cent of the healthcare burden.

If the PM needs advice on what he needs to have in his mental health reform cab, then here’s the advice he has had trouble outlining. First, we must prevent another generation of young Australians developing chronic mental health problems because they have little or no access to services.

There is strong evidence for the effectiveness of collaborative, youth-oriented services, such as Headspace, and the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre pioneered by Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry.

Yet we will have only 40 per cent of the necessary capacity for Headspace by 2013-14 and EPPIC has received only token funding from the Rudd government. To truly build these programs, an additional investment of $250 million a year is required.

Second, let’s expand prevention as well as early intervention programs for children’s mental health.

The parents of every child with a learning or developmental disorder should have access to effective services, yet even wealthy families living in Sydney or Melbourne struggle to access them.

Too often these children develop more severe problems and are removed from schooling, cutting short careers, and lives, before they have truly begun.

Third, it’s time to properly invest in suicide prevention.

Take the number of young Australians killed in road accidents and double it: still more lives are ended prematurely by mental ill-health; it is the leading killer of Australians under 44.

But, across Australia, lifesaving suicide prevention services are starved for funds.

About $100m would expand these crucial services and we should concentrate on suicide hot spots such as The Gap in Sydney, where just last week the NSW government passed on an opportunity to fund suicide prevention.

Fourth, $20m would fund effective e-health programs. For high-prevalence disorders such as anxiety, there’s solid evidence that e-health programs reach a huge number of people in a very cost effective way.

Australia was a world leader in this a decade ago, and the internet is only going to become more important as a source of information and support – but now we’re backsliding.

Fifth, 60 per cent of our homeless have severe mental health problems. That’s about 63,000 people, and they need housing and support services.

These people are not lost causes. With help they can regain employment and their lives.

There are some great programs across the country, including the Housing and Accommodation Support Initiative in NSW, but your chances of getting a place are about the same as those of winning the lottery.

These are targeted, sensible investments that are ready to go; and they’re popular. A poll released by GetUp! last weekend found that 83 per cent of Australians would be in favour of investing $500m in mental health immediately.

So, what’s stopping the Rudd government?

The Prime Minister has told us that fixing mental health care in Australia will be the “next cab off the rank”.

But we’re still not sure what that cab looks like: is it a rickshaw or a Commodore? Mr Rudd, we’ve got the cab, tell us when it’s going to take off.

John Mendoza resigned as chairman of the National Advisory Council on Mental Health last week. He is adjunct professor of health science at the University of the Sunshine Coast and adjunct associate professor of medicine at the University of Sydney.

I voted Labor in the last Federal election (actually, Greens with preferences to the ALP), as I generally do. I did so hoping that a change of government would return the compassionate heart to Australian politics. I was horrified by the cynical maltreatment or neglect of refugees, the aged, mentally ill, the sick, the poor, the environment. I felt the Liberal / National coalition government had run social capital down into the ground, and, moreover, nearly succeeded in creating an expectation that even the most powerless and disenfranchised would be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and ‘get on with life’.

I’m not sorry I voted Labor, as I truly believe that if John Howard had been returned to Government we would be suffering under even more horrifying policies. That’s what Tony Abbott represents for me – John Howard conservatism writ large.

However – the Labor Party’s Government, under Kevin Rudd’s leadership, has failed in so many ways that it is difficult for me to hold my head up.

One particular failure, highlighted by the resignation of John Mendoza, is delivering on promises about properly funding mental health care. It seems to be sufficient, in Mr Rudd’s mind, to make promises, as if they actually amounted to something other than vague intentions. As if they would actually make people well. The funding hasn’t come, and in fact, strategies that were working well, such as Medicare funded visits to psychiatric social workers and occupational therapists, have been gutted, presumably to save some money.

Mr Rudd’s government is behaving just as John Howard’s did. Perhaps it is the way all governments behave, I don’t know. If it is, we have really got a problem, and need to work for change in our political and social institutions.

I wrote a letter to Senator Kim Carr today, asking for him to make representations about this. Here’s what I said:

I am writing to urge you to take all actions within your power to work for more funding and resourcing for the mental health sector.

I am a 41 year old man, who, in 2005 was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. This is a disorder which, because I am able to afford access to a private psychiatrist, is well managed with drugs and psychotherapy.

However, in 2005 my 32 year old brother Brian committed suicide when he was overcome by despair. He was unable to access mental health services because he lived in the country, and they simply were not available. One day he began to give things away – clothes, CDs, books, DVDs, little things. Not enough to arouse any attention. The next morning he got up, left his wife and three children, and hanged himself. He was found by workmates. His suicide has scarred my mother and father, his wife and children, his workmates, my two brothers, the community in which he lived, and it has scarred me.

I miss my brother. Each day I think about him. Sometimes, when I see something or hear something, or watch a particular TV program I think “Gee, Brian would like that”. But, Senator Carr, Brian is no longer here. I can’t share it with him. Not only have we been robbed of him, but so has the world.

Funding for mental health would make such a difference to the lives of so many. I realise that the mentally ill are rarely visible, and if they are, are frequently not photogenic. But we are people, with needs, rights and potential just like anyone else. To neglect us so cynically, to promise again and again to help, yet fail to deliver, is cruel in the extreme.

I urge you to do something to act, Senator Carr. Please – because I don’t want others to have to deal daily with the things I am forced to confront.

The Gospel reading for the Sunday just past was Luke 8:26-39:

So they arrived in the region of the Gerasenes, across the lake from Galilee. As Jesus was climbing out of the boat, a man who was possessed by demons came out to meet him. For a long time he had been homeless and naked, living in a cemetery outside the town.

As soon as he saw Jesus, he shrieked and fell down in front of him. Then he screamed, “Why are you interfering with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Please, I beg you, don’t torture me!” For Jesus had already commanded the evil spirit to come out of him. This spirit had often taken control of the man. Even when he was placed under guard and put in chains and shackles, he simply broke them and rushed out into the wilderness, completely under the demon’s power.

Jesus demanded, “What is your name?”

“Legion,” he replied, for he was filled with many demons. The demons kept begging Jesus not to send them into the bottomless pit.

There happened to be a large herd of pigs feeding on the hillside nearby, and the demons begged him to let them enter into the pigs.

So Jesus gave them permission. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the entire herd plunged down the steep hillside into the lake and drowned.

When the herdsmen saw it, they fled to the nearby town and the surrounding countryside, spreading the news as they ran. People rushed out to see what had happened. A crowd soon gathered around Jesus, and they saw the man who had been freed from the demons. He was sitting at Jesus’ feet, fully clothed and perfectly sane, and they were all afraid. Then those who had seen what happened told the others how the demon-possessed man had been healed. And all the people in the region of the Gerasenes begged Jesus to go away and leave them alone, for a great wave of fear swept over them.

So Jesus returned to the boat and left, crossing back to the other side of the lake. The man who had been freed from the demons begged to go with him. But Jesus sent him home, saying, “No, go back to your family, and tell them everything God has done for you.” So he went all through the town proclaiming the great things Jesus had done for him.

The man in this story probably suffered from a mental illness, and because he was trouble he was chained up outside the city. Did he choose to live outside the city among the unclean dead? Did others drive him away and make him seek refuge with the dead, who, like him had little claim to humanity. His life is lonely, pitiful and empty.

The surprising thing about this man, though, is that it isn’t he who fails to recognise Jesus. He knows who he is, and what he represents – the loving, healing, renewing, challenging and rule-breaking God.

?What is your name?? Jesus asks. The question creates a little ripple of quiet in the middle of this frantic and noisy story. The man has been shouting; the narrator has been telling, in lurid detail, the awful methods of restraint that have been used on him, and his terrifying response to them; and into this clamour, Jesus speaks. The question treats the man like a human being for the first time in who knows how many years. He has been unclothed, alone, tied up and beaten like a mad dog. Did he once have a name?

But although he cannot now remember what those who once loved him used to call him, Jesus? question marks the turning point in the story. Now Jesus is in command, restoring the human image to this man, as he is to restore it to the whole of humankind.

Why are the local people afraid? Why do they look at the calm, clothed man and beg Jesus to leave? It cannot just be that they are afraid for their livestock. Something about Jesus and his action terrifies them. Perhaps they liked having the mad man there at the outskirts of the village, making them feel sane and in control of their lives. Perhaps they realize that to recognize Jesus is to be on the path to inevitable change. The ?mad? man was desperate enough to welcome change, however drastic, but these ?sane? people are comfortable with their illusion of life, and they do not want it challenged.

Perhaps we’re like that, too.

BY Clive Hamilton. In The Age.

The miners’ fight against the new tax is an attack on our democracy.

Plutocracy, n., 1. The rule of wealth or of the wealthy. 2. A government or state in which the wealthy class rules.

SO HERE’S the situation. A small group of obscenely rich people are acting in concert to bring down an elected government that wants to tax super profits. They want to install a new government sympathetic to their interests.

The war over the government’s proposed tax on the super profits of mining companies is revealing the ugly truth of Australia’s modern parliamentary system. It is not so much the $100 million war chest and the ruthless exercise of power by the mining companies that is shocking, but the attitude of outraged entitlement they project.

The mining industry has always believed it should receive special treatment, but the boom of recent years has seen its assumption of a privileged place reach sublime levels. Having governments fawn over them has inflated the egos of the magnates to the point where the normal constraints of propriety no longer prevent them from saying in public what they say to each other in private.

One of the most telling vignettes in this sordid debate was Andrew Forrest’s expression of wounded bewilderment that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer no longer return his calls. Well, they won’t return my calls either.

It’s the sense of entitlement of the militant rich that sticks in the average craw. Yet in Australia today, mining billionaires expect that they only need to pick up the phone to get our most senior politicians to jump. So accustomed are the mining magnates to getting their own way that they are genuinely dismayed when the government, deciding for once to represent the collective interest, acts against the miners’ commercial interests.

So the dispute over the super profits tax is a defining moment in Australia’s democratic history, because here we see in its starkest form a conflict between the raw power of capital and the public interest.

The mining industry has been basking in its own success since its brilliantly successful campaign to defeat the introduction of an emissions trading system. It was an exercise in political thuggery rarely seen in this country. No remorse was felt over the direct thwarting of the popular will embodied in a government that won an election in which both main parties promised an emissions trading scheme.

And why would you have qualms if you are convinced that you know better what is in the national interest, and have no respect for democracy?

What has happened to Australia over the past three or four decades so that now many side with the mega-rich against a government attempting to obtain a fairer share of their vast wealth to distribute to the rest of the nation? Some have been gulled by the disingenuous claims of the mining industry that they are responsible for jobs and prosperity, even though the industry is responsible for only 1 per cent of employment.

There was something grotesque about watching Australia’s second richest person, Gina Rinehart with assets of $4.75 billion, and the fourth richest, Andrew Forrest with assets of $4.24 billion, pumping the air at an anti-tax rally and demanding justice.

Have we shifted into some crazy parallel universe where the obscenely rich complain of being victimised and call rallies where they protest that they can no longer have everything go their way?

What is absurd about the situation is not that the rich behave without conscience and continue to feel deprived as they sit atop mountains of wealth, but that we no longer laugh at them.

The top 25 mining magnates have seen their wealth increase by $9 billion over the last year alone. That is the amount that would be clawed back by the super profits tax.

Forrest, Rinehart, Palmer and the like are outraged because they cannot bear the thought that they will remain only as rich as they were last year. Of course, they cloak their greed in declarations about ”the national interest” and the workers they nobly employ, workers who would be sacked tomorrow without remorse if it were deemed commercially necessary.

So where is the public outrage at this unprecedented assertion of rapaciousness and the attempts by plutocrats to destroy Australian democracy?

Where is the trade union movement? After all, taxing to fund services for all working people is a fundamental labour principle and there is no tax more justified than an impost on the super profits of the mining industry. The threats of the plutocrats are a scandalous attack on working people, those who would benefit most from the distribution of tax revenue, yet the leaders of the trade union movement remain holed up in their offices.

Today we have an angry and powerful minority holding the country to ransom. The dark mutterings of Forrest and Palmer about the spread of communism in Australia are laughable for their paranoid absurdity. What we are in fact seeing is not an attack by the proletariat on the bourgeoisie, but the brutal assertion of power by the richest people in the country.

It’s enough to turn anyone into a Marxist.

I couldn’t agree more. The sight of these ultra-rich people working to undermine Australia’s democracy for their own benefit is very disconcerting. While I disagree with elements of the Government’s policy and their approach, I support their right to tax appropriately for the benefit of Australia.

The Age ran this story today:

A RAPID increase in lone person households will result in 1.7 million more Australians living by themselves in 20 years, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has projected.

And couples without children are set to overtake the nuclear family as the most common family household within three years.

As the number of households reaches 11.8 million nationally in 2031, an increase of 4 million from 2006, lone person households will surge by 91 per cent.

Couples with children are the dominant family household now but by 2031, if trends are maintained, they will drop to 2.5 million as the number of couples living without children rises to 3.8 million.

”Mum, dad and the kids are down to one household in five. Over 50 years the shift has been quite profound,” said KPMG demographer Bernard Salt.

The rise in single-person households was being driven by an ageing population, said Mr Salt.

”These are not young, sexy singles … but sad, lonely old baby boomers. The widowed, separated and divorced.”

Mr Salt said he doubts whether Australian cities are ”ready for an army of single old people living in suburbia disconnected from the community”.

Sad and lonely…

We are a community in transition – there’s little doubt about that, and I’ve noticed the social changes Bernard Salt describes. We certainly see those in church. Which makes me wonder about the almost fanatical focus we have on the nuclear family. Not that we shouldn’t welcome, support and nurture families, but shouldn’t we also care for and include (and let them know they’re normal) those who don’t fit into the nice, neat nuclear family box?

Sad and lonely…

As I think about this I also reflect on the fact that I need to be able to reach out to those people, too, and show them care, love and support.

Last night Peter and I went to help some people who were in exactly this situation. Older, sick and in need. Pretty radical and immediate need at the time. One of the people died last night, leaving a partner alone, bereft and in some ways isolated. I think also of another person who has been widowed, and now feels cut adrift from a world which just wants to look past her.

How do we care for all?

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently released his Pentecost pastoral letter, in which he detailed his proposals for punishing those parts of the church that allegedly broke some of the moratoria agreed to in various councils of the Anglican Church. The punishments are removal of the right to participate in various forums.

The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, recently released a response to +Rowan’s letter, setting out the Episcopal Church’s position. In part she wrote:

… the Spirit does seem to be saying to many within the Episcopal Church that gay and lesbian persons are God’s good creation, that an aspect of good creation is the possibility of lifelong, faithful partnership, and that such persons may indeed be good and healthy exemplars of gifted leadership within the Church, as baptized leaders and ordained ones. The Spirit also seems to be saying the same thing in other parts of the Anglican Communion, and among some of our Christian partners, including Lutheran churches in North America and Europe, the Old Catholic churches of Europe, and a number of others.

In a rare moment of moving quickly the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion has acted to punish the Episcopal Church (naughtiness by taking seriously the baptism of gay and lesbian people), and has indicated he has written to the other two ‘moratorium breaking’ provinces – the Anglican Church of Canada (potential naughtiness by taking seriously the baptism of gay and lesbian people) and the Province of the Southern Cone (invading and colonising other provinces). No mention of punishments for the churches of Kenya, Nigeria or Uganda, which have also invaded and colonised other provinces.

In Australia – silence, it seems. Sydney reports, with an air of triumphalism. Melbourne does the same. And those of us who are the subject of squabbling continue to suffer.

I wish the Episcopal Church would decide to invade and set up a colony here. I’d be there.

The environmental catastrophe happening off the Louisiana coast is terrible, worrying, and in real terms, unprecedented. Even worse – there does not seem to be an end to it.

The following pictures are of birds affected by the oil spill.

I shake my head and weep at our self-centredness as a species.

Bishop Katharine Jefferts-Schori (Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church) wrote this in the Huffington Post:

The original peoples of the North American continent understand that we are all connected, and that harm to one part of the sacred circle of life harms the whole. Scientists, both the ecological and physical sorts, know the same reality, expressed in different terms. The Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) also charge human beings with care for the whole of creation, because it is God’s good gift to humanity. Another way of saying this is that we are all connected and there is no escape; our common future depends on how we care for the rest of the natural world, not just the square feet of soil we may call “our own.” We breathe the same air, our food comes from the same ground and seas, and the water we have to share cycles through the same airshed, watershed, and terra firma.

The still-unfolding disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is good evidence of the interconnectedness of the whole. It has its origins in this nation’s addiction to oil, uninhibited growth, and consumerism, as well as old-fashioned greed and what my tradition calls hubris and idolatry. Our collective sins are being visited on those who have had little or no part in them: birds, marine mammals, the tiny plants and animals that constitute the base of the vast food chain in the Gulf, and on which a major part of the seafood production of the United States depends. Our sins are being visited on the fishers of southern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, who seek to feed their families with the proceeds of what they catch each day. Our sins will expose New Orleans and other coastal cities to the increased likelihood of devastating floods, as the marshes that constitute the shrinking margin of storm protection continue to disappear, fouled and killed by oil.

The oil that continues to vent from the sea floor has spread through hundreds of cubic miles of ocean, poisoning creatures of all sizes and forms, from birds, turtles, and whales to the shrimp, fish, oysters, and crabs that human beings so value, and the plankton, whose life supports the whole biological system — the very kind of creatures whose dead and decomposed tissues began the process of producing that oil so many millions of years ago.
We know, at least intellectually, that that oil is a limited resource, yet we continue to extract and use it at increasing rates and with apparently decreasing care. The great scandal of this disaster is the one related to all kinds of “commons,” resources held by the whole community. Like tropical forests in Madagascar and Brazil, and the gold and silver deposits of the American West, “commons” have in human history too often been greedily exploited by a few, with the aftermath left for others to deal with, or suffer with.

Yet the reality is that this disaster just may show us as a nation how interconnected we really are. The waste of this oil — both its unusability and the mess it is making — will be visited on all of us, for years and even generations to come. The hydrocarbons in those coastal marshes and at the base of the food chain leading to marketable seafood resources will taint us all, eventually. That oil is already frightening away vacationers who form the economic base for countless coastal communities, whose livelihoods have something to do with the economic health of this nation. The workers in those communities, even when they have employment, are some of the poorest among us. That oil will move beyond the immediate environs of a broken wellhead, spreading around the coasts of Florida and northward along the east coast of the U.S. That oil will foul the coastal marshes that also constitute a major nursery for coastal fauna, again a vital part of the food chain. That oil will further stress and poison the coral reefs of Florida, already much endangered from warming and ocean acidification. Those reefs have historically provided significant storm protection to the coastal communities behind them.

The dispersants that are being so wantonly deployed will have consequences we’re not yet cognizant of, and the experience of gold and silver mining in the West is instructive. The methods used in those old mining operations liberated plenty of arsenic, mercury, other heavy metals, left cyanide and acids, all of which have significant health effects on those who live in the immediate area of mines and tailings, as well as those who use water downstream and breathe downwind air.

There is no place to go “away” from these consequences; there is no ultimate escape on this planet. The effects at a distance may seem minor or tolerable, but the cumulative effect is not. We are all connected, we will all suffer the consequences of this tragic disaster in the Gulf, and we must wake up and put a stop to the kind of robber baron behavior we supposedly regulated out of existence a hundred years ago. Our lives, and the liveliness of the entire planet, depend on it.

Here is a story of how religious dogma intersects with, and affects, human lives:

We finally have a case where the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy is responding forcefully and speedily to allegations of wrongdoing.

But the target isn’t a pedophile priest. Rather, it’s a nun who helped save a woman’s life. Doctors describe her as saintly.

The excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride in Phoenix underscores all that to me feels morally obtuse about the church hierarchy. I hope that a public outcry can rectify this travesty.

Sister Margaret was a senior administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. A 27-year-old mother of four arrived late last year, in her third month of pregnancy. According to local news reports and accounts from the hospital and some of its staff members, the mother suffered from a serious complication called pulmonary hypertension. That created a high probability that the strain of continuing pregnancy would kill her.

“In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy,” the hospital said in a statement. “This decision was made after consultation with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee.”

Sister Margaret was a member of that committee. She declined to discuss the episode with me, but the bishop of Phoenix, Thomas Olmsted, ruled that Sister Margaret was “automatically excommunicated” because she assented to an abortion.

“The mother’s life cannot be preferred over the child’s,” the bishop’s communication office elaborated in a statement.

Let us just note that the Roman Catholic hierarchy suspended priests who abused children and in some cases defrocked them but did not normally excommunicate them, so they remained able to take the sacrament.

Since the excommunication, Sister Margaret has left her post as vice president and is no longer listed as one of the hospital executives on its Web site. The hospital told me that she had resigned “at the bishop’s request” but is still working elsewhere at the hospital.

I heard about Sister Margaret from an acquaintance who is a doctor at the hospital. After what happened to Sister Margaret, he doesn’t dare be named, but he sent an e-mail to his friends lamenting the excommunication of “a saintly nun”:

“She is a kind, soft-spoken, humble, caring, spiritual woman whose spot in Heaven was reserved years ago,” he said in the e-mail message. “The idea that she could be ex-communicated after decades of service to the Church and humanity literally makes me nauseated.”

“True Christians, like Sister Margaret, understand that real life is full of difficult moral decisions and pray that they make the right decision in the context of Christ’s teachings. Only a group of detached, pampered men in gilded robes on a balcony high above the rest of us could deny these dilemmas.”

A statement from the bishop’s office did not dispute that the mother’s life was in danger — although it did note that no doctor’s prediction is 100 percent certain. The implication is that the church would have preferred for the hospital to let nature take its course.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy is entitled to its views. But the episode reinforces perceptions of church leaders as rigid, dogmatic, out of touch — and very suspicious of independent-minded American nuns.

Sister Margaret made a difficult judgment in an emergency, saved a life and then was punished and humiliated by a lightning bolt from a bishop who spent 16 years living in Rome and who has devoted far less time to serving the downtrodden than Sister Margaret. Compare their two biographies, and Sister Margaret’s looks much more like Jesus’s than the bishop’s does.

“Everyone I know considers Sister Margaret to be the moral conscience of the hospital,” Dr. John Garvie, chief of gastroenterology at St. Joseph’s Hospital, wrote in a letter to the editor to The Arizona Republic. “She works tirelessly and selflessly as the living example and champion of compassionate, appropriate care for the sick and dying.”

Dr. Garvie later told me in an e-mail message that “saintly” was the right word for Sister Margaret and added: “Sister was the ‘living embodiment of God’ in our building. She always made sure we understood that we’re here to help the less fortunate. We really have no one to take her place.”

I’ve written several times about the gulf between Roman Catholic leaders at the top and the nuns, priests and laity who often live the Sermon on the Mount at the grass roots. They represent the great soul of the church, which isn’t about vestments but selflessness.

When a hierarchy of mostly aging men pounce on and excommunicate a revered nun who was merely trying to save a mother’s life, the church seems to me almost as out of touch as it was in the cruel and debauched days of the Borgias in the Renaissance. (Nicholas D Kristof, The New York Times, 26 May 2010)

I struggle for words when I read about this, and start to write.

As Kristof notes, the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy is entitled to its views. I wonder, though, what Jesus would think about a situation in which the church – his body – would allow a mother of four other children to die so that a dogmatic position can be upheld. And I wonder what Jesus would think, and do about one of his daughters, Sister Margaret, being persecuted and excluded in this way. I doubt Sister Margaret took this decision lightly, and I’m sure she struggled over it. I’m also sure she knew what the likely repercussions were. My heart is full of love and admiration for her, and I remember her in my prayers each day.

It seems to me that many of the shepherds (bishops) no longer care for the sheep. They allow them to be devoured or even devour them themselves.

I do not advocate abortion, and I don’t believe it its use capriciously. However, as a nurse I did see quite a few women present for termination of pregnancy. Not one of them was glad. Not one of them approached it lightly. All of them cried, and all of them deserved my care, my support and my love. And some of them needed forgiveness, too. I’m not sure what they needed to be forgiven for, but in their hearts they felt they did.

The Melbourne Storm Rugby League Club has recently been found guilty of a systematic and elaborately conceived breach of the NRL’s salary cap rules. As a result they’ve been fined and stripped of two premiership wins (2007 and 2005). They won’t accrue any points this season, either. It is possible this will see the end of the Melbourne Storm, but I hope not.

I’m sad about what has happened, but am still a supporter.

Doctor Who – Eleventh Hour begins in Australia at midnight on Friday 16 April, on ABC TV’s iView site. The program is broadcast at 7.30pm on Sunday 18 April on ABC1.

This is so wearying. From The Australian.

THE Pope’s right-hand man has blamed homosexuals for the clerical abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, while denying any connection between pedophilia and priestly celibacy.
Speaking on a visit to Chile, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, said: “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia. But many others have demonstrated, I have been told recently, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia. That is true. That is the problem.”
His remarks drew a furious reaction from gay spokesmen yesterday. “There is no relationship between pedophilia and homosexuality,” said Rolando Jimenez, the head of the Movement for the Integration and Freedom of Homosexuals in Chile. “The Catholic Church hierarchy will at some point have to apologise for this perversion, for the sinister attitude of this Vatican gentleman. Neither Bertone nor the Vatican has the moral authority to give lessons on sexuality.”
Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner and spokesman for the British Protest the Pope campaign, said that Cardinal Bertone “has, in effect, blamed gay priests for the pedophile scandal”. He described the Cardinal as “a blatant distorter of the truth and an outrageous homophobe … His vile smears against gay people bring shame and dishonour to the Church. The Vatican is trying to deflect attention from the sex crimes of Catholic clergy by blaming gay people.”

There are a couple of immensely distressing things here. One is the distortion of the truth, and the failure of these shepherds to do their jobs. The other is the failure of other Christian leaders to come out to decry these remarks.

This is the new design for Daleks. Sharp, I reckon.