When Dignity Becomes the Question - September 2022

9–23 September 2022

There are moments in a long struggle when separate parts of a story suddenly converge: family, work, faith, culture, grief, mental health, justice and the question of whether the values an institution publicly professes are actually lived when somebody is suffering.

September 2022 was one of those moments for me.

Two emails I wrote that month were separated by only two weeks. Reading them together now, I can see the same question running through both:

What does human dignity mean if it disappears precisely when a person most needs it?

——

9 September 2022: In memory of the Queen and my parents’ citizenship, loyalty and contribution to Australia

On 9 September 2022, the morning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II was announced, I wrote to Professor Hayden Ramsay at ACU.

This wasn’t really an email about monarchy.

It was about my parents.

It was about migration, sacrifice, loyalty, service, education, faith and filotimo — the deeply held Greek value that encompasses honour, dignity, generosity, responsibility and doing what’s right because it’s right.

I asked ACU to recognise what its treatment of me had also meant for my family:

“I really need ACU to show respect to my parents, their sacrifices, hard work, loyalty, filotimo and contribution to our country.”

I spoke of my parents’ service to Australia and their belief in education - educating their children so that we could use the gifts we had been given and contribute to society.

And I connected that history directly to what I was asking of my university: dignity, restoration and the return of what had been taken from me after approximately twenty years of honourable service.

My request was explicit. I sought reinstatement and continuity and the restoration of what I was entitled to, consistent with the mission, values and ethos I had served.

——

Why the Queen’s death brought this to the surface

The longer material accompanying that email explains why the events of 8–9 September 2022 resonated so strongly.

I shared a story from the Hellenic Genealogy Geek Facebook community about a Greek migrant who had arrived in Australia in 1960. He treasured the booklet he received upon naturalisation as an Australian citizen and British subject. He kept it carefully wrapped in plastic until his death in 2014 and showed it to his grandchildren.

The point of that story wasn’t a political argument about republicanism or monarchy.

It was what the booklet represented to a young migrant who had come from poverty, war and hardship: welcome, opportunity, belonging and dignity.

Another child of Greek migrants responded that her own father had kept the same booklet among his treasured possessions. She remembered her parents as:

“honourable hardworking and respectful people”

who instilled filotimo and respect in their children.

The original writer replied:

“Φιλότιμο and respect… they seem to be fading away… Let’s all try to maintain these values…”

That exchange affected me because I knew exactly what they meant.

That was my father. That is my mother.

And so I asked Professor Ramsay:

“Will ACU leaders and colleagues start to repair the trust I had so willingly given for twenty years?”

This wasn’t an abstract philosophical question. I was asking whether dignity, respect, trust, integrity and filotimo could be demonstrated through action - including supporting my recovery and my return to work as per statutory obligations require.

I ended with two questions for a professor of ethics:

“What is the truth?”

and:

“What defines courage?”

——

The contradiction I was trying to expose

The accompanying letter went much further.

I wrote about gaslighting, mobbing, fear and the continuing psychological consequences of what had happened. I said that supporting my recovery and implementing the injury management plan would bring an end to the fear and risks to my safety and wellbeing.

To me, this was a test of ACU’s Catholic identity.

I wrote that supporting recovery would:

“support the mission, values and Catholic ethos of the university.”

And:

“It demonstrates the university’s integrity.”

That remains important.

——

Values are not demonstrated by publishing them. They are demonstrated by what an institution does when applying them is difficult.

What are our values worth when keeping them costs us something?

——

The Justice and Peace Office

Later that same morning, on 9 September 2022, I forwarded the material to the Justice and Peace Office.

I did so deliberately.

I told them that what was happening was relevant to their commitment to social justice because the injustice I was describing was occurring within an institution of the Catholic Church.

By then, my distrust of regulatory systems had become profound. I wrote that I had received a letter from the Fair Work Ombudsman but was frightened even to open it because previous regulatory experiences had become triggers for trauma.

That detail says something about how far things had deteriorated.

A letter arriving in the mail shouldn’t have been frightening.

Yet I was contemplating travelling to my federal MP’s office in Kogarah simply so that I wouldn’t have to open the envelope alone.

I wrote:

“I’m alone, frightened and vulnerable.”

And yet I was still looking for an institution - somewhere - that would demonstrate that systems of accountability could work.

I described the Fair Work Ombudsman at that point as my “last hope of restoring trust and integrity in the government system.” *

I ended that message with words that capture much of what I had been trying to communicate:

“Hypocrisy needs to be replaced by integrity.”

* The Fair Work Ombudsman failed to restore trust and integrity in the government system - see http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-fair-work-ombudsman-when-another.html

——

Twelve hours after my father’s death

The email then returned to one of the most painful experiences of my life.

I wrote about my father’s suicide and what occurred approximately 12 hours after his death.

I described my manager coming into my family home and approaching my mother about when I would return to work because it was a busy time of year and everybody was needed.

Three days?

A week?

My father had just died.

My family had barely begun to comprehend what had happened, let alone organise his funeral.

That memory sat behind my question in September 2022:

“Am I an exception for a support network from my university community?”

And then:

“I expect to return and recover in my job as a matter of principle, respect and dignity to the human person.”

I was not an exception to dignity.

“I’m not an exception to ACU’s identity and mission, nor the laws in our society.”

——

“Do we act on what we preach or not?”

My email of 23 September 2022 contained a question:

“Do we act on what we preach or not?”

That’s the thread running from 9 September to 23 September.

It connects my parents’ migration story with my father’s death.

It connects filotimo with Catholic social teaching.

It connects workplace health and safety with human dignity.

It connects institutional mission statements with the actual treatment of a human being.

And it connects ethics with courage.

I was asking people within a Catholic university and within Catholic social-justice structures not merely to sympathise with what I was saying, but to act consistently with the principles their institutions professed.

By 23 September 2022, I was exhausted. I wrote that I needed to pause from what I called a “battle of social injustice” because the continuing workplace situation had taken its toll.

But even then, I remained clear about what I wanted:

to return and recover in my job.

Because it was a legal obligation and dignity in the university mission should mean something.

——

The question remains

What strikes me is how many times I tried to communicate the same fundamental message through different languages.

Sometimes I spoke in the language of workplace health and safety.

Sometimes workers compensation.

Sometimes ethics.

Sometimes Catholic identity and mission.

Sometimes social justice.

Sometimes family.

Sometimes grief.

And sometimes through the Greek word that perhaps says it most simply:

Filotimo.

On 9 September 2022, I asked:

“What is the truth?”

I also asked:

“What defines courage?”

On 23 September 2022, I asked:

“Do we act on what we preach or not?”

Those are not three separate questions.

They are different versions of the same one.

When an institution speaks publicly about dignity, justice, ethics, compassion and the value of the human person, what happens when living those principles requires it to confront what has happened within its own community?

That’s when values cease to be words.

That’s when they are tested.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 473, 482

 

They Preached Solidarity. I Asked for It. Silence Followed - September 2022

“Woe to those who build their houses by unrighteousness, and their upper rooms by injustice; who make their neighbours work for nothing, and do not give them their wages.”

Jeremiah 22:13 

It’s painful to be asking an institution to live by principles it already publicly professes.

In September 2022, I was writing to people and institutions that spoke explicitly about human dignity, justice, fair work, solidarity with workers, and the responsibility to act when people are being exploited or treated unfairly.

I was asking them to apply those principles to what was happening to me.

And I was asking because, by then, I was desperate to be heard.

——

The teaching was already there

The Justice and Peace Office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney published material on Catholic Social Teaching on Work that could hardly have been clearer.

Its starting point was the dignity of the human person:

“PERSON FIRST: Employees are people first therefore they cannot be defined or treated as only units of labour to be put to use for economic ends.”

It cited the Australian Catholic Bishops’ formulation that:

“work exists for the person, not the person for work”.

The same resource described safe working conditions as a right, emphasised the particular importance of protecting vulnerable workers, supported workers’ ability to organise and protect their rights, and explained that business and economic interests must be shaped by moral concerns rather than placed above the human person.

This wasn’t an incidental message buried somewhere in Church teaching. The Justice and Peace Office’s separate page on Fair and Dignified Working Conditions went further and moved from principle to action.

Among its suggestions was:

“Stand in solidarity with the unemployed, underemployed and those in difficult and unfair working conditions.”

It added:

“This will sometimes include advocacy to government and the public service”.

And the page invited people seeking support to contact the Justice and Peace Office to learn more about how the Church “stands in solidarity with workers and the dignity of fair work”.

Most strikingly for me, the page displayed the words of Jeremiah 22:13:

“Woe to those who build their houses by unrighteousness, and their upper rooms by injustice; who make their neighbours work for nothing, and do not give them their wages.”

I read those words while living through what was the profound contradiction between Catholic social teaching and the treatment I was experiencing.

So I wrote. 

——

“I’m hoping you’ll put in action what you say regarding social justice”

On 5 September 2022, I emailed the Justice and Peace Office.

The subject was:

“Fwd: We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces”

I specifically directed the Office to its own Fair and Dignified Working Conditions webpage and to Jeremiah 22:13.

I wasn’t simply sending them information. I was asking for help.

I told them that I had reported serious misconduct elsewhere and that I was contacting them in case there was something they could do in relation to Australian Catholic University and Catholic Church Insurance.

I wrote:

“I’m hoping you’ll put in action what you say regarding social justice.”

I was pointing to the gap between social justice as a stated value and social justice as something a person should be able to experience when they’re vulnerable and asking a Catholic institution for help.

I explained how deeply the experience had affected me:

“the greatest trauma for me is the shock that so many people can choose to be unconscionable and hypocritical in our society. Where’s the integrity?”

I spoke explicitly about reparation and restitution. I invoked the commandments against stealing and bearing false witness and connected those principles with what needed to happen: repairing the harm, complying with laws and regulations, and preventing further harm.

And I asked the question that had become impossible for me to reconcile:

“It’s what the Catholic Church teaches, and I aligned to ACU’s mission, values, Catholic ethos and positive community engagement initiatives. Then why am I the one being persecuted?”

I also raised what had happened to my family and that their privacy had been violated and that they had been unfairly drawn into what began as my request for a safe workplace.

——

“Everyone has a right to respect and dignity”

My email became increasingly direct because this was no longer an abstract discussion about workplace values.

I wrote about the health and financial consequences that were continuing while people with responsibility remained silent:

“It’s the complacency, the ‘doing nothing’, the silence, that’s causing more damage to health and finances each day.”

And then:

“Everyone has a right to respect and dignity. I wasn’t there to be exploited nor was I slave labour with no human rights.”

Those words were raw because the circumstances were raw.

I was describing my experience of bullying, mobbing, harassment, discrimination, isolation and the exploitation of family trauma. I was also trying to understand how that could be occurring in a period in which organisations were increasingly talking about mental health and mentally healthy workplaces.

The email ended with a plea to the Justice and Peace Office itself:

“Surely as a Justice and Peace office of the Catholic Church and Diocese of Sydney, you can do something.”

And then the question that captured where I was psychologically by that point:

“How much longer will I be saying, ‘Stop the abuse, I can’t take it anymore’, and hear nothing but silence from the Catholic Church institutions?” 

The message forwarded my email of 4 September 2022 to ACU governance, copied to Deputy Vice-Chancellor Ethics Professor Hayden Ramsay, titled “We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces.”

So the Justice and Peace Office was being shown that I was simultaneously trying to reach the governance structures inside my workplace.

——

18 September 2022: I wrote again

Thirteen days later, on 18 September 2022, I contacted the Justice and Peace Office again.

This time I forwarded material concerning my complaint to the NTEU.

My message to the Justice and Peace Office was short, but its meaning was unmistakable:

“I’ll continue to share my pleas to have my voice heard with your office.”

I told them that I, too, was passionate about social justice issues.

Then I asked:

“Please do something to stop the injustice and exploitation of employees in Catholic Church Institutions now.”

I tried to explain the contradiction through an analogy:

“It’s like taking action for human rights in the community, but turning a blind eye to human rights violations and abuse happening behind closed doors within your own family, if you don’t take action.” 

That’s at the heart of why this part of my records remains so significant to me.

Catholic social teaching cannot meaningfully distinguish between the dignity of the worker outside a Catholic institution and the dignity of the worker inside one.

Human dignity doesn’t stop at the institution’s front door.

——

19 September 2022: determination and perseverance

The following day, 19 September 2022, my correspondence records how distressed I remained.

I forwarded another document describing the latest traumatic incident. The language I used was angry and distressed.

But another email sent just nineteen minutes later captures something else.

I was an information professional. I started compiling the documentation from the moment that library associate director fobbed off her responsibilities (and me) to HR. Research, documentation, evidence and information management were part of the skills I had spent years developing. Under extraordinary circumstances, those skills became one of the ways I tried to preserve what was happening.

I wrote:

“I’m … still going until truth, justice, mercy and peace triumph in the name of the Lord.”

Then I reflected on something my family had known about me all my life:

“My family call it stubbornness, … other people call it determination, God calls it perseverance.” 

Perseverance is probably the word that matters most.

——

What does solidarity mean when somebody actually asks for it?

The Justice and Peace Office’s published material doesn’t merely describe Catholic social teaching historically.

It calls for action.

Its material says workers are people first. It says safe working conditions are a right. It says the vulnerable deserve particular attention. It affirms unions as a means through which workers can protect their rights. However, the nationally registered, publicly funded Catholic university employer in question intercepted my emails to union reps and forced the union to collude in this institutional abuse. See http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/07/prohibited-workplace-surveillance.html!

And when people experience difficult and unfair working conditions, it expressly calls upon Catholics to stand in solidarity with them, including, where appropriate, through advocacy. 

That creates an important question.

What does solidarity mean when a person actually comes to the door?

What happens when somebody doesn’t merely discuss injustice theoretically, but sends the documents?

What happens when she identifies herself, describes the harm, explains that she’s frightened and traumatised, points directly to the institution’s own social teaching, and repeatedly asks for somebody to act?

For me, that’s where Catholic social teaching has to become more than words on a webpage.

Solidarity cannot only be something Catholic institutions advocate for elsewhere.

Dignity cannot only belong to people whose suffering is safely outside the institution.

Justice cannot only be preached when providing it carries no institutional cost.

And a commitment to fair and dignified working conditions has to mean something when the worker asking for those conditions is standing directly in front of you.

——

The contradiction I was trying to expose

I wasn’t asking the Justice and Peace Office to invent a new moral framework for my circumstances.

I was asking it to apply the one it already published.

Person first.

Human dignity.

Safe and fair working conditions.

Solidarity with vulnerable workers.

Advocacy where necessary.

The common good.

Those principles were already there.

So was Jeremiah 22:13.

And in September 2022, so was I, repeatedly asking to be heard.

That’s what makes these documents so difficult to revisit.

They preserve more than correspondence. They preserve the moment when I was trying to hold Catholic institutions to the values they themselves had taught me mattered.

I was asking for dignity while reading about dignity.

I was asking for justice while reading about justice.

I was asking for solidarity from an office that publicly called people to solidarity with workers experiencing unfair conditions.

And I was asking for action.

The question I was raising then remains the question these records raise now:

When an institution publicly teaches justice, dignity and solidarity, what responsibility does it have when someone within its own institutional community asks it to put those principles into practice?

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 470, 479-480.

The relevant webpages:

https://justiceandpeace.org.au/fair-and-dignified-working-conditions/

https://justiceandpeace.org.au/catholic-social-teaching-on-work/