This was the reaction of Te Kupenga – Catholic Theological College lecturer and abuse survivor Dr Rocio Figueroa to the “heart-wrenching testimonies” of abuse survivors at the royal commission on abuse in care hearings held from November 30 to December 4, 2020.

“It caused me deep pain, not only to listen to the stories of each of the testimonies [of people] who suffered the most atrocious abuses when they were innocent kids, but also to listen to the lack of response or hopeless way in which, many times, we have handled the disclosure within our communities,” Dr Figueroa said.

“As a member or the Catholic Church, I regret our poor response, and I apologise for all that we could have done and we have not done,” she said.

Dr Figueroa said she recognised the situations that the survivors describe, because “it was more or less the same experience” that she had.

She said that in listening to them, she picked up on a lot of good recommendations that came out of the hearing – which was into redress processes in faith-based institutions. (The Anglican Church and the Salvation Army were the focus of the second week at the hearing).

First, Dr Figueroa said, “we need to be people who show mercy”.

Showing mercy, she said, means to open our hearts to the pain of survivors, and to question our attitudes.

“[To] show mercy means to learn to apologise and become a survivor-centred Church, in which we try to support the victims, not with our own methods or our own ideas of what can be helpful to them,” she said, “but listening to their needs and involving them in the healing process.”

One survivor called for the Samoan practice of seeking forgiveness (called Ifoga), while another sought an apology in person. Others called for the removal of honours from perpetrators.

Dr Figueroa said the Church should see this time as a moment of conversion and transformation and that means taking responsibility.

“Conversion involves treating survivors not as ‘problems’ to be solved, but to see in them Jesus’ countenance. In many cases, our institutions have entered a process of managing liability, forgetting that our main concern is to take responsibility of the wounds that, as a Church, we have inflicted,” she said.

Dr Figueroa said there is a need to train priests and religious, as well as lay people, on how to respond to traumatised victims.

“They (priests, religious and lay people) need to be trauma-informed. Victims are very sensitive, very wounded. You need to be able to understand them, to be empathetic,” she said.

She said the Church’s actions cannot be limited to treating the survivors in a legalistic manner, “to minimise the effects or negotiate compensation”.

“We need, in each instance, an integral response: justice, compensation, healing and pastoral care, taking care of the needs of the survivors,” she said.

Dr Figueroa pointed out the problem is not confined to the clergy and religious. She said the temptation is to make it someone else’s problem: the bishop’s, the National Office for Professional Standards’s, the congregation’s or the parishes’ problem.

“This transformation is not just required from the authorities. We lay people have enabled abuse with our idealisation of priests and clericalism,” she said, pointing out that lay people have considered members of the clergy beyond accountability.

Lastly, she said, the Church needs to accompany the survivors.

“Accompanying them means to be open to change and improvement,” Dr Figueroa said. “We can only rebuild confidence if we recognise the deep impact of the damage and violence that have wounded many victims.”

She said one of the recommendations was to have the process simplified, as one of the victims said there are too many bodies that deal with abuse, it was confusing.

Another was to include more women in the process, not just bishops and priests.

“I think that we need to include women, minorities and other survivors to respond to victims. We need all the voices. We cannot change the past, but we can change the present to make our future Church a safe place,” Dr Figueroa said.

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Dr Areti Metuamate

ITENZ is the biggest association covering all areas of tertiary education and is recognised by the Government as the main representative of the tertiary private sector. It has more than 130 members.

Dr Metuamate became the inaugural chief executive of Te Kupenga after it was created last January by merging Good Shepherd College with The Catholic Institute.

Te Kupenga (the Net) has three operating units – Catholic Theological College (for tertiary courses and qualifications), National Centre for Religious Studies, and the Nathaniel Centre for Catholic Bioethics.

“It’s good to be involved in an organization like ITENZ at the national level,” says Dr Metuamate, who is of Ngati Kauwhata, Ngati Raukawa ki te Tonga, Ngati Haua and Cook Islands descent, and has extensive experience with tertiary  institutions in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand.

“As a private training establishment, Te Kupenga is actively involved at the national level of our sector.”

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In 2006, lecturer in philosophy at Te Kupenga – Catholic Theological College Fr John Owens, SM, set about reading everything he could about American philosopher Richard Rorty. The Kiwi academic ended up publishing a book in 2019. 

The book, “Rorty, Religion and Metaphysics” was launched on August 5, at the Catholic Theological College on Ponsonby Road, Auckland. 

Fr Merv Duffy, SM, in introducing Fr Owens, said the book is not a “potboiler”, but is “a serious book about deep issues”. 

“It’s taken years of research and then years of polishing, until it is a gem of clarity and precision,” Fr Duffy said. 

“Those of you accustomed to John Owens’ style of communication may not be surprised to discover that the book we are launching entitled ‘Rorty, Religion and Metaphysics’ is a book about Richard Rorty, religion and metaphysics,” he said. 

“The interesting thing about Rorty’s pragmatism, is that it’s a way of seeing the world that abandons both religion and metaphysics, at least as they have been traditionally understood. So, and this is the storyline, John Owens disagrees with Richard Rorty.” 

Fr Owens, in explaining in more detail what his book is about, started by saying “metaphysics, and most of religion, start from the belief that there is a way things finally are, and a final truth about this”. 

“If reality is a certain way, we should find out about it and say what it is,” he said. 

Rorty’s philosophy, however, rejected metaphysics and religion. 

“He (Rorty) came to think that, for all that it dominated Western philosophy, the metaphysical vision never delivered. The arguments for it are always circular. Philosophical harmony never happened. So, we should just get out of the mindset of metaphysics, where we are pointed toward something large and non-human, to which we owe allegiance. We should simply give it up, as one commentator says, in the way we might give up smoking,” explained Fr Owens. 

For Rorty, a self-described pragmatist, words are tools, and languages are instruments, that human beings developed to cope with their environment. Some words or vocabularies are not better than others because they more accurately represent the world, but they are better because they work better for our purposes. 

“He [Rorty] thinks we should give up questions about corresponding to a final state of affairs, and simply treat our languages as instruments that we develop in order to create and achieve interesting forms of life,” Fr Owens said.  

“This runs fundamentally against the Christian view that God made the world through the Word, so that there is an original way that the things of the world are, and our knowledge should first of all try to correspond to the way they are.” 

Fr Owens cited the moral example that Rorty used: A child growing up in a feral state, who is discovered by a community, which then takes the child in and does their best for her. Rorty would say that the child has no dignity of her own, and that the community is not responding to a deep metaphysical reality (her dignity), but simply applying their own vocabulary and traditions in helping her. 

Fr Owens said the main argument of his book is that “this will not do”. 

“It is not enough to see the world just as the correlates of vocabularies we happen to have developed. Particularly when we deal with another person, they do not appear just in light of a vocabulary of ours, but they somehow demand the use of a particular vocabulary. 

“I think that this encounter with other people first brings us to a sense of reality, the strange conviction that the objects of our mind are not just objects of our mind, but are realities in their own right, that demand a kind of recognition. In Aristotle’s terms they have reality, or ousia,” he said. 

Fr Duffy said Fr Owens explained Rorty’s theories so well that reviewers of the book recommend it as a good way to understand the American philosopher. 

“Evidence of its success is that this book is being accepted for the American Philosophy series,” Fr Duffy said.  

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Dr Areti Metuamate

Te Kupenga chief executive Dr Areti Metuamate told NZ Catholic they are looking for a “proper campus in Auckland” for the Catholic Theological College, the new Catholic tertiary education provider formed from the merging of the Good Shepherd College and The Catholic Institute. 

The Provincial Council of the Society of Mary earlier agreed to relinquish ownership and governance of Good Shepherd College to the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference. 

“[That campus on] Ponsonby Road is half-owned by the Marist priests and half-owned by the bishops. So, ultimately, we’ll have to sell that campus,” he said. 

Dr Metuamate said they are looking at two options for a new campus. 

One option, he said, is having the campus at Holy Cross Seminary in Ponsonby.  

“We are considering doing something in conjunction with the seminary because the seminary is having some major refurbishment,” he said. 

Dr Metuamate said a second option is “a building in the city that we are looking at as a possibility”. 

“Because the bishops are very committed to having an Auckland campus for Te Kupenga -Catholic Theological College, what we are going to do now is to look at all the things that we need and then start working out what’s viable for us. I will also be talking to staff and students about what they want to see in the new campus going forward.” 

Dr Metuamate also revealed that a new website and branding will be revealed next month. 

“With our branding, what we want to do is to really show that we are modern, but also show that we stand on a really strong Catholic education tradition. We’ve got new ideas, new people, new ways of doing things,” he said. 

Dr Metuamate said the Catholic Theological College, at the moment, has 60 students who do Good Shepherd College courses and 387 in total taking on-line courses. 

“We hope to increase that next semester because we’ve been doing some work on getting people to know about our courses,” he said. 

Financially, the college was not as affected by the pandemic as the secular universities. 

“Because we don’t have a large number of international students, we don’t have the same impact that mainstream universities have [had],” he said. “Of course, we don’t know how much the bishops have been impacted [by the pandemic]. It could be the case that if the bishops are heavily impacted, then that could affect our funding.” 

He said some planning has been done around this possibility. 

Dr Metuamate said he is proud of how fast the lecturers of the college adapted to the new way of teaching during the lockdown, particularly at levels four and three. 

“One of the fun things that happened is that all of lecturers had to work out how to teach online, and actually, I’ve been really pleased with how fast everyone’s been able to do that. Even Sr Elizabeth Snedden taught her Latin class on-line,” he said.  

“If there is another lockdown tomorrow, we would be able to teach all of our students online and not have much disruption. That was an impact that we responded well to,” he added. 

He said they also gave pastoral support to students who weren’t able to go back to their families during the lockdown. 

Graduation, which would have occurred around this time (June), had been postponed, but Dr Metuamate gave an assurance there would be some form of celebration down the line. 

He expects that his could happen when the borders between New Zealand and Australia are opened so that people from the Sydney College of Divinity, for which Good Shepherd College taught a Bachelor of Theology degree.  

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Newly-appointed Te Kupenga chief executive Dr Areti Metuamate said he is looking at how to engage Māori and Pasifika people, in particular, who are “often the most under-represented in educational institutions”.

“What I’m really going to be working on is to try to think of ways that our courses and that our teachers can be connecting to communities beyond the communities we are connecting to,” he told NZ Catholic.

“For example, we have a number of courses that are taught online. What are we doing to go out and ensure that people in remote parts of New Zealand know about those courses?”

Te Kupenga was formed on January 1 in a merger of Good Shepherd College and The Catholic Institute of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has three operating units — Catholic Theological College (for tertiary courses and qualifications), National Centre for Religious Studies and the Nathaniel Centre for Catholic bioethics.

New Zealand’s Catholic bishops expect the new institute to play a vital role in training, educating and forming Catholic seminarians and lay leaders.

Dr Metuamate said that, to increase the number of students, they will be “going out to communities and talking to people in their communities. And that we don’t seem like some foreign organisation that’s only on a website or that’s only in a brochure”.

This means going to secondary schools, meeting with careers advisors and talking to year 12 students about the courses Te Kupenga provides and the possibility of priesthood.

“It’s just about getting out there and talking to young people about options available to them. When I was in school . . . no one ever came to us to talk about the possibility of being a priest. Sometimes, people just need to hear about an idea, plant that seed and they go away and think about it,” he said.

Dr Metuamate stressed, though, that Te Kupenga is not just for those preparing for priesthood.

“[Te Kupenga] is for anyone who’s in the Church and actually, people outside the Church who want to learn about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be Catholic, what it means to have a faith. There are courses for all those people, too,” he said.

Dr Metuamate was given a Mihi Whakatau (formal welcome) at the formerly Good Shepherd College site in Ponsonby, Auckland on February 21.

Dr Metuamate said he was glad to see Manuel Beazley, Vicar for Māori in Auckland diocese, in a leadership role in the Church because “the leadership of the Church needs to reflect the people of the Church”.

“I’m really keen to see our organisation reach out more to Māori and Pasifika people, and Asian New Zealanders as well, because there are large numbers of those peoples and they are not as engaged as they should be,” he said. “And sometimes, that is because it’s hard for them to see a role for themselves as leaders in the Church.”

He also met then Bishop-elect Michael Gielen, who was the celebrant at the Mass for the opening of the academic year. Bishop Gielen was ordained auxiliary bishop on March 7, 2020.

“[Bishop-elect Gielen] is the sort of person who is the future of our Church, a person who is connected to young people,” Dr Metuamate noted.

Beginning and End

Bishop Gielen said being at the opening Mass of Te Kupenga feels like a beginning and an end for him.

“It feels like the end of a journey for me. This would be [the] sixteenth Academic Mass for me. It feels like a bit of a farewell,” he said as he thanked the staff and the students for their support over the years.

“I assure you of my prayers as I launch out on my waka to the different parts the Lord has in store for me in the Auckland area.”

In his homily, he referred to the Gospel reading (Mark 8:34 – 9:1), saying everyone is called to give their best for their faith.

“We are all called to these same words that Jesus has given us today. We are asked to give our best. There are no shortcuts, no easy options, no comfortable roads, no computer programmes or secret passwords,” he said. “We have to step out . . . not just flock at the finish line, but reach there with a renewed sense of faith and vigour.”

Bishop Gielen said St Peter did not want to bear the cross of Jesus when he (St Peter) denied Jesus three times.

The bishop then contrasted this with St John Henry Newman who “took the hard road” when leaving the Anglican communion. St John was pretty much rejected by his community.

“Even his family and friends struggled [and] misunderstood what he was doing,” Bishop Gielen added.

But St John went on to establish the Catholic University of Ireland, now University College, Dublin.

“St Peter and St John Henry Newman were faced with a choice: save their lives or lose their lives. Live according to their own limits or take risks and live by Jesus’ limits. We, too, are faced with the same choice,” he said.

“Give your best. Lose your life. You’ll never regret it.”

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NZCBC president Bishop Patrick Dunn said he is delighted with the appointment.

“Dr Metuamate has emerged as the best candidate from a rigorous selection process. He is a personable and capable man, with the vision, energy and relationship skills needed to get the new organisation up and running,” said Bishop Dunn.

“Areti’s appointment will help drive visibility and growth for Te Kupenga among Māori, Pasifika, younger people and other important communities within our increasingly diverse Church and society.”

The bishop said Dr Metuamate “will bring a contemporary style and quality of leadership to a new organisation that seeks to engage the Catholic and wider communities in ways that are authentic and resonant for our time”.

Te Kupenga was formed on January 1 in a merger of Good Shepherd College with The Catholic Institute. It has three operating units — Catholic Theological College (for tertiary courses and qualifications), National Centre for Religious Studies, and the Nathaniel Centre for Catholic Bioethics.

Dr Metuamate said he is honoured to have been appointed and is excited to be back home after a decade in Australia. He is currently based in Adelaide and will return to Wellington next month.

“It feels like the right time to return home to bring the learning and experience I have gained after 10 years working in Australian universities and organisations. The opportunity to play a leadership role in shaping Te Kupenga and ensuring it connects and appeals to more of our people is also a key motivation for me,” he added.

He revealed that he and his wife are expecting a son, to be born in March.

“Being based amongst whanau is important for us,” said Dr Metuamate who is of Ngati Kauwhata, Ngati Raukawa ki te Tonga, Ngati Haua and Cook Islands descent.

Dr Metuamate held advisory and leadership roles in both the public and tertiary education sectors, most recently as dean of St Mark’s College in Adelaide, South Australia.

He was raised in Feilding where he attended Hato Pāora College. He graduated from Victoria University of Wellington and the Australian National University, where his PhD was in Pacific leadership.

His wife, Dr Jessa Rogers-Metuamate, is a distinguished indigenous academic, educator and artist from Australia’s Wiradjuri peoples, whose international research has included working with students of St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College in Napier.

The bishops chose “Te Kupenga – Catholic Leadership Institute” as the name for the new organisation after careful thought and consultation with staff and students, noted an NZCBC media release late last year.

Te Kupenga means “the net” or “the fishing net” and harks to the first four disciples of Jesus — Andrew, Peter, James and John. They were called from their boats and nets to become fishers for Jesus’ kingdom with the same care, dedication and skill they brought to their fishing.

Bishop Dunn said the name resonates strongly with Pope Francis’ call to the Church to revive its missionary spirit and purpose.

“Te Kupenga will put out into the deep and cast our net wide,” said Bishop Dunn.

The bishops intend the name to also reflect a contemporary reference to networking, online learning, and linking with others collegially.

They expect the new institute to play a vital role in training, educating and forming Catholic seminarians and lay leaders.

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