A review of Edmund Campion's biography 'Ted Kennedy: Priest of Redfern'

The details of his ministry are both astonishing and inspiring. The experience of being in Redfern radicalised him deeply. He fought for Aboriginal rights and criticised the Church hierarchy for not giving their total support and for not becoming “mouthpieces for the hot breath of the poor” (p. 74). With the help and guidance of the Aboriginal Activist Mum Shirl, Kennedy turned the church at Redfern in to a physical and spiritual home of the Koori people. Kennedy understood clearly as unfortunately few Australians do, that the injustice shown towards Aborigines under the imperatives of white colonialism has in Kennedy’s own words “stultified the heart and putrified the social atmosphere of our country” (p. 77)

Being a good man, Kennedy inevitably quarrelled with the hierarchy. Here his nemeses seem to have been Cardinal Clancy and his successor Cardinal Pell. When Clancy came to Sydney in 1983 to head the archdiocese, Kennedy and he had an angry meeting where Clancy rejected the notion of land rights for Aborigines and said that the conquest of Australia was fact of history (p.121). In 2000 when Clancy’s reign was climaxed by the raising of the steeples on the cathedral, Kennedy wrote a letter to the press condemning the lack of consultation with the poor about the spires project and describing the Catholic Church under Clancy as “dysfunctional” (p.175).

Kennedy’s relations with Cardinal Pell were no less hostile. Indeed the latter’s refusal to give communion to a number of gay Catholics sparked Kennedy into writing “Who is Worthy?” This was to be Kennedy’s passionate last defence of the alternative church that Paul VI and John Paul II in Rome and Cardinals Clancy, and Pell in Sydney had birth strangled. Campion is fully aware of the importance of Kennedy’s book and he is brave enough to do it justice (pp. 151-160). Thus he quotes the Kennedy line “Between God’s love and those who turn to it, let no one place an obstacle” and describes it as a “powerful meditation” (p. 160).

A tale of two saints?

In his account of Kennedy’s funeral, Campion broaches the subject of sainthood. He relates how many at the funeral thought Kennedy was a saint, but some at the funeral also felt that to discuss this was too much like following the example of the “santo subito rentacrowd” (p. 201), which was already at work calling for John Paul II’s canonisation and so they refused to take part in any discussion of Kennedy’s holiness.

Such a reaction is indeed understandable if one looks at the official process of canonisation as practised by the Roman Catholic Church. John Paul II holds the Vatican record here with 476 saints and 1315 blesseds. No wonder this inflationary process has led to the kind of lampooning practised by Professor As’ad Abu Khalil, the “Angry Arab”, on whose website one is urged to contribute a miracle to speed up the process of the canonization of Mother Theresa. He himself offers “As'ad's sink was miraculously unclogged in October 2003” (Khalil, n.d.). Campion also quotes with approval Dorothy Day’s reply to reporters who labelled her a saint, “You can’t dismiss me that easily” (p.201).

Yet understandable as these reactions to the politics of canonisation as practised by John Paul II are, it seems to me that it is a serious mistake to leave the process of sainthood to the Vatican. For what is at stake is the defining of what constitutes goodness or holiness, and that is something that we must not leave to the Vatican. This can be seen most clearly if we look at the recent discovery that John Paul II was a flagellator who often slept on a bare floor when he was a bishop (Guardian, 2010, p19). These details have been released by Monsignor Oder, the Vatican official in charge of the canonization process, who regards them not as signs of a serious mental illness but rather of a “profound relationship with God” (Oder quoted in Guardian, 2010, p. 19).

By way of contrast Ted Kennedy drank too much (p.85), stank because he didn’t wash (p. 173) and was quarrelsome (p. 85). One is tempted to here and say that Ted Kennedy drunk was a better man that Carol Wojtyla sober, but that leaves us without a means of judging what is goodness or holiness. Here Vyschogrod’s neo-Levinasian definition of sainthood is very helpful. She defines a saint as

One whose adult life in its entirety is devoted to the alleviation of sorrow ( the psychological suffering) and pain (the physical suffering) that afflicts other persons without distinction of rank or group or, alternatively, that afflicts sentient beings, whatever the cost to the saint in pain or sorrow (1990, p. 34).

Within the terms of this definition Kennedy was manifestly saintly. But it is important to demystify the process of goodness here. Goodness or holiness is not the property of the esoteric flagellator sleeping on the bare floor. Rather in Bhaskarian terms its source lies in a rejection of what he terms the world of duality. This is the world that we humans have created and it is marked Bhaskar tells us

by unhappiness, oppression and strife – more especially, it is a world in which  we are alienated from ourselves, each other, the activities in which we engage and the natural world we inhabit, currently hurling into crisis and self-destruction (Bhaskar, 2002a, p.8).

This world of duality is the world of the selfish manipulative ego which regards every other human being as a potential rival or threat. This is of course the world of free market capitalism and also of the clerical church that Ted Kennedy so passionately opposed. Crucially though the world of duality rests parasitically upon a world of non-duality, a world of unconditional love and creativity. This is the world of our transcendentally real self or ground state. Ted Kennedy like all of us was called to goodness by his ground state – a state consisting of “creativity, love, capacity for right action and for the fulfilment of our intentionality in the world” (Bhaskar, 2002b, p.x ).  But it was a concretely singularised call and it led Ted Kennedy to Redfern and his dedication to the Aboriginal people of Australia. The rest as they say is history, and Campion has succeeded in making it very good history at that.