No holding back on indigenous healthAn excerpt.
Brian McCoy is a Jesuit priest and a wati - an initiated man under traditional Aboriginal law. Does he know of anyone else who shares this duality? "No," he says. "Not one." His manner is quiet and, at that moment, faintly humorous. He is speaking on the phone from the Aboriginal community of Balgo, in Western Australia........One of what he calls "the biggest wounds" in Aboriginal culture is that so few kartiya (white people) either respect or understand their culture. "We don't really listen to Aboriginal people and learn from them."
Brian McCoy is a Jesuit priest and a wati - an initiated man under traditional Aboriginal law. Does he know of anyone else who shares this duality? "No," he says. "Not one." His manner is quiet and, at that moment, faintly humorous. He is speaking on the phone from the Aboriginal community of Balgo, in Western Australia........One of what he calls "the biggest wounds" in Aboriginal culture is that so few kartiya (white people) either respect or understand their culture. "We don't really listen to Aboriginal people and learn from them."
I ask him whether the Christian God and traditional Aboriginal beliefs are compatible. When Patrick Dodson tried to bring them together in the 1970s, when he was still practising as a Catholic priest, he was accused of inciting paganism."It depends how big your God is. If you have a theology which says God comes with this physical church, then the answer is probably no. If you see God at work in the lives and hearts of other people regardless of their culture, which is part of a long Jesuit tradition, it's not a problem."
Link (here) to a much larger article in The Age
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