Michael Kelly

Father Michael Kelly is an Australian Jesuit who directed the Catholic Church’s news feature and commentary service, UCA News, 2008-2018. He is the publisher of the English editions of La Croix International and La Civilta Cattolica, the 170 year old Jesuit publication of the Italian Jesuits.

Michael's recent articles

Michael Kelly SJ. Pope Francis is a game-changer.

Theres no doubting that Pope Francis is a game changer and not just for the Catholic Church. The question remains whether he can pull off the changes hes foreshowed and many Catholics want. Three decades of people being made bishops more for reasons of their readiness to comply with directives from Head Office than for any evident leadership capacities means that Papa Bergoglio as the Italians call him has little to draw on in the way of resources and personnel to see the desired changes through. And five decades of resistance by the Vatican Curia to the changes mandated...

Michael Kelly SJ. Todays Totalitarianisms Powerful Forms.

Australian eyes are focused on the unspeakable brutality and pointlessness of the downing of MH 17. But alongside this event, Australian minds and hearts are assailed daily by barbarism across the Middle East and in different parts of Asia. Its the paradox of liberalism that pluralistic secular democracies like Australia afford citizens far greater freedoms than some of its citizens would be ready to concede if they were in charge. Australian authorities readily approve the right of Muslims to build mosques, get government subsidies for their schools and dress as they wish. Not so for Christians in parts...

Michael Kelly SJ. Catholic Church needs to show more than legal compliance

It's been a big few weeks for the clergy and their dealings with the police across the world. In legal matters in countries covering four continents India, the Dominican Republic, Italy and Australia clerics are being held to account by police and civil courts. Two priests in India have been charged with murdering the rector of a seminary in Karnataka, in southwest India; a former papal nuncio to the Dominican Republic has been defrocked by the Vatican for child abuse and will face criminal charges; a bishop in Australia has been charged with sexually abusing an adolescent...

Michael Kelly SJ. The banality of evil

Denial has many faces. Some of them are necessary. If any of us entertained what might befall us each day and the harm we could come to, we would never get out of bed. But denial also has corrosive and destructive effect if we deny the facts of our experience or refuse to be honest in questioning our own behavior. Watching Scott Morrison behaving like an outdated school master in telling asylum seekers what their fate is to be, as reported with the original video in the The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/25/morrison-asylum-seekers-should-go-home-or-face-very-very-long-detention is about as complete an example of one human...

Michael Kelly SJ. A powerful minority or an elected majority!

In a process that shows no sign of ending soon, Thailands unstable governance has reached another crisis. The Acting Prime Minister has been tipped out only to be replaced by an Acting Acting Prime Minister who is himself to face judgment for his part in the failed scheme to stabilize the price of rice. These judicial decisions - seen by many to be actions of courts tainted by their association with the anti Shinawatra, Royal establishment - are now the trigger needed to bring the opposition back onto the streets of Bangkok. However, more prosecutions to come...

Michael Kelly SJ. Why Protestants are more popular than Catholics in China

Questions abound over the recent vicious actions of the Chinese government towards Christians in the prosperous Zhejiang Province just south of Shanghai. The actions of the government during the fortnight after Easter against both Protestants and Catholics are unprecedented in recent decades and, justifiably, have received world attention. As with all actions in a country as vast as China, whose government could never be accused of transparency, it is difficult to discover who is making the decisions and what they hope to achieve.But one issue that has surprised many people outside China is both the size of its Christian...

Michael Kelly SJ. Next item on the Catholic reform agenda

This is a time of reform in the Church. Everyone who bothers to look, from average Catholics around the world to the cardinals who elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio to become Pope Francis, knows the Church is in strife and in need of a lot of work to render it an effective means to the end it serves: to proclaim the Gospel and serve Gods people. First steps are being taken to fix a dysfunctional Vatican. But some of the big-ticket items for the wider Church wont be fixed as quickly. Many of them are pastoral and require cultural change...

Michael Kelly S.J. What makes this week Holy.

The recent casual remark of a friend got me to thinking about just how people experience Easter differently. My friend and I were talking about something Christians are constantly encouraged to consider especially in Lent and which gets its highest profile in the Christian calendar on Good Friday: humility. The way I have come to discover what humility might be is through being humiliated. In the tradition of spirituality I have learnt to love that coming from St. Ignatius Loyola - humility and humiliation are related experiences. And Ive found my own and others most common reaction...

Michael Kelly SJ. The canonisation of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII - an event of telling significance.

Pope Francis may need some help from Our Lady The Untier Of Knots On April 27, we will witness an event that will tell us more about what to make of Papa Francesco and what to expect in his papacy. He will canonize on the same day both Popes John Paul II and John XXII. Each represents contrasting styles and records as Bishops of Rome: John XIII who convoked the Vatican Council and opened up the Church; John Paul II who stiffened and straightened the Church when some thought it was out of control. From his opening words...

Michael Kelly SJ. Where does the buck stop in the Church?

You could be forgiven for not knowing where the buck stops in the Catholic Church these days. In any society, organization or Church community, it is important to know who is ultimately responsible in decision making; otherwise, chaos or worse would prevail. In an unprecedented (for a cardinal) cross examination in court last week, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney seemed confused about responsibility in the Sydney Church. He was speaking for the Archdiocese of Sydney which he led from 2001 until his transfer to a job at the Vatican, appearing before the Royal Commission into...

Michael Kelly SJ. Sexual abuse and the humiliation of the Catholic Church. A new spirituality.

Michael Kelly SJ invites Australian Catholics to embrace the humiliation that isbound to increase as the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse continuesin 2014 through a spirituality based in the gospel. The Spiritual Exercises of StIgnatius Loyola invite us to pray for the gift of identification with Jesus in theabuse and derision he experienced in his Passion. Much of what made people pleased to be Catholic throughout our history since white settlement in Australia is gone and never to be revived. It fitted a time one where most Catholics felt at home in the tribe, got their identity...

Michael Kelly SJ. Australians as the 'white trash of Asia' reaches new depth.

It is now over thirty years since the then Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew described Australians as the white trash of Asia. The barb stung and is still recalled with shame and hurt by Australian politicians as then Prime Minister Julia Gillard did in 2012. But the term has reached a new level of accuracy with the current Australian Government led by Tony Abbott who has degraded Australias relations with China, Indonesia and Timor Leste close to their lowest points in decades with one piece of diplomatic ineptitude and insensitivity after another. White trash is a...

Michael Kelly SJ: Chaos reigns in Bangkok

The fear of many Thais is that the country will end up like the Philippines so laid back that nothing gets done, so corrupt that everyone stops trying, so mismanaged that there is misery for many just around the corner. While things may not have reached the depths of Marcos era chaos, there are worry signs. Why? There seems now no way out of the circumstances the country finds itself in: The protests are led by a former deputy prime minister facing murder charges over his part in 2010 when there was the bloody suppression of just...

Bangkok is bubbling. Will it blow? It's looking increasingly like it will. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

In recent months, most independent observers have admitted to complete uncertainty about the outcome of the demonstrations and disturbances that for months have plagued Bangkok with its metropolitan area population of some 15 million. But now there is a date with fate. Organizers of the demonstrations and their leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, have set Jan 13 as the day to shut down Bangkok as they try to prevent a planned national election in February. As expressed in the Thai Constitution, when an election is called, it is the King who allows the parliament to be dissolved for the election....

Sexual abuse: two Popes late on the scene. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

Early in the 20th Century, the French Catholic poet and writer Charles Peguy observed that, at the turn of each age, the Catholic Church arrives a little late and a little breathless. It was not till the 1960s, at Vatican II, that the Church absorbed and authorized the major influence of the French Revolution that sovereignty inhered in the people rather than the Sovereign when it declared that the Church was the People of God rather than the aristocracy of the Church (the Pope, bishops and clergy). John XXIII brought the freedoms declared in the UN...

The end of an era. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

It may be because Ive been in Ireland and dealing with people who are the heirs of those responsible for most of the heritage and works of the Australian Jesuits. But I dont think so. What struck me most deeply after a month or more among European Jesuits, and registering the scale of challenge to the Church as it is represented in the new Pope, is what a fin de sicle state the Church is in throughout all its moods and tenses.   It is difficult to overestimate the rate and depth of change and the collapse of...

The Catholic Church is in for a shake-up. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

Pope Francis has pressed all the hot buttons that get Catholic and other tongues wagging- a pastoral response to divorced and remarried Catholics, homosexuality, the place of women in the Church, the excessively centralized nature of management in the Church, liturgical adaptation to local pastoral circumstances and wealth and triumphalism as the all too frequent public face of the Church to the world. Pope Francis has also commenced a process for addressing at least one of them by convening an Extraordinary Synod of Bishops in 2014 on how to address what is probably the issue that sees most adults...

Commodifying and dehumanising asylum seekers. Guest blogger Michael Kelly SJ

The rejection by the Indonesian foreign minister of Tony Abbotts suggested ways of stopping the boats is only the latest assertion of how the Coalitions policy on asylum seekers was never going to work. It might have made political sense at election time, allegedly in marginal seats though the results in western Sydney throw some doubt on that. But now a factious Senate that will be difficult for a Coalition government to woo, a High Court to appeal to about the implementation of a policy that has all to many features similar to the one struck down when the...

Clericalism and the inability to recognise one's own shortcomings. Guest Blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

But what was the question? For a very long time I have puzzled over what fanatics, bigots, sundry village idiots and fundamentalists have in common. I used to think it was fear the fear of losing control. So, all manner of extreme positions, programs and political strategies are worked out to keep control. Its plainly evident in societies run by religious leaders: theres only one way to do things and that is according to the Book, whichever Book might be invoked. Its obvious also in the totalitarian politics that keep Communist Parties in office in several Asian...

Fear and Trust. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

It was Arthur Augustus Calwell, Federal Leader of the Australian Labor Party before Gough Whitlam, who believed that fear was the most potent political weapon. He ought to know: he lost three elections because of it. The political correlative to fear is another emotion the appeal to trust me. Creating or eroding trust is the common task and challenge of individuals and institutions in Australia, home to the most testing and suspicious populace in the world. Its a tried and tested tactic in Australian public life Paul Keating in his attack on Fight Back; the way...

Next step for Pope Francis. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

So Pope Francis said to himself when he was elected Bishop of Rome, as he told journalists in Rome on last Saturday, what about the poor? Bishop of Rome means Pope and his question was what does it mean to take the poor seriously as Bishop of Rome? Thats Pope Franciss question. But its far from clear how Jorge Bergoglio is going to handle the practical consequences of becoming Pope Francis. The issues are clear: reform of Church governance, root and branch; giving voice and status to local churches in the governance of the Church that has been...

Francis I. An unpredicted but not unpredictable result. Guest blogger Michael Kelly SJ

While everyone agrees that the election of Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis is unprecedented in many ways, it is not entirely a surprise. He was runner up to Joseph Ratzinger in the 2005 Conclave that saw him elected as Pope Benedict XVI. Bergoglio is the first Jesuit, first Latin American and first Pope from the South. He is of Italian migrant parents but not a Romano or a Curial Cardinal having had no time in his working life at the Vatican. He is considered a theological conservative but an informed pastor and especially attentive to the needs of...

It happens every day (Guest blogger: Fr Michael Kelly S.J.)

It happens every day. People in public life try to grab hold of and change the public narrative about themselves, those they represent or lead. For most of the second half of last year, the Prime Minister had charge of the public narrative, leaving the Opposition Leader flat footed as he tried to capitalize on the Coalitions lead in the opinion polls. He failed. Julia Gillard made a policy announcement here, called a Royal Commission there, published a report on anything from disability insurance to the place of Australia in the Asian Century. The PM looked in command...

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