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“It’s political correctness gone mad. The tradition has always been to use ‘BC’ and ‘AD’.”
Christ’s time not quite up By Sarah Motherwell MOVES to substitute the use of ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ in school curricula with secular terms have been condemned by Catholic educators. Educators should honour traditions and heritage by using the traditional Christian dates, said the Director of Catholic Education in Western Australia, Ron Dullard. “This is political correctness gone mad. The traditions in this country have always been BC and AD. We shouldn’t be changing it to BCE and CE for namesake,” he said.
By 2013, under a proposal from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), schools will no longer have to refer to the terms BC (“Before Christ”) and AD (from the Latin Anno Domini, meaning “Year of Our Lord”). Schools will instead be free to use the secular historical terms BCE (“Before the Common Era” and CE (“Common Era”). A spokesman from the authority, which is responsible for making all changes to the national schools curriculum, described this as a “pre-
scriptive measure”. He emphasised schools could choose which system they preferred to use in teaching. “We’re not excluding BC and AD. We expect students to be conversant with a number of ways for representing dates in history,” the spokesman told The Record, adding: “This is not an attempt to denigrate Christianity in any way or form.” The use of the terms BC and AD date back to the 6th century and were formalised with the replacement of the Julian calendar by the Gregorian calendar under Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th century.
The dean of St Mary’s Cathedral and a governor of the University of Notre Dame, Monsignor Michael Keating, said he believed the decision of the curriculum authority was a further creep towards secularism and an attempt to be inclusive in a multicultural country. “My view is that secularists are trying to use this tactic to deChristianise society, to get rid of Christian symbols,” he said. “The fact is that the most notable person in history was Jesus Christ; I think most people acknowledge that. He’s had the biggest, most pro-
found effect on people in the world. “Before him, Before Christ, and Anno Domini, the time of Christ, is for me a very good line in the sand.” The new terms are increasingly used in academia, according to Dr Angela McCarthy, a theology lecturer at the University of Notre Dame. She said the use of “BCE” and “CE” came about in the 1980s when people of different religions wanted more fruitful discussion about their faiths. The curriculum changes are planned to be rolled out across the country in 2013.
A Mass each ’arvo starts the next day By Robert Hiini A NEW Catholic chapel has opened in the industrial heartland of Malaga. Next to an aluminium workshop and across the road from a giant hardware warehouse, St Philomena’s chapel has been established in a workshop unit off Juna Drive. It brings more Mass and confession time options to people working in or near the city, with a 4.45pm Mass from Monday to Friday and a 6.45am Mass on Monday mornings. St Philomena’s opened its doors on 22 July, the feast day of Mary Magdalene; chaplain Father David Watt said he already had interest from workers in the area. Fr Watt said the chapel was intentionally different from anything that was offered elsewhere, except perhaps for the Robert Healy Centre in Joondalup and All Saints chapel in the city. With 4.45pm mass being a vigil of the following day, he is doing his level best to help busy, working people keep alive the tradition of beginning each day with Mass. “As I always say, a day without Mass is a non-event,” Fr Watt said. “It’s not about attending ‘this’ Mass, it’s about attending ‘a’ Mass,” Fr Watt said. Continued on Page 5 At the office: Father David Watt outside his typical daily scene, St Philomena’s chapel in the industrial heartland of Malaga.
PHOTO: ROBERT HIINI
Adelaide archdiocese rejects abuse inquiry claim By Tim Wallace THE ARCHDIOCESE of Adelaide has denied allegations by the global head of the Traditional Anglican Communion that Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson and vicar-general Monsignor David Cappo failed to investigate a 2008 written complaint itemising a decade of sexually abusive behaviour by three Catholic priests – including one still running an Adelaide parish. Archbishop John Hepworth,
the head of an estimated 400,000 traditional Anglicans who split from the Anglican Communion in 1991 and who in 2007 expressed a desire to reunite with the Catholic Church, began his clerical career as a Catholic priest, being ordained in Adelaide in 1968. In revelations published by The Weekend Australian, Archbishop Hepworth said his decision to leave the Catholic Church in 1972 and become an Anglican had been driven by more than a decade of sexual exploitation by older semi-
narians and priests that began with his grooming for homosexual sex at the age of 15 at Adelaide’s St Francis Xavier Seminary; the abuse continued, he said, until he decided to leave Australia and the Catholic priesthood at the age of 27. In written statements provided to the archdiocese in 2008, Archbishop Hepworth details his youthful feelings of deep confusion and guilt over “sexual experiences that fed at the same time my need for friendship and acceptance” as well as his sense of “being trapped” by warn-
ings from superiors that any talk of sexual experiences would disqualify him from the priesthood. The statements name three priests who sexually abused him. Two of them are now dead: Fr John Stockdale, who died on New Year’s Eve in 1995 in a cubicle at a notorious “men-only” club in Melbourne; and Fr Ronald Pickering, who avoided prosecution for sexually abusing a string of teenage boys by fleeing to Britain. In 2001, the head of the Melbourne archdiocese’s Independent Commission on
Sexual Abuse, Peter O’Callaghan, QC, wrote that Pickering “had a proclivity for child abuse”. The third, according to Hepworth’s statement, one night in 1969 during a walk wrestled him to the ground and forced him into sex, and remains a senior cleric in the Adelaide archdiocese. The archdiocese said in its statement that an investigation into the allegations had been “on foot” since 2007 when Archbishop Hepworth first notified the archdiocese. Continued on Page 4