Cafe siege breaks city’s heart

Hell had touched Sydney with the 16-hour siege in a city cafe this week, Archbishop Anthony Fisher said at a Mass only hours after the crisis ended with the deaths of two hostages and the gunman.

Speaking on 16 December at St Mary’s Cathedral, only two blocks from the Lindt Chocolate Cafe in Martin Place where an Iranian man, Haron Monis, held 17 hostages captive, Archbishop Fisher said the heart of the city had been broken by the deaths of two innocent hostages, the injuries and the trauma of the event.

“We are not used to hearing words like ‘siege’, ‘terrorist’, ‘hostages’ associated with our city,” he said. “Yet for the past day and night we were subjected to pictures and sounds we tend to associate with alien lands. In a [nearby] cafe ... hostages were pinned for hours against the windows and forced to hold up a flag which blasphemously used the name of God as a threat ... But despite patient efforts to negotiate, there were, in the early hours of this morning, flashes of gunfire, intervention by our police to save lives, merciful escapes, but finally death. Hell had touched us.”

The archbishop went on to make a powerful reference to the darkness that surrounded the birth of Christ. “So the backdrop to the Light who will dawn for us at Christmas is in fact darkness. The Way, the Truth and the Life comes to people who often lose their way … to what is often a culture of death more than of life.”

During the siege, the grand mufti of Australia and National Imams Council issued a statement in which they condemned “this criminal act unequivocally”.

The Australian  Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council has acknowledged that clericalism may have contributed to child sexual abuse. In an Activity Report detailing its two years of work in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the council also said training was necessary for priests and Religious, “including psychosexual development”.