Clare Bowditch

ABC's Compass program did a great 1-on-1 with Australian singer songwriter Clare Bowditch. It covers her religious upbring, her beliefs, her absence from church (despite still being close to God) and how she sees things now.


Some of Clare's thoughts (though i recommend seeing the whole chat for a better sense of where she is coming from):

God is ... the source of longing and question and compassion and this impulse in us to want to do good; to want to be kind to our fellow human; to protect; to nurture.

So I think what the world is for me is a series that presents a series of choices. So what do we choose? What do we believe? What do we focus on? What do we spend time on and what do we get caught in? And it is always looking to the question of a higher ideal and what that is and where it's hiding.

It's been difficult to find a priest who I can relate to, to be honest. So that's one of the problems I've had.

I don't know if there's a home for people like me in the Catholic Church any more to be honest.

But if you're a questioning Catholic, the question today that you ask is, can the church open its heart to difference?

Some of the most interesting and curious and thinking and intelligent and heartfelt open hearted of people I know are atheists, are agnostics. No church has a monopoly on what it means to be good. But I think the conversation has to be broader.

We can't be in a world that divides people on points of sexuality or gender or so on. Those things are really disruptive for people who want to believe in god and then feel that they don't have a home for their faith because their religion doesn't allow that kind of difference.

The interviewer asked "Imagine that you could change three things within the Catholic Church that would make it feel like home. What would they be?"

I think the issues that are most urgently in need of being addressed and that I see people hurting over are really the question of sexuality, same sex marriage and the legitimacy of love between humans who happen to be the same sex. And also the question of the role of women in the church. And of course there's that heartbreaking one which is the question of, well the question of how do we encourage what seems like such a closed institution to open up and tell the truth and be transparent.