KEY POINTS:
The 1960s brought youth rebellion and social change in New Zealand, as elsewhere - yet the Church remained entwined in this country's political and business affairs and the education of our young. In the northern half of the North Island, nearly 180,000 people identified as Catholic, while nearly
20,000 Auckland children attended Catholic schools.
Patriarch of the faith for nearly half a century was James Michael Liston, the Archbishop of Auckland. The son of a Dunedin publican forced to flee Ireland, Liston's Irish nationalism ensured early notoriety - he survived trial for sedition in 1922 after a St Patrick's Day speech was misreported as referring to British troops in Ireland as "foreign murderers". But his long reign would come to be characterised by innate conservatism, aloofness and suspicion of change.
By the late-60s, aged in his 80s, Liston's iron grip was challenged as never before by issues such as the contraceptive pill, abortion, and anti-Vietnam War protests. He sacked two editors of the newspaper he founded, Zealandia, for their comparative liberalism. He also suspended two young priests, Tony Peterson and Con Kiernan, in December 1968, after they took part in an anti-war demonstration.
Peterson was granted leave of absence from the Church in 1970 on condition that he leave the country. A biography of Liston, James Michael Liston: A Life, by Auckland writer and academic Nicholas Reid, has prompted Peterson to tell his story for the first time.
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I only knew Liston as an old man, but by that stage of his life he certainly was an expert in the art of bullying. When I attempted to uphold a piece of Catholic doctrine that he did not greatly care for I was punished, sworn under obedience to silence, and then had to sit back and take it on the chin while his lawyer lied about me on national TV.
Liston, even before his namesake arrived on the world boxing scene, was fond of pugilistic imagery according to Nicholas Reid's biography. Liston's methods were often far from sporting. I was metaphorically tied up and subjected to a good public kicking.
Virtually every Catholic commotion during his last two years in command of the diocese - the banning of the Tablet, the dismissal of successive Zealandia editors, the formation of the National Association of Priests - had some connection with the Vietnam War.
In 1968 the Vietnamese people were suffering the most horrendous onslaught suffered by any nation since World War II. After shameful interventions by France, Germany, Japan, Britain, and the USA the scene had been set for the most horrendous bombing campaign in human history. This campaign was peaking in 1968.
There are four clear conditions, all of which are necessary, before Catholics can take part in armed conflict with the blessing of their church's doctrines. Not one of these conditions was satisfied when New Zealand sent soldiers to Vietnam.
Prime Minister Keith Holyoake simply gave in to pressure from the United States (which threatened New Zealand with loss of access to US for dairy produce just as Britain was considering joining the Common Market) and sent a token force to support the Americans. He should have been opposed by the Catholic hierarchy, but was not.
So when Con Kiernan and I demonstrated against that war, we were upholding the teaching of the Catholic Church. There are today not many dogmas of the Church that I would agree with. However, the Just War doctrine pitches it, even in my present view, about right. The Catholic Church in New Zealand in 1968 had as much, or more, reason to oppose the action in Vietnam as it had, say, for opposing abortion clinics.
The text of Reid's book makes it clear why Liston felt it necessary to punish us for protesting against this idiotic crusade. Liston's political views overrode those Roman moral teachings in which he was supposedly expert. Then, as now, Catholic morality was a pick-and-mix matter for its bishops.
Reid notes that I was eventually reinstated as a curate well out of town. What he apparently did not know when he wrote his book was what happened to me between the suspension at Hillsborough and my new job.
When Kiernan was allowed home to his parents that December to wait further orders, I "disappeared". Liston raided the diocesan newspaper's bank account to pay for a one-way ticket by air to Napier and a bus ticket on to Takapau. I had been ordered, under obedience, to be silent, and was sent to the Cistercian monastery at Kopua.
There an embarrassed but sympathetic guest master told me I would be allowed to return only when I wrote a letter of apology to my bishop. I told him that I had nothing to apologise for. It was a pleasant couple of weeks, and I think those lovely, gentle, taciturn, medieval men were starting to worry that their guest house might be occupied for a very long time.
With Amnesty International starting to ask questions, and the press asking what had happened to me, and my father suffering a stroke, I too was eventually allowed home. But I made no apology. Ever. Six weeks later I was appointed as the junior of three priests at Te Aroha. Yes. Three priests. There isn't one there now.
There were a couple of other moments in my dealings with Liston which Reid may have wished to use had he known about them.
Early in 1968 I had a letter published in the Tablet criticising Liston's Lenten appeal. I quoted approvingly from the Sermon on the Mount that bit about doing good for your enemies, and mentioned that the Pope's Lenten appeal fund was to benefit equally North Vietnam and South Vietnam. I pointed out that Auckland's Lenten fund was going to Catholic charities in South Vietnam only.
I was promptly summoned to New St. Liston was incandescent. What Jesus of Nazareth said was irrelevant. What the Pope said was his business - "The Pope has his reasons, and I have mine. I don't have to tell you my reasons. If you criticise me I'll have you thrown out of my diocese."
You have to say that in Liston's funny voice to get its full impact. I remember walking back to my scooter muttering "So Liston trumps the Pope and Almighty God. Who is this man?"
One encounter with him was deliciously satisfying. It began with a sermon I gave in Manurewa. I noticed one of the Knights of the Southern Cross, Liston's secret army of informers, a few rows from the pulpit, carefully noting down a sentence.
By mid-week the expected summons arrived. The offending sentence was read back to me.
"Did you say that?" he demanded. I had to agree that I had. His spy had reported my words perfectly.
"Whatever made you spout such rubbish ... such utter rubbish?" he demanded.
"I am sure that your Grace knows as well as I do that those are the exact words of Pope John 23rd in the encyclical 'Pacem in Terns' in the CTS translation." There followed the longest pause in conversation I had ever known up to that moment. I had to break it. Helpfully, I gave him the reference "Section 159". The silence that followed was even longer. Only this time I waited for him to end it.
There are some amusing footnotes to the history of the Catholic Church in New Zealand which Liston's successor had to deal with. The time has come for me to own up to some of these.
The emergence of a National Association of Priests in 1969, intended as an independent forum for Catholic clergy which could give some democratic protection against the totalitarian behaviour of bishops, was a direct consequence of Liston's treatment of Kiernan and myself.
While rusticating in the Cistercian monastery at Kopua on Liston's orders, I reflected that the US and Australia had functioning unions of Catholic clergy, and New Zealand did not. Once I was posted to Te Aroha, together with my fellow curate, and with the help of the parish Gestetner (on the parish priest's day off), we circularised first those priests we felt were most likely to be sympathetic.
An advertisement for an independent national association was placed in the Victoria University Catholic students' magazine Dialectic. Responses and modest subscriptions were to be sent to a Wellington box number, which was used amongst others by the Catholic Peace Fellowship. Outgoing and incoming mailing was all bundled up and posted between Te Aroha and Wellington.
The response was surprisingly positive, although many criticised the secrecy of the operation. Others were upset to have missed out on the first mailing. The first two editions of the newsletter were printed at Te Aroha.
The cloak-and-dagger nature of the operation had some amusing consequences. A prominent Wellington layman, a Knight of the Southern Cross, of course, lay in wait in the box room at the Wellington Chief Post Office for almost a full day before tailing the student who cleared the box.
There were some surprises amongst the first members. All the ordained monks at Kopua joined up en bloc. Once we had a membership list and a volunteer from Wellington willing to organise a conference and elect a leadership we handed over the mailing list and the subscription balance. It quickly recruited roughly one third of New Zealand priests into its membership Sadly, it did not, last much more than a decade.
Although my career as a priest in Liston's diocese was short, lasting only four years, and my regular confrontations with the old man were personally bruising, I have retained a grudging respect for the memory of the weird character who ordained me. Though I have since met powerful people with fiefdoms much larger than Liston's, I have never met anyone as strange, or as sublimely convinced of his own total rectitude and his own divine right to command, as this Irish publican's son.
* After leaving NZ, Peterson settled in England and and resumed teaching. He lives in retirement with his wife in Cumbria.
* For a more impartial take on the Archbishop, see Nicholas Reid's biography, James Michael Liston: A Life, Victoria University Press, $49.95
