Abstract

Christ’s name is often taken in vain, but not in this book title. It is at once a prayer and a cry of anguish. Robinson was deputed to deal with the whole abuse problem in the Archdiocese of Sydney and knows horrid things at first hand: abuse and clerical cover-ups, both.Bishop Robinson’s book is practical—if perhaps at the time of publication unduly sanguine. He calls, in chapter 13 for ‘A New Council for a New Church’ to enable to get the problem of sexual abuse fixed and for the Church to get out of its self-constructed ‘prison of the past’.See Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus, Melbourne, Garrett Publishing 2007: reviewed in Sophia, vol.47, pp.231–239 in 2008. See page 119 and passim. The authoritarian Church to date has not squarely faced, and not by any means fixed, the sexual abuse problem. It can do this, Robinson argues, only if it changes both its ways and its structures. Such a change, Robinson suggests, could happen if there we