Murphy’ Law and the Pursuit of Happiness: a History of the Celebrant Movement. by Dally Messenger III

Summary of the review found on – https://collegeofcelebrancy.com.au/Pages3/HistoryCMCs.html

The article titled “Murphy’s Law and the Pursuit of Happiness: A History of the Celebrant Movement to the year 2000” by Dally Messenger III provides an overview of the history and development of the celebrant movement. It emphasises the importance of understanding the history of the profession to truly appreciate and engage with the work of a celebrant.

The book is described as an ultimate resource and a valuable addition to every celebrant’s library. It has been written by Dally Messenger III, a successful celebrant who has been involved in the development of the program since its inception. The book is said to be well-researched, documented, and easy to read.

The article mentions that the book is divided into six sections or volumes. Here is a brief summary of each section:

1. “The Background”: This section provides the historical context and discusses the secular ceremony, including the Registry office ceremonies, the Marriage Act of 1961, the attitude of the law and churches towards divorce, and the social changes of the 1960s.
   
2. “The Early Years”: This section tracks the Civil Marriage Celebrant Program from its establishment to the late 1970s or early 1980s. It covers the experiences of the first celebrants, the impact of the Whitlam government’s dismissal, changing public attitudes towards divorce and remarriage, and challenges faced by celebrants.
   
3. “Progress”: This section focuses on the development of wedding ceremonies, including the evolution of content, poetic elements, and theatrical skills of leading celebrants. It also discusses the acceptance of civil ceremonies by the public and the dignity they attained for secular and non-church individuals. It briefly touches on the naming ceremony, renewal of vows ceremony, and the initial attempt to establish gay marriage.
   
4. “Funerals”: This section addresses the initial challenges and dissatisfaction regarding funerals, the influence of Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, the role of celebrant Diane Storey, and the involvement of celebrants in conducting funerals. It also discusses the struggle over money and time with funeral directors and the revival of standards by reforming celebrants.
   
5. “The Fixed Fee et alia”: This section delves into struggles and political
6. problems faced by celebrants. It includes the battle with the Attorney-General’s department, issues related to fixed fees, legal challenges, and the establishment of professional competencies. It also mentions the formation of the Australian Federation of Civil Celebrants and the National Council of Celebrants.
   
7. “The Flowering”: This final section describes conferences and events that marked a growing understanding of the celebrant role. It mentions the influence of international lecturers, such as Mary Hancock and David Oldfield, and their contributions to expanding the range of ceremonies. It also discusses the rise of postgraduate diploma programs in celebrancy and the promise of reforms in celebrant selection and training.

For a more comprehensive understanding, it is recommended you buy and read the book “Murphy’s Law and the Pursuit of Happiness” by Dally Messenger III.

The book is available from the
Celebrants Centre – Yvonne Werner – weare@celebrantcentre.com.au
– ‭0411 128 285‬ –
or as an ebook from Amazon and iBooks

On the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Statue of Dally Messenger at the Sydney Football Stadium.

March 29, 2008

Master of Ceremony and leading Celebrant, Mr Rodney Cavalier, 

Benefactor and Sponsor, Mr Basil Sellers, 

Talented Sculptor and Artist, Ms Cathy Weiszmann, 

Wise and Honorable Members of the Sydney Football Stadium Trust

Address by Dally Messenger III

Ladies and Gentlemen

There is an axiom which has come down to us from ages past. It was popularised by its inscription on the tomb of the Naval Commander Horatio Nelson – palmam qui meruit, ferat. Loosely translated it means – “let he who deserves honour be given it.”

Today my grandfather – Dally Messenger – has been honoured. On behalf of my brother Ken Messenger and my cousins and family gathered here today – I have to tell you we feel most gratified. The Messengers are proud of their place in the sporting history of this nation – in the history of Australia.

But it was not always thus.

My grandfather, a humble and unassuming man off the battlefield of play, was fully celebrated by this city in his time of achievement, but towards the end of his life suffered some cruel indignities at the hands of Rugby League officials. 

In this “down” period in the history of Rugby League, when you, the followers, were taken for granted, when clubs and their traditions became playthings on a chessboard, and good and deep feelings were trodden underfoot, this too was the time when the heroes of Rugby League, Dally Messenger and others, were dishonoured. One such dishonouring occurred in the 1950’s. It was a malevolent behind-the-scenes derailing and subverting of the proposal to erect a statue of Dally Messenger in Double Bay Park.

But today is a good a day. And a symbolic day. We honour our past. We honour our beginnings. We celebrate our sport. We affirm our identity. We unveil a statue with story. A good statue in a good place.

And as we have left the short dark period of our past behind, the game of Rugby League has emerged as better to play and better to watch. It calls forth marvellous skills from the players, it demands strength, endurance, resilience, versatility, quick thinking, the will to win, and the finest forms of trickery. 

The rules are refined, the rules are good. To paraphrase the original Dally Messenger, the game of Rugby League tolerates no slackers – It is on, and it stays on – from start to finish. The game we will see today from the Storm and the Roosters will be absorbing and exciting from start to finish.

What does it do for us? To quote Dr Paul Komesaroff –

. . . sport plays an important symbolic role in social life. It is the repository of the classical virtues of courage, determination, loyalty, selflessness, and the willingness to suffer pain in the quest for a higher goal. It offers an escape from the crushing burden of everyday life . . . 

Dally Messenger will turn 125 on his birthday this coming April 12, 2008. As he is too old to be here and speak for himself he has delegated me to thank, first of all, everyone who has contributed to this great game in the last hundred years  First of all he would like to thank team mate and best friends, Dan Frawley, Sandy Pearce, Alby Rosenfeld and salutes their dependents. 

He would like send his best regards to the families of Victor Trumper, JJ. Giltinan , Harry Hoyle and their families. He would like to thank all the unsung players, youngsters’ coaches. and officials at all levels – and -, all the loyal fans who, for the last hundred years, have given to the game of Rugby League for the love of it. He would like to thank the chroniclers of history,  – men like Ian Heads, David Middleton, Geoff Armstrong Sean Fagan and others. He is even a little bit proud of me but he is not overstating it. He would like to thank young Rodney Cavalier and young Basil Sellers and their collaborators for their honouring of his name and his achievements. He would like to thank his fellow artist, Cathy Weizmann for her beautiful statue.

He also sends his love and regards to all the members of the Messenger family here today.He wishes Craig Fitzgibbon especially, but also Cameron Smith all the best for tonight’s match and advises Craig to keep his eye on young Billy Slater from Melbourne who reminds him a bit of himself.

Finally he invites all of you, anytime you feel like it, to visit this statue, as often as you like. If you look up at him he will be sending you a message.

Video about Dally and the other statue – password is ESMP

CONSIDERED OPINION: BILL D’ARCY IS INNOCENT.

Those of us who have studied the criminal convictions of Bill D’Arcy at a fairly deep level are convinced he is innocent. Those who have gone into it into it at a less demanding level soon conclude that he is certainly not guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Despite media reports and official correspondence only one woman ever accused Bill D’Arcy of rape. This accusation has been medically certified as physically impossible. In addition, evidence from the complainant demonstrates that D’Arcy was not even at the school at the time of the alleged offence. This rape conviction accounted for 10 years of his original 14 year sentence.

D’Arcy was first of all publicised in the media as guilty especially by the Courier Mail, the one newspaper of Queensland. Former executive Chris Mitchell admits this in his book “Making Headlines” (p.220). For identifying Bill D’Arcy before his trial, the Courier Mail was upbraided in strong terms by her sister publication, the Murdoch owned Australian in an editorial of 1 September 1998.

Augmenting this unbalanced coverage was a two year positive effort by a police task force whose mission was to dig dirt on Bill D’Arcy (Who authorised this bizarrely uncustomary use of police resources and why?) In this police “trawling” operation, the people police targeted were mostly of low socio-economic status. The police persuaded whoever they could to “remember” unsavoury actions by D’Arcy.

Thirdly, the fervour of the child protection enthusiasts to find a guilty high-flyer which who would be great publicity for their laudable cause must be added to the mix. Given these three factors D’Arcy didn’t stand a chance.

Eventually Bill D’Arcy was charged and brought into a court room (November 2000). In any other jurisdiction the accusations would have been immediately dismissed. As it turns out the judge, the newly-appointed Bob Douglas, until a few weeks previously enjoyed dubious political connections, decided to proceed. The evidence in this main trial is chockers with contradictory evidence and anomalies. But with the scandalously effective trial by the media, the Queensland population, including judge, jury, and related personnel, convinced prior to the trial, decided D’Arcy was guilty.

The appeal to the Supreme Court only decided to deal with the sentencing. (Why did they do that? ) In any case, they reduced D’Arcy’s sentence by four years, amidst fierce criticism from the media and the general populace.

Immediately, the one rape victim and one other applied for compensation in the civil court. Judge H.W.T. Botting ruled that the charges could not be proved and gave them no compensation. He also awarded costs to D’Arcy. Two questions: who financed the two applicants to issue proceedings? Why was D’Arcy never paid his costs as awarded?

I agree with the former senior police officer/investigator who described the other trials as “carpet bombing”. In a one page summary, it is next to impossible to comment on them. Suffice to say, that in these trials proven perjury has been documented, charges were dismissed because the complainants couldn’t remember what they said in police-assisted statements, powerful evidence by a supportive colleague of D’Arcy was ignored, and police abetted an important accuser to seriously change their original statement in the light of serious perjury.

The Bill D’Arcy case demands a thorough independent investigation wherein witnesses may speak freely without being sued. Some more information on the supporters website http://www.apersonalhistory.com/Bill_D%27Arcy/. Other statements by former senior police officers Warren Smithers, Peter Slatter, Jim Coughlin and Bob Munt will agree with the above.

Dally Messenger Monday, 20 June 2022

by Dally Messenger III

 Launch of the book, 
A Safe Distance:
Surviving Religious Trauma
by Steve Hyndes. 

Held at the Function Room of the Glenroy RSL,
184 Glenroy Rd, Glenroy,
on 26 February, 2023.

In February 1956, at 17 years of age, Steve Hyndes entered the seminary at St Columba’s College, Springwood, to study for the priesthood.

26 years later Steve called it quits. In the first part of the book Steve describes his state of mind on the day he left the ministry.
And I quote:-

I was in turmoil. I was flooded by feelings of relief at being free of all the culture, demands, conflicts and being imprisoned by ideas that had driven me steadily to the point of madness. Equally I felt the crushing weight of failure. I was turning my back on all the paradigms and thinking that had been central to my life and decision making for 26 years. The constant anxiety that living within such a system injects into day-to-day life had been replaced by a feeling of almost robotic numbness. 

End of quote

When I read this I said to myself. Is Steve writing about me or himself? On a certain day you leave. It is big.  I think that most of us who left in this manner had the same tumultuous feelings on that day. I would reckon that part of the story would be the same for almost every priest who packed his car and drove out of the clerical world.

Steve has written a good book. It tells his story. It is an easy read. You are going to read it so I do not think this launch should just repeat his narrative. So I have decided to make some general comments about the history, the times and the issues.

I find it difficult to describe to others why I became a priest. I think some think it is kind of a cult madness phase I went through before coming to my senses. Let me examine whether this was the case. So why did Steve and I take this on and why did we stay in it so long?

THE VALUES AND IDEALS

To be fair it should be noted that part of the belief package of the catholic church contained some superbly good values. 

The historic leader and “founder” of the tribe was a man who believed in compassion, non-judgmentalism, forgiveness of offences, non-violent change, respect and love for others, assisting the needy, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and supporting those in grief. 

It advocated that individuals live an upright, responsible, honest, and principled life. 

Embedded in the very notion of the tribe were the admirable dynamics of friendship and mutual support. I am calling it a tribe because that’s how it started – with a tribe who escaped autocratic rule in Egypt and formed itself into a cohesive unity trudging across the desert of Sinai.

The later breakaway tribe drew on the developed culture of the past with wonderful stories, such as the good samaritan, songs, inspiring music like Gregorian chant and poetic polished words in their holy books. Francis of Assisi, after whom our no.1 son and MC, and the Pope is named, created a prayer containing the words “where there is hatred, let me sow love.”

The leader’s name of the breakaway christian tribe was Jesus. His followers talked of the dignity of the human person, the concept of human rights, and the duty to follow one’s conscience. Many of his followers became distinguished advocates of social justice. 

That was the understood plus side. 

But as Steve and I both learned later, it became a source of wonderment to us how little of these values figured in our “training”.

IMMINENT THREAT OF NUCLEAR WAR

Some of us had other motives for signing on for the priesthood. Another powerfully subconscious influence was ceaselessly present in the 50’s and 60s. It was the imminent threat of nuclear war. Russia and the West had acquired the capability of destroying the world. I remember a read-out paper by a fellow student in the seminary, Mick Kelly, who began his lecturette with the sentence,
“ … it has been calculated, by men in a position to so calculate, that both Russia and the United States have the capacity to destroy the world, and every living thing in it, eight times over. “

So – don’t waste your life, become a priest, and do your bit to make the world a more loving, peaceful and safer place.

We are much less aware these days but it is alarming to note that asa physical threat, nothing has changed.

INSPIRATIONAL BROTHERS, PRIESTS – CATHOLIC MEN AND WOMEN 

Most of us don’t think of it much but there were some really good men who inspired Steve and me and others.  Steve talks about the people who influenced him. His catholic aunt, the psychiatrist, for example, gets a good and worthy mention.

When I reflect about it, I acknowledge I have been helped through life by some very good institutional catholic people. At the same time as experiencing the sadism of Bro Malachi and indirectly the paedophilia of Brother Silverius, I recognise with gratitude the key intervention of Brother Dermott, of St Canice’s, Katoomba, who made sure with my parents that I did not leave to work at the end of primary school, which I easily could have done. 

I recall with gratitude too the wonderful dedicated teaching of Bro Anthony (English, Latin, maths) and that of Brother Mark (Physics) of St Bernard’s College, Katoomba. What I learned from them still stays with me every day. Another key intervention was by Brother Lawrence of the Marist Brothers, Parramatta, who changed my life for the better in another way.

As we are talking about the male priesthood there were a number of priests too, with whom I crossed paths. I observed them organising youth clubs, visiting old people’s homes, helping poverty stricken families through the St Vincent de Paul, listening to people when there was no one else who would. 

COMMUNITY AND IDENTITY

Subconsciously, we both acknowledged that the church gave us a broader family. It was here we gathered, here we made friends, here we had rituals which gave us a sense of stability. 

It was here we gained a sense of identity and a reassurance that we belonged.( And when we chucked it in, this is what disturbed us the most.)

So I don’t think Steve and I and the other former priests here were empty headed victims of a humungous cult which sucked us in. We were not a group of really stupid people. 

THE DOWNSIDE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The disillusionment

When we studied and lived our way through the seminary, as Steve relates, and when we became ordained priests and when we were put out into a parish, we couldn’t help digging deeper. 

We realised we were not achieving our admirable ideals. Society had changed enough to render us less effective than our predecessors. It became clear to us that the catholic church organisational set-up did not work any more. Steve talks about having to live with the lost and twisted personalities of a string of parish priests. My experience too. Don’t get me wrong – they were,  and they started off, really good men. But we observed many who sought solace in alcohol, golf, greyhound racing and girlfriends. The organisational church was trying to operate through a system designed for the world of the Council of Trent back in 1545. We were living in the thought-bubble of the sixteenth century. We were clinging to a world view which wasn’t ever supposed to change. 

But the world did change and was changing. In 1962 Pope John XXIII inaugurated the second Vatican Council which we seminarians and young priests observed drew fierce under-the-radar resistance. 

The world in general radically changed in all sorts of ways in the 1960s and the 1970s. 

Most people to whom I converse on this have lost, or have never had an awareness of, the gianormous change in Western society that was the advent of birth control. When we were young, families of 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12 children were quite common. And I am not talking just of catholics – for most couples children just kept on coming, for the simple reason that there was no way of stopping them except abstinence.

Following this came a really big mistake. The catholic church shot itself in the foot on birth control. On the 25th July 1968, Pope Paul VI overode the delegates to the Vatican Council, issued an encyclical named Humanae Vitae, and, by that instrument, forbad birth control. The church lost a huge amount of credibility. It kept losing credibility because of its stance on same sex relationships, monogamous marriage and the refusal to countenance divorce, an outright ban on abortion, held fast against women taking hold orders, and, silliest mistake of all, the insisted on maintaining celibacy of the clergy. 

Who could measure the harm of not coming to terms with the relatively small percentage of priests who were paedophiles, the consequent cover ups, and the mistreatment of victims and their families. 

THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS

Some of us faced a deeper and more confronting issue. Did God actually exist? If there was a God, was he the one described in the old and new testaments and in the christian story of salvation history?   

A disturbing personal revelation in my seminary studies is that I became aware that the New Testament only came together in its start-up stage about four hundred years after Jesus had died. (The Council of Hippo in 393 AD)

The New Testament took shape by choosing documents from a whole range of stuff, and it has became smoothed out and edited in the seventeen centuries which followed. What?

GOING TO MASS

One looks at the billions of stars in the sky and one says to oneself — is the being that created all this, if he/she did create it, listening to me when I take some bread and wine and dress up in fancy robes and starting asking him for things? 

And then there is the seemingly meaningless nature of it all. All the planets that the new super telescopes and cameras have picked up are just balls of dust and rock and gas – for what purpose? Are human being capable of working his out?

I am a cultural catholic, most of my best friends are practising, lapsed or almost-lapsed catholics, but I find it very difficult attending mass, which I sometimes have to do, such as when a catholic friend dies. The presumption that the priest and the people are actually talking to the Someone who created all these billions of stars, is so strong, and such a stretch, that I find it totally surreal.

I’ve read Steve’s book and you should buy your own copy, get it autographed, and read it!

Many men left the priesthood during these disillusioning years. We suffered turmoil, angst, worry and a loss of identity. We had no money. We had no qualifications which got us jobs. We had a fierce struggle to catch up financially – it drained us of energy and time for enjoyment. Steve’s financial struggle, one which I too experienced, moved me greatly. 

One choice Steve did make was spot on. From the beginning, he latched on to this beautiful woman named Paula. They brought forth three sons from our mysterious universe. We aren’t all so smart Steve. Congratulations on that one. 

Friends, as human beings we live by stories. This is a good one. I hereby launch this book.

A Safe Distance: Surviving Religious Trauma
by Steve Hyndes
Book Review and personal commentary
by Dally Messenger (Christmas 2022)

(see below for reviews by Graeme Ryan, Kieran Tapsell and Carla van Raay)

No matter what your circumstances, it is a truism that happiness and equilibrium depend on what goes on in one’s own mind. While on a trip to Sydney some years ago, I took my then-wife over to Saint Patricks College, Manly. St Patrick’s is an impressive nineteenth century college on a beautiful hill above the suburb. It overlooks the ocean and it has the beaches on one side and the famous Sydney Harbour on the other.  Both the author and myself spent four years of our lives in that place studying for the Catholic priesthood.  

My wife asked the question – “How could anyone be unhappy here?” 

The remark took me totally by surprise. Yes, it is an outstandingly beautiful location, but I only remember it as a source of inner conflict, angst, anxiety and agonising. Years later it remains a source of puzzled amusement to my daughters that I put myself in this position voluntarily, and a further kind of mystery why I didn’t walk out of the place when I was always free to do so.

In an attempt to sort himself out and explain his life to his own three sons and their successors, Steve Hyndes has written this revealing book on his own story. He is about the same age as I am and his book is a straight out chronological story.

In 1976 at 38 years of age he left the priesthood, troubled and in turmoil. He had decided to turn his life around and reject almost everything that he believed in, and had deeply committed himself to, for so many years. Difficult is such an understatement.

The beginnings of his life run their course in post World War II country Queensland. His father was the local GP in a number of country towns. Steve came from a large family of seven children, 3 girls and 4 boys.

He has an unbridled admiration for his mother. Their father had died before Steve had turned twelve. After his father’s death in 1950 she struggled against great odds to raise a family with very little money or resources. Fortunately, his father had a sister, Auntie Kit – a fervent Catholic – a single woman – a psychiatrist with a good income  — who chose to help the family and was clearly a life saving support.

Young men sign up to study for the priesthood for various reasons. Steve Hyndes recalls his times. In Australia in the 1950s, religion was a powerful force in the lives of almost everyone. The vast majority of the population were believing Christians and most were members of the Catholic Church or the Church of England. The White Australia policy was not abolished until 1973 so there were few other faith groups. 

Sectarianism was rife, or to put it another way, catholics felt hostile to non-catholics and vice versa. You belonged to a “tribe”. You were part of it, you believed in it, you absorbed the almost primal instinct to do your part in it. You were called on from above to make sure the tribe survived and was successful. 

Human beings tend to believe what those around them believe.So you followed everyone else. You did not like the other tribe, and you were taught that they were on the wrong track. Becoming a dedicated worker, a priest, in the catholic tribe drew almost universal approval and respect. The god of the tribe only called special people to play this important role, a mysterious personal calling dubbed “a vocation”. Says Hyndes: “ I was a sponge in this environment, absorbing all that was taught and placing absolute trust in those who were the leaders.” 

So in February 1956, at 17 years of age, Hyndes entered the seminary at St Columba’s College, Springwood, to study for the priesthood. To be fair it should be noted that part of the belief package contained some superbly good values. The historic leader and “founder” of the tribe was a man who believed in compassion, non judgmentalism, forgiveness of offences, non-violent change, respect and love for others, assisting the needy, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and supporting those in grief. It advocated that individuals live an upright, responsible, honest, principled life. Embedded in the very notion of the tribe were the admirable dynamics of friendship and community. The tribe drew on the the developed culture of the past with wonderful stories, songs and poetic polished words. The leader’s name was Jesus. His followers talked of the dignity of the human person, the concept of human rights, the duty to follow one’s conscience and an awareness of social justice. That was the understood plus side. But as Steve and I both learned later, it became a source of wonderment to us how little of these values figured in our “training”.

There was another powerfully subconscious influence ceaselessly present in the 50’s and 60s. It was the imminent threat of nuclear war. Russia and the West had acquired the capability of destroying the world. I remember a read out paper by a fellow student in the seminary, Mick Kelly, who began his lecturette with the sentence, “it has been calculated, by men in a position to so calculate, that both Russia and United States have the capacity to destroy the world and every living thing in it, eight times over. “

Don’t waste your life, become a priest, and do your bit to make the world a more loving, peaceful and safer place.

St Columba’s seminary, Steve found, was a cold, unnecessarily spartan place with an agenda of destroying individuality and initiative, and brainwashing the inmates to be functionaries who unquestionably do what is necessary to keep church authority supported and in power. Part of the package was a God who guided and supported seminary authorities, and demanded as much unthinking obedience as they required. 

The notion of fear was driven home relentlessly. Fear of offending God, fear of committing sin, fear of trouble with the authorities, fear of not becoming the docile functionary God wanted, fear of “impure” thoughts, fear of purgatory, fear of hell, fear of the world, fear of predatory women, fear of disappointing proud parents, fear of not saying enough prayers, fear of disloyalty to the system, fear of failure to stay the course. 

As he tried to sort out the serious issues, Steve Hyndes was particularly haunted by the Church’s  preached “mantra”  – There is nothing wrong with the system; what we are dealing with is the failure of individuals – . Somehow, his problems must come back to his failure as an individual. Not a bad formula for creating a giant inferiority complex and a loss of personal esteem. He spends Chapter 4 describing the seminary and its routines, its meal times, its prayer times, its study times and how he subconsciously accepted these strange but psychologically harmful routines. (don’t forget he was only seventeen.) 

His acceptance of seminary life continued in the years he left St Columba’s and continued his studies at St Patrick’s Manly. One only has to read his description of college life to draw quite a few conclusions.

Omnibus periculis superatis, (all perils overcome) Hyndes became a priest in July 1962. Now aged 24 he was cast into that strange world of living in a succession of parishes. His first parish priest was Barney, a blustery but pleasant Irishman whose lifestyle was dominated by the Housie-Housie (Bingo), golf, pigeons in the belfry, and the greyhound races. 

At the same time, in this vineyard of the Lord, the young priest kept on falling in love with the beautiful young girls in the CYO (Catholic Youth Organisation). He became shocked and aware that his fellow priests were not all celibate, and at big meetings of priests under Cardinal Gilroy, he experienced a disillusioning “meanness of spirit”, an atmosphere of judgmentalism, and a kind of anger at the world.

Hyndes next appointment was not so pleasant. His parish priest of Bankstown was Phil the angry. Phil was always seething and ranting about something. He was a denouncer of his many disapprovals from the pulpit. A “kiss-up kick-down bully”, he was a user of sleeping tablets, a drinker of alcohol, and a chain-smoker of cigarettes. “He was a fine example of how the destructive training regime and the clergy culture can isolate and destroy individuals.” Hyndes experience at this parish, he believed, destroyed any semblance of self-esteem or personal autonomy he had left. 

Hyndes worked in several more Sydney diocesan parishes especially Caringbah and The Entrance. By this time he had gained a grasp of the larger Catholic Church scene and how abnormal and mentally sick it all was. His fellow priests were basically good men but there were so many whose personalities had become distorted. He felt frustrated by the conservatism of the older priests but much more by the celibate lifestyle and the idiosyncratic, eccentric and warped effects which resulted.

The system was flawed, and this compromised the individuals within it. He observed that, in this bent and buckled social milieu, his fellow members of clergy were not drawing the spiritual inspiration with could result in a happy and fulfilled life. Quite a few of his priest contemporaries were leaving the ministry.

In the midst of his personal deliberations, he had a brief conversation with the famous Bishop “Bull” Muldoon. Muldoon told Steve that at 36 he was too old to start a new life, so it was better for him to stay in the priesthood. Nothing like a bit of high end motivation!

At a retreat to sort himself out, Steve met Paula. She was a young, enchanting, personable and beautiful woman who had left the convent a couple of years previously. The writing started appearing on the wall. It was a shocked relief to both of them when they became pregnant. The die was cast. Decisions finalised by nature itself. Steve drove out of Sydney towards Melbourne. As he did so, his soul was flooded with relief – the same exhilarating feeling I had experienced some seven years before.

Here I intrude the personal. There are now a number of Australian books written about leaving the seminary and / or the priesthood. All the ones which I have read describe similar dehumanising experiences. I was appointed to a parish called Lochinvar. The parish priest, Father Flatley, opened my bedroom door at 2am one morning and as I awoke let out a frenzied verbal diatribe attack on me for desecrating the Mass as a sacrifice and trying to turn it into a cheap meal among friends. 

Another memory was at the parish of Muswellbrook where the parish priest, a bedridden alcoholic, begged me to buy him a bottle of Dewars Scotch Whisky. For acceding to his wish (near dying wish as at turned out), the senior curate, one Roderick O’Neill, who lived in an abandoned convent down the road, vitriolically excoriated me for encouraging his alcoholism. I’ve been insulted a few times since but never as lucidly as I was on those two occasions. 

If I wrote a book like Steve’s I would have mentioned the issues which caused almost unbearable inner conflict. Birth control dominated my scene in 1968. Priests were excommunicated and suspended for voicing their opposition. Divorce then was an absolute no-no. Who would have believed that years later annulments would become the catholic form of divorce?  Celibacy, of course was a big issue, women clergy not too far behind. Add some angst about Bob Santamaria’s “The Movement”, the Vietnam war, and the notion and psychological grip of church authority. (This is not to ignore the questions of the existence of God, life after death, the purpose of existence if it has one, the rotation of useless barren planets, the beginning of time and the end of space and the whole unknowable kit and catastrophe.)

Sorry Steve, back to you. So Steve and Paula with number one son, Francis, set about putting food on the table. It is so painful to recall that we ex-priests had no recognised qualifications and certainly no money. Steve, at 36, was a at least 18 years behind his regular contemporaries financially. He had to start from scratch. What could he do? This part I found so so painful. Sending out job application after job application. Working your wits. Taking whatever was going. Low money, hard work. One saving feature. Steve had a loving wife. She also had tickets. She was a trained nurse and an operating theatre manager, as well as a qualified social worker. She kept the family surviving sometimes when he had no employment. He took challenging work managing difficult businesses, taking on jobs in outfits full of human problems — and travelling all over Australia to get the work. But he did it. His three sons grew up. Well done Steve and Paula. He retired. 

When you are desperately paying the bills you do not have any time to dig into the deep recesses of your own psyche. A time came for Steve to examine his unconscious self, to get therapy, to gain enlightenment, to free his mind of the pervasive mental wounds which had been inflicted by his church past. He read a series of books by writers who shared his experiences and how they coped. This is a good section of the book and the note it ends on. 

The book itself is an easy read. It simply tells the story. A record of social history of a certain era, of the unique past through which we lived. Steve has no pretensions of producing a masterpiece of literature. We learn through stories. I learned more of myself through this one. Thank you Steve Hyndes.

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“A Safe Distance: Surviving Religious Trauma” by Steve Hyndes.
A short review from Professor Graeme B. Ryan AC of the University of Melbourne

This is a brave and engaging book, intensely personal and frank, recording first how Steve Hyndes was “groomed” into the Catholic Church, entering the seminary in 1956 at the age of 17, followed by his ordination as a priest in Sydney in 1962.  He had “swallowed the whole toxic package” resulting sadly in his feeling of entrapment as a priest into a life of significant turmoil, disillusionment and unhappiness from which he was not able to escape until 1976 when he “left that strange world”.  

Steve was fortunate then to be able to reinvent himself, against the odds, and get on with a life of “new adventures” filled with family and fulfilment in partnership with Paula, a former nun, over the next 40 years and beyond.  

This is an inspirational story interlaced with interesting anecdote and self-deprecating humour, sometimes bleak in the earlier years, but always an entertaining, uplifting and worthwhile read throughout the book.

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“A Safe Distance: Surviving Religious Trauma” by Steve Hyndes.
A short review from Kieran Tapsell, author, lawyer , academic

At the beginning of his book, A Safe Distance: Surviving Religious Trauma, Steve Hyndes describes how his maternal grandfather, Thomas Robertson Thompson, who died in 1922, left an account to inform his family of his life and times, which “was different to theirs”.

One of the realities of human existence is that all of us slip into the past and will be forgotten within a couple of generations, unless somewhere along the line, pen is put to paper in some form of biography. I have always thought it a shame that some of my more interesting ancestors did not put pen to paper. 

Much of the book will be of interest to his family, but there is another group of people who would also find it interesting because they have travelled along the same path of a reverse St. Paul or St. Augustine. These two giants of the Christian religion were famously struck by such strong religious experiences that they devoted their whole lives to propagating their beliefs and in trying to convince others that it was the only right way to live. Their experiences have been so intriguing that their lives and writings have become an important part of Western literature. 

There is another spiritual journey, just as intriguing, of those who were born into that same religion and who devoted a great part of their lives to its practice and propagation but then slowly and painfully saw the scales fall from their eyes to see that they had been operating under a delusion, with just as much conviction as St Paul and St Augustine had viewed their former lives. The only difference is that most of these survivors don’t feel the need to convince others of their non-belief and are happy to put it down to experience and move on.

It is not surprising that neuroscientists have discovered that the centres of the brain that deal with religious experience are the same as those dealing with the experience of falling in love. And indeed, much spiritual literature in religions of all persuasions describe the religious experience in similar terms. It leads to a kind of blindness where one can only see the good qualities of the beloved, and the bad qualities slip into the drawer of non-importance. George Pell once described how he started reading the Koran to try and understand Islam, which at that time was plagued by various forms of violent extremism. He said he couldn’t finish it because he was turned off by the violence in this holy book. George must have read his Old Testament with the rose-tinted spectacles of the besotted. It is also interesting that dignitaries of mainstream Christianity are quick to brand splinter groups as “cults” without seeing the beam in the eye of their own. 

Steve Hyndes writes about his difficult journey from belief to unbelief: “There was no flash of lightning. It was like waking up one day after a bout of flu’ and realising that I was alive and well. I had reached a stage where I regarded the Catholic Church with the same interest as a plate of cold day-old fish and chips.” He does not see his experience as something special, saying it is a bit like ex-soldiers adjusting to civilian life, athletes at the end of their sporting life, adults and children involved in divorce or people facing up to the reality of their different sexual orientation. This transition may be relatively easy for some, but for others it can be traumatic. The subtitle and contents of the book suggest that for Steve, it was the latter.

Art became a source of therapy for him and the book contains copies of his interesting paintings. Some of them are mournfully surreal, particularly those dealing with his clerical past.

The book is a very easy read. Some outside his family may find his descriptions of different jobs and constant house moving as worth skimming over, but his journey of the mind in and out of the Catholic Church is interesting even if it is a familiar painful story.

A Safe Distance – by Steve Hyndes
A Review by Carla van Raay, author of God’s Call Girl

As an ex-nun who left her order at about the same time as the author of this fascinating account left his priestly life, I was enthralled to read and compare the details of the restrictive life of a male within the Catholic clerical structure with my own experiences.

I had expected something more human or humane than my own experiences of convent life, but I found that the religious indoctrinations accompanied by years of destructive criticisms and dehumanisations Steve Hyndes endured, were far more severe. Of course, it is easy for me now to look back and wonder how we could have allowed such manipulation for more than a week! That we both did for years, and in Steve’s case for 26 years, is testimony to the power of inducing guilt and in the systematically reducing of confidence in one’s own innocence and validity from early childhood. 

The first part of the book, which deals with the author’s clerical life in full cinematic colour and a bland sense of humour, I found the most engrossing. I smiled a lot in spite of the grim content, and also laughed out loud. His ruminations about sex and the shocking revelation of how celibacy of his fellow priests was simply a ‘face’ or ‘farce’ and not always a fact, were particularly interesting to me, since sexual freedom can be equated (at least by me) with the freedom to think for oneself. In the case of vowed celibacy, however, this freedom is marred by a harmful duplicity. That Steve finally connected with Paula, who was to become his wife and mother of three sons, felt like a relief at last to me.

After leaving the priesthood, I looked for accounts of his spiritual development along truer lines, but had to wait for a long time for that as I read the accounts of many movements through many towns and places as they made their lives together, often looking for work. At twenty pages from the end, we get a first good idea of how the clerical mask, preserved internally in spite of so much disillusionment, is faced full on and beginning to get dismantled. Without a clear new belief system to replace the old, the process proved to be extremely difficult, accompanied with physical symptoms reflecting severe emotional stresses. 

I laud Steve Hyndes for writing so openly about these very personal experiences, offered to the reader with the hope that understanding will dawn on those likewise brainwashed, whether as clerics or as church-goers. By reading this account, one cannot stay blind to the contradictions within a religion which preaches love and lives self-hatred. I wish him and his dear wife Paula the happiest of relaxed years to come. 

Carla van Raay, author of God’s Callgirl and Carla’s News and Views 

www.carlavanraay.com 

Perth, Western Australia. 

My friend, Dr Val Noone,  has just published a book entitled Dorothy Day in Australia to coincide with the 50th anniversary of her once only visit in 1970. To mark this occasion I am, on his behalf,  releasing an audio recording of Dorothy’s speech at the Public Lecture Theatre, University of Melbourne, on 16 August , 1970

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. She led a wild and bohemian lifestyle in her younger years. A journalist and a Labour radical, she converted to Catholicism in her thirties, opening a House of Hospitality on the lower east side of Manhattan, New York.  Dorothy founded a newspaper called the Catholic Worker which combined traditional Catholicism with advanced social ideals. Fuller information available on the web e.g. her Wikipedia entry under “Dorothy Day”.

Dorothy was one of the most interesting and puzzling figures in the history of 20th Century Catholicism, and of American dissent. She has had a small but definite effect on Australian Catholic culture to this day.

The following recording gives a rare and precious insight into her personality and mission. (There are some difficulties in the early minutes of the tape.)

ORDER FORM for the Dorothy Day Book

Shorten,  the ALP , and losing the election

Back to the ALP self-examination on why we lost the election. Am I nuts or something? The ALP is giving into Joel Fitzgibbon and the burn coal group.
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What beat the ALP is the $60 million dollar gift to the Liberal Party campaign by Clive Palmer. And the money was well spent on the fear of Shorten being “shifty”.  In current discussions it is not even getting a mention. Clive’s advertisements landed on fear. Fear, the psychologists tell us, is the best motivator. The Fear of “Shifty Shorten” message was far more effective than, $60million saying, “Vote Liberal Party”.

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The loss in the last election of May 2019 had little to do with “policies” – it was a $60 million dollar political donation to the Coaltion by Clive Palmer to save his coal mines. This was a huge amount even by USA Coke Brothers standard

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If $60million would have been donated to the ALP we would have won the election easily.

Clive only had to sway 3% – but in my opinion his advertisements  swayed many more.

$60 million dollars, effectively spent, has a big effect.

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And it was so cleverly donated. 

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So you pretend you are starting a new political party without policies and spend the guts of the advertising on attacking the person of “Shifty” Shorten. And this was not any kind of advertising. Clive let loose the full catastrophe — radio, television, print newspapers, robo calls – the works. All of it was in piercing McDonalds yellow Coca Cola repetition, and shades of “Crooked” Hillary – plus a really ugly photo of Bill Shorten.

We didn’t lose, comrades. We had wonderful policies. We were beaten by capitalist money.