The appointment of the Australian Catholic University’s vice chancellor was the final act of a dying man.
It was 2020, and the university’s chancellor, John Fahey, had advanced leukaemia. Fahey had lived a life of public service – he’d been a NSW premier and a federal finance minister – and was determined to appoint a new vice chancellor as his final act. He chose Slovenian-born Zlatko Skrbis, a sociologist who’d come to ACU from a career in secular universities. Fahey died soon after. Some wish he’d bequeathed the decision.
Skrbis stepped into a tough job. Politics is complex at all universities, but the ACU has a particularly strange set of overlords; it is funded by the federal government and most of its students are not Catholic, but it is overseen in Australia by a coalition of bishops, nuns and brothers, and from the Holy See by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, which sits alongside dicasteries for the Causes for Saints and the Discipline of Sacraments in the shadowy Roman curia, and monitors schools and universities to make sure they are Catholic enough.
In biblical parlance, Skrbis must appease both Caesar and God. The latter is harder to manage. Catholic politics is as intense as the secular kind – particularly now, when clerics worldwide are at odds over how to respond to plummeting mass attendance in the developed world. Progressives argue the sanctimonious wielding of doctrine as a weapon is driving people away, and the church should get off its high horse and back to its mission of reaching out to the poor and marginalised; conservatives say appeasing the secular world by weakening positions on issues such as gay marriage and abortion would fatally wound the church.
The divisions are no less intense in Australia, where the three most powerful bishops in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane hold different views. A series of scandals at ACU, including two in which university bosses have been accused of sanctioning pro-abortion views – has turned its pretty campuses into the epicentres of that battle over the future of the church. Bishops in hardline Sydney and centrist Melbourne want Skrbis gone, and have asked the Vatican to investigate. Progressive Brisbane, his chief supporter, is doubling down.
“There’s totally different ideas about whom the university should serve and work with,” says one person with knowledge of its operations, on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to speak. “There’s a group of people who want it to be more public at the expense of being Catholic, and another that thinks it’s trying to be too public.” As leaks, letters and accusations fly, and as rumours of dissatisfaction in Rome grow, some predict Vatican intervention is only a matter of time. There have been battles between bishops and university bosses over the Catholicity of ACU before, but this one threatens to dwarf them all.
The Australian Catholic University’s Melbourne campus is in Fitzroy, not far from St Patrick’s Cathedral. There are modern glass buildings, an avant-garde chapel and a renovated boot factory, all on land supplied by the Melbourne Archdiocese. The factory is now a performance space, but the most compelling show of last year happened off campus.
It was late October, and health sciences students were graduating from various degrees at the city’s convention centre. On top of their degree, each ACU student studies a core curriculum, which includes units on Catholic social thought or philosophy based on principles such as the dignity of the human person, the common good, and the just society. The chair of the academic board, composer and organist Tim McKenry, who is not Catholic himself, presided. He reminded students of the university’s mission: “Knowledge founded in truth, and communicated with grace and compassion.”
The ceremony closed with a speech from controversial former union leader Joe de Bruyn, a staunch Catholic who had been nominated for an honorary doctorate by Sydney’s conservative archbishop, Anthony Fisher.
Joe de Bruyn’s speech at the Australian Catholic University became a nightmare for administrators.
The university knew what de Bruyn was going to say. It didn’t censor him, but shifted him to the end of the program. Neither the chancellor nor vice chancellor attended. McKenry told this masthead that was not unusual; he presided at half the graduations in 2024.
De Bruyn spoke about the moral wrongs of IVF and the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. He described abortion as the single biggest killer of human beings in the world, and a “tragedy that must be ended”.
There was fury from the audience. Estimates suggest 90 per cent of attendees and 70 per cent of those on stage walked out. Yet some remained and gave de Bruyn a standing ovation.
The speech was a multifaceted nightmare for the university; a moment when secularism collided with different Catholic world views and exploded all over the bishops, the administration, and the students, of whom only about 30 per cent are Catholic, about 36 per cent are atheist or agnostic, and – thanks to the university’s strength in teaching and health – about 70 per cent are women.
Reverberations reached Rome. The dicastery puts a high value on ACU, not only because it’s one of the largest Catholic universities in the English-speaking world, but also because – in an international anomaly – it gets generous funding from the Australian government with few strings attached.
The university scrambled. It expressed regret for distress caused, refunded the students’ graduation fees, and offered counselling. It defended de Bruyn’s right to express his personal beliefs, but said the content of the speech did not meet its standards for student safety and inclusivity. It was an attempt to appease everybody that ended up pleasing nobody.
The academics’ union and student groups issued a joint statement condemning the “discrimination and hate” in the speech. Fisher, a hardline conservative who was a protege of the late, controversial Cardinal George Pell (he was once dubbed Boy George), was furious for the opposite reason; the walkout and the apology. The sanctity of life from conception is a core Catholic belief. He wrote to the university, saying the incident “exposed real issues regarding the university’s commitment to its Catholic name”.
One abortion scandal is bad enough for a Catholic university, but this wasn’t the first. Last January, the university hired Queensland academic Kate Galloway as its law dean. But it then found out that back in 2018, she’d described abortion as a women’s health issue in a government submission. The university paid her out $1 million and moved her to a strategy job, at the same time as it was infuriating academics by repealing a previous investment in research by cutting jobs (ACU says the tertiary funding landscape had changed, and the money was needed for other priorities).
Rumblings about ACU management intensified. But the de Bruyn incident was incendiary. A group of right-wing Catholic lawyers – including two former Coalition ministers – warned ACU risked losing its Catholic designation. Then, in early December, American Catholic news website The Pillar reported Fisher had written to the dicastery in Rome, saying he and his centrist Melbourne counterpart, Peter Comensoli, would welcome a Vatican investigation into the affairs at ACU, citing “the shaken confidence in the leadership of the university amongst many of its stakeholders”. (Fisher declined an interview with this masthead, but a spokeswoman confirmed the letter. Comensoli’s office said he was away and uncontactable.)
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge, a progressive, backed Skrbis. The battle lines were drawn; traditional rivals Sydney and Melbourne had united against Brisbane.
Brisbane has the most clout in the fight, given its archbishop is chair of the corporation that oversees the university and is close to the chancellor, former Queensland Supreme Court judge Martin Daubney (Skrbis is from Queensland, too; opponents describe them as the Brisbane cabal). But it also has a vulnerability; at 76, Coleridge is overdue for retirement. The Vatican could appoint a new archbishop in Brisbane at any time, and that man – they’re all men – is most likely to come from NSW or Victoria.
Amid all this, the academic board endorsed Skrbis for another five-year term, even though his contract was not up until January 2026. Comensoli is on the academic board and abstained from the vote. Defenders say reappointment a year before a contract ends is routine; the board must allow time for a search if it wants change. Critics accuse Coleridge and Daubney of rushing through the renewal while they still had the numbers. “At ACU, the joke was always that if you have three bishops against you, the world would end,” said one ACU veteran, on the condition of anonymity. “No one knows who the next archbishop [of Brisbane] will be.” Approached for comment, Coleridge’s office did not respond.
ACU’s North Sydney campus occupies a leafy pocket of land not far from the harbour, which was once home to the order of nuns founded by Australia’s first saint, Mary MacKillop. It’s a fitting seat for the university’s beleaguered vice chancellor; MacKillop had her own problems with church hierarchy. She was excommunicated for exposing an abusive priest.
ACU began life as a collection of old convents or monasteries or parish meeting halls 30-odd years ago. It was considered a glorified teaching and nursing college until Skrbis’ predecessor, Greg Craven, turbocharged student numbers and built its research reputation in areas that crossed over with Catholic tradition, such as history and philosophy. “Before Craven, it was always a bit of a joke,” said one university veteran.
Greg Craven, former ACU vice chancellor, had the measure of Catholic politics.Credit: AFR
As the founding law dean at Australia’s other Catholic university, Notre Dame, Craven was also blooded in Catholic politics. He could keep the bishops onside and even push back against them. Skrbis, who is a Catholic but has spent his career at secular institutions, did not have the same experience. Some believe Craven’s departure created ideal conditions for a clerical power struggle.
Skrbis is not the first ACU vice chancellor to butt heads with the bishops. The clerics are deeply invested in what happens there, partly because of their financial investment (they supply land for key campuses), partly because the Vatican will rap on their door if something goes wrong, and partly because it’s the only national Catholic institution they can influence (the hospitals are run by orders of nuns and brothers, and bishops only control schools in their local patch).
There was a bitter battle between conservative Pell and progressive vice chancellor Peter Sheehan 20 years ago over the university’s Catholic identity, in which Pell threatened to increase the rent on ACU’s Sydney North Sydney and Strathfield campuses by millions of dollars.
Skrbis’ critics – who, if leaks of highly confidential internal documents to newspapers such as The Australian are any guide, reach the high echelons of university management – say the ACU crisis is less about the bishops than university management; that the cuts to research have hurt the ACU’s reputation, and that the Galloway and de Bruyn incidents were embarrassing own goals that undermined faith in ACU’s leadership. They point out that soon before Christmas, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority, which keeps an eye on governance issues, sent ACU a please-explain letter about the issues aired in the press.
One person with links to the Vatican said (on the condition of anonymity because of the intense secrecy demanded by Rome) discussion of ACU was “taking up significant time” at the dicastery. It has the power to order a canonical inquiry into ACU, but is more likely to tell the bishops to sort things out themselves. The bishops have a range of levers to pull, such as an inquiry of their own, removing the Catholic designation, or threats to property arrangements.
As he tries to navigate the culture war, Skrbis is also trying to get on with running a university that’s competing with rivals for domestic students, navigating cuts to international student quotas, and managing a $35.7 million deficit.
ACU National Student Association president Stefan Orfanos speaks at a protest outside St Mary of the Cross Square in Fitzroy after hundreds of Australian Catholic University students and staff walked out during the Joe de Bruyn speech.Credit: Joe Armao
Of all the people approached for this story, he is among the few willing to talk on the record. I visit him in the vice chancellor’s office, with its crisp white walls, stained-glass windows and ghosts of anti-establishment nuns in the halls. With his lilting Slovakian accent, Skrbis explains the juggle of having so many masters – three state and one federal government, six bishops and an assortment of nuns and brothers, the academic body and the students themselves.
“Very often, the compromised positions I try to adopt meet, I suppose, some degree of objections or criticisms from these stakeholder groups,” he said. “When you’re dealing with such a rich tapestry of stakeholders, if your final outcomes make everyone just a tiny bit uncomfortable, then hopefully this is an indication to most reasonable people that one has done a good job in trying to navigate and negotiate.”
The de Bruyn incident, he said, was a case in point. “We enabled Joe de Bruyn to give his speech. We have not curtailed his freedom of expression. These views happen to be on matters that are inherent to Catholic Church teaching. I have never criticised Joe de Bruyn for that. I have, however, expressed regret to staff, students and parents … that we did not deliver on the expectations that [accompany] an occasion like this. That was a day to celebrate and to acknowledge and recognise the effort that our graduates have gone through. I don’t think this is how they expected the day to end, and that’s where my expression of regret came from.”
The university also operates in a world in which employers have a duty to protect employees and students from psychosocial hazards, or anything that could cause psychological harm, which can include positions that are central to church doctrine. “Two days after the graduation ceremony incident occurred, we had [people] from WorkSafe Victoria visiting our campus and checking how we have followed up on our obligations,” he said. “I cannot satisfy all people at all times, but I have certain obligations to uphold.”
Skrbis says he knows nothing of Fisher’s letter to the dicastery beyond the Pillar article. He visits Rome about three times a year, and last met the head of the dicastery in November. “We had a fruitful and mutually satisfactory conversation, including about the challenges in Catholic education,” he said. “We, of course, would more than happily [work] with the dicastery on any questions that they might have in terms of the Catholicity of the university, but we have not been approached about that.
“My interactions with the bishops generally, and with Archbishop Fisher and Comensoli, specifically, have always been professional, cordial, friendly, engaging and I don’t see any reason why I would doubt [their confidence] in any way. Striking this balance between being public and being Catholic is something we’ve been doing over decades, and nothing has really changed.”
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The controversy has been an unwelcome distraction for the students at ACU, many of whom look no further than their course’s ATAR when they sign up and have little understanding of the church or its politics. Student president Maple Mirzaian, who isn’t Catholic herself, says she has found the university to be a tolerant place. “There are people within ACU that hold different values, and it’s never really been an issue,” she said. Yet “if there’s multiple instances like [the de Bruyn incident], I would start questioning my decision to remain.”
McKenry says the controversy has saddened rather than angered staff. “It upsets me that we’re seen as an awkward community, when we’re not,” he says. “It’s one of the most functional, tolerant, loving communities I’ve ever had. [The controversy] is very distanced to the actual life of the university, but it nevertheless saps the strength of the university.”
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