Priests Gone Wild!

Otago Daily Times, 6 Jan
About 1000 people were protesting against Israel’s air and ground offensive in Gaza…
Father Gerard Burns, the Parish Priest of Te Parisi o te Ngakau Tapu in Porirua, took part in the demonstration marching to the Yitzhak Rabin peace memorial in Wellington’s CBD. Father Burns smeared the memorial to Mr Rabin with a mixture of a drop of his blood and paint.

Kiwi Friends of Israel, 8 Jan
Pressure mounts on Priest gone wild
Pressure is mounting on Catholic Priest Fr Gerard Burns to apologise for desecrating a memorial to murdered Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, says Kiwi Friends of Israel…

NZ Herald editorial, 8 Jan
For Father Burns to desecrate the Rabin memorial is not only in breach of any civilised standard of protest but utterly wrongheaded in terms of his target. Rabin, a former Israeli general-turned-two-time-Prime-Minister, was perhaps the greatest hope for peace between Jews and Palestinians in a generation… The memorial in central Wellington marks that commitment to peace. The sins (as Father Burns might see them) of his successors in the Israeli Government cannot be visited upon Rabin… The organisers of the Wellington march… must know that their message against the killings of civilians, including children, is diverted and made hollow by a calculated insult to Jews everywhere….

NZ Herald, 9 Jan
The Archbishop of Wellington has apologised for the actions of a clergyman who attacked a memorial to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin… Auckland’s Catholic Bishop Patrick Dunn has also joined calls for Father Burns to apologise for desecrating the memorial to Mr Rabin.

I know Father Gerald (Gerry) Burns a little. He served in the church where I went as a child and supported my childhood school . He impressed me with his youth and energy, but I was quite frankly far too young to make any further comment about what he was like in those days, and when I was older I saw him too infrequently to know him as more than a friendly face. But while I can’t speak to his character, I can still speak to his impressive commitment to social justice issues and his concern for the suffering of innocents. Specifically, the way he spoke to me and others about his experiences in East Timor during the horrible fighting there. I’ve googled up this second-hand account from 1999:

In July, Father Gerry Burns returned to Wellington from East Timor with grave concerns as to the well-being of the people – he was part of an aid convoy attacked by militias, the third attack on UN convoys that week. He reported on a range of atrocities perpetrated by the pro-integration forces aimed at intimidating those in favour of independence – homes burned out, people tortured and killed, bodies mutilated. Food production was dropping all over East Timor as people were afraid to leave their homes and work the fields in case they were kidnapped or attacked.
The militias had a deliberate policy of targeting aid convoys to the displaced persons; and of mayhem and destruction to terrorise the people to prevent them registering to vote. Father Gerry described an atmosphere of total terror.

There was much more. Maybe East Timor radicalised Gerry; maybe he was already so inclined. Regardless, it is easy to imagine that his experiences in East Timor then would make him sensitive to the situation in Gaza today. So I have some sympathy for Burns, and I have to wonder that his side of the story is hardly anywhere to be found.
Burns and his fellow activists have claimed that the Rabin peace memorial is itself part of a manipulation of history that contributes to the situation in Gaza. It’s a rational (although complex) position to take* and makes instant sense of the chosen focus of the protest. However, this explanation has been thoroughly absent from media coverage. Partly this was because the explanation was only released Jan 10, several days after the narrative of the protest had been established; but that communicative ineptitude doesn’t excuse the news media from failing to ask whether there was, perhaps, a rationale behind the actions. Instead, the story stabilised around the image of an irrational rogue priest who had no idea of what he was doing and didn’t much care to find out.
Targeting the Rabin memorial for protest was, of course, foolish. The generally-accepted perception of the memorial is the precise opposite of the protester perception, and there’s hardly a clear link to the events in Gaza. That makes symbolic communication doomed to failure. (And spilling blood over a memorial stone? That’s just crass, no matter who the stone commemorates.)
So I don’t support the protest action, but nor can I find a reason to share in the outrage. I can see why Burns did what he did; I can see what he was getting at. And where is ignorance of his motives going to get anyone? Condemn the protest and disagree with the protester’s claims, by all means (and no-one has held back from that), but I would imagine a healthier society wouldn’t settle for “loony priest gone wild” as the sum total of explanation for his behaviour.
And let’s not forget, as the NZ Catholic hierarchy distance themselves from Fr Burns, that Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican’s Council for Justice and Peace, just called Gaza a “big concentration camp.” Perhaps Gerry Burns isn’t as much a rogue as some would take comfort in believing.
* For the record, I think there is definitely something to the claim that the Rabin memorial is part of a process of hagiographical revisionism that serves the purposes of PR for the Israeli state; but I’d take some convincing, given the compelling fact that he was assassinated by someone on the far right of Israeli internal politics. Regardless, it would be a complex argument, covering a number of historical variables that are still very uncertain.