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Dying of cancer, Bishop Emeritus Geoffrey Robinson appeared Aug. 24 before the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to testify to the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the church.

"However great the faults of the Australian bishops have been over the last 30 years, it still remains true that the major obstacle to a better response from the church has been the Vatican," Robinson told the commission. Most of the Roman Curia saw the problem as a "moral one: if a priest offends, he should repent; if he repents, he should be forgiven and restored to his position. ... They basically saw the sin as a sexual one, and did not show great understanding of the abuse of power involved or the harm done to the victims."

"I eventually came to the point where I felt that, with the thoughts that were running through my head, I could not continue to be a bishop of a church about which I had such profound reservations," Robinson wrote in a 2008 book Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church. "I resigned my office as Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney and began to write this book, about the very foundations of power and sex within the church."

Robinson came away from that meeting knowing that the Australian bishops had no choice but to continue to go it alone, irrespective of what the fall out might be.

The extent to which he and the other Australian bishops were prepared to do that is starkly illustrated in the minutes of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference of Nov. 28, 2002, where they resolved to disobey Pope John Paul II's 2001 Motu Proprio, Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, which required all complaints of child sexual abuse to be referred to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which would then instruct the bishop what to do.

The first hard-hitting words by orthodox cardinals and archbishops about the "current crisis" in the Catholic Church have been sounded. Previous comments by Vatican Cardinal Raymond Burke have been more guarded but as the Synod nears, the reality of a looming schism in the Church has pushed him and other Church leaders to a painful willingness to be frank in publicly warning about the seriousness of what is facing the Church.

Speaking to the idea proposed in the mid-term report of the 2014 Extraordinary Synod on the Family and repeated by various bishops’ conferences, he says, "It is heresy to teach that homosexual relations are not disordinate or are not disordered or have positive elements."

The comments come in a newly released video by the Polish publication Polonia Cristiana called Crisis in the Church. (3) In addition to Cardinal Burke, the video features Archbishop Jan Pawel Lenga, who takes aim at Cardinal Reinhard Marx, president of the German bishops conference and one of Pope Francis’ Council of Nine advisors. Speaking of Marx's acceptance of communion for remarried divorcees and his statement that the Church in Germany "is not a subsidiary of Rome," Archbishop Lenga said, "There was Marx, Karl Marx. And if present Marx says similar things, then there is no real difference."

"The Pope during the Synod will show whose side he is on," said Archbishop Lenga. "If he accepts the statement of those who want to distribute Holy Communion to the divorced, there would be a heresy in the Church, and if he does not accept, there could be a schism in the Church."

Lenga concluded, "Either we are on the side of Christ, or on the side of the devil. There is no third option. The common people are sometimes closer to Christ than priests."