The marginalisation of Ted Kennedy

Idealism often leads people who belong to idealistic groups to live and work among the marginalised. In time they often feel marginalised and are seen as marginalised within the organisations to which they belong. They are said to 'go native'.

This is often seen as an event to be avoided and as a problem to be solved. Wiser counsel suggests it is a fact to be accepted. If you live at the margins, you will be marginalised, if you work at the boundaries you will be seen to be outside the main game, if you dwell beyond the frontiers you will lose your citizenship. That is what happens. The real question is: how do you handle this fact of life?

Edmond Campion's stimulating new book describes the process of marginalisation, and suggests lines of reflection on it. He tells the story of Ted Kennedy, a notable Sydney priest whose desire for an engaging form of ministry led him to Redfern in the 1970s. There he found and was found by the Aboriginal community. He opened his church and his house to people as he found them — which often meant drunk, dirty and abusive — and stayed with them for 25 years. In his language, he found Christ in them.

He also felt and was seen as marginalised. Acting as if nothing mattered more than to respect and be with his people soon brought him into conflict with police and landowners. It also alienated him from some of his parishioners and brought him into tension with church authorities whom he believed to have only a perfunctory interest in Indigenous Australians.

He came to see the world and church through the eyes of Aboriginals. This perspective inevitably diverged more and more sharply from that of officers of church and government who saw them only in relationship to their own institutions and their own kind of people.

This is a common experience and fact of marginalisation. Its logic is to alienate people from the group in which they found the inspiration to live at its edges. That is a pity because it cuts off a basically well-disposed group from the bridge that could be made to the marginalised community. How then can people handle the fact of marginalisation in such a way that they can feed back their experience to their broader community?

The structure of Jesuit thinking may be helpful here. Recent Jesuit rhetoric has picked up the commitment of their founder Ignatius Loyola to work at the frontiers of race, religion, culture and ideology that ordinary church organisation cannot easily reach.

Ignatius addressed the fact of marginalisation by supposing that Jesuit missions to the frontiers came from the symbolic centre of the Catholic Church, the Pope. He also suggested actions that would help to resist alienation: praising devotional practices like long prayers and devotions, refraining from criticism of prelates and so on.

But underlying these practices and this imaginative vision lay the bonds that linked Jesuits to one another. They were expressed in the letters from distant missions, reports from dangerous postings and so on.

These ways of imagining and acting in the world will seem prissy and self-protective when they are adopted as a slogan by those who live and work among Catholics. They will be used to suggest that marginalisation is a problem, not a fact, and ultimately discount any kind of life at the margins. But when they are embodied in a life lived at the edge they will have a robust, often rebarbative, shape.

As Ed Campion shows, the way in which flesh and blood human beings like Ted Kennedy creatively handle being marginalised is messy. Ted handled it with rage followed by request for forgiveness, with indictment of Catholic pastoral priorities and safer understandings of what it meant to be a priest, with large expectations of himself and others, a simple faith, and with a gift for friendship and good conversation.

He was a priest in a world without walls. He was blown by the winds that raged through his world. He often raged at those who lived a more sheltered life, and faithfulness became native to him. There are other ways of being Catholic and being a priest, but as a margin dweller he was exemplary: subversive of settlements that trimmed the Gospel, a human being among human beings, and faithful to his calling. 

Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He also teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.

Source: www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=15140