A turbulent priest

Things continue to go well. At the moment, my only real concern is the occasional flourish of stigmata from the VAD wounds. Pinochet remains a broken, bitter man in exile, living on memories. I think he is somewhere in Teddington. I am exercising well and tweaking my diet to maintain the best condition for surgery. Now would be a very good time to receive the call.

Noel is now free from all drains and attachments and healing fast. He is scheduled to be discharged on Tuesday and everything he does is marked with unbridled enthusiasm. He is high as a high school student mucking up in the last week of school. He goes AWOL for hours on end wandering the hospital, enjoying his freedom. Once night the nurses found him asleep in a chair down in outpatients. He refuses his physio sessions and won't study his post-transplant tablet regime for the discharge exam. We all know Noel well and nobody is too concerned. He'll never wander too far and will eventually do his study. He likes to bend the boundaries but is smart enough not to jeopardise his own well being.

So very soon, Voight and Hoffman will cease their hospital partnership. The Midnight Cowboy will return to Wynnum Bay and Ratso will remain in the big house. I will continue to keep up contact with Noel.  He's a good bloke and we will all miss him up here. At some point this year, he is likely to grace our living rooms when the Sixty Minutes story airs.

Noel is looking to get himself a new car once he gets home. He has decided on a Hilux but perhaps he could look a little further afield and see if Jon Voight's Le Baron is still on the market. If he could secure that vehicle it would make for a great and very lucrative story.

Mandy is doing well. She is now able to get in and out of bed unaided and is pushing her VAD around the hospital corridors. It took me until late November or early December to do these things, but this is not a fair comparison. I was very sick and she is harnessing the amazing regenerative powers of youth. Mandy should heal quickly and well and she deserves that.

Mandy is aiming to spend most of her time on the waiting list at home. Her mother is a nurse and it looks like home will be a practical alternative for her circumstances. I really hope she can do this. Hospitals are inherently depressing places, filled with the old and infirm (with a few fabulously good looking middle aged lawyers here and there to break the monotony). They are not conducive to being young and free.

Over the course of my confinement, I have had a few visits from the former Bishop of Toowoomba, Bishop Bill Morris. My first memories of Bishop Morris date to my long lost adolescence. At the time, he was a young and vibrant new Bishop and the diocese quickly warmed to his energy and compassion. He became much loved and respected by his priests and parishioners with very good reason. He was an excellent pastoral Bishop and a kind and gentle man.

In 2006, Bishop Morris wrote an Advent letter to his parishioners in which he had the audacity to suggest, amongst other things, that the Church ought to consider the ordination of women and married priests to meet the chronic shortages in dioceses such as his own. The Bishop merely suggested that it be a subject for debate within the Church. Many Catholics agree with this, whether progressive or otherwise. I see no issue whatsoever in the implementation of such reform. Indeed, it is a blight on the Church that it wasn't done a long time ago.

Some parishioners did not agree with Bishop Morris' views and reported him to the Doctrine for the Congregation of the Faith in Rome. This resulted in Pope Benedict XVI deciding that someone needed to rid him of this turbulent priest and Bishop Morris was asked to resign. He did.

Rome's action saw the events in faraway Toowoomba makes headlines around the world. Local priests and parishioners were outraged and staged protests. Many of them, such as my parents, were conservative and quiet people who had never previously participated in an organised protest about anything.

Several prominent Catholic scholars believe that Rome acted in breach of both canon and civil law, because Bishop Morris had been denied procedural fairness. Among them are Father Frank Brennan, a  Jesuit priest and respected lawyer whose father sat as Chief Justice on the bench of the High Court of Australia. Another is Bill Carter, a retired judge of the Queensland Supreme Court.

True to character, Bishop Morris appears neither bitter nor regretful. He just goes about his business of being a wonderful and kind priest. He is one of the few men I truly admire and I am proud to welcome him into my hospital room. He is a man of God and a man of the people. I sleep well knowing that he is praying for me. The Church would be much stronger and more relevant to the modern world if it were able to embrace and promote the views and works of progressive and good men such as Bishop Morris. We seem to have lost more than a little ground since the days of Pope John XXIII.


Until next time,