their art is what the sacred looks like when it survives

By Cas Quilty

I’ve read your petitions, and I’ve heard your rhetoric. I want to answer you directly. You say your call to shut down the Divine Playhouse is not about hatred but about bureaucracy, funding, and fairness. I am going to take you in good faith, at your word.

You argue as Catholics, as Christians, and taxpayers. I write as one of the children your Church claimed, your schools shaped, your taxpayer dollars educated, and now a taxpayer myself. I entered a government-funded Catholic school at five years old. When we talk about Christ or what the government funds in relation to Him, I am not speaking from abstraction.

You contend taxpayer money should never be used to support projects that mock, ridicule, or demean any religion or faith community. Equal treatment. No contempt with public endorsement. Beautiful. I accept it. I would only extend it — not just to religion and faith, but to every person and every community, including queer people and so many others.

…cont’d below

The Odyssey (2026) | a spectacle in every definition

The “it” factor in movie form, from its director, cast, music, cinematography, and its cultural impact. Everybody and their dog has an opinion about this movie, and even if I think some of them are so, so wrong, it’s exciting to see everyone buzzing about it.

National Treasure (2004) | they don’t make heist movies like this anymore

One of the best movies ever, as long as you don’t think too hard. Fortunately, that’s one of my favourite pastimes.

Widow’s Bay (2026) | about to do a matthew rhys marathon

Horror girlies unite because this is an immediate comfort watch in my books. Horror/comedy is on a generational run, and this AppleTV series continues the streak.

You say a private business may operate, but the government should not be associated with it. I hear the distinction. It cuts the other way. In a secular country, the government funds art on its merit; it does not withdraw funding whenever a religious group takes offence, because a government that defunds art at the Church’s displeasure is not neutral toward religion — it is kneeling to it. And that same government holds a far deeper official association with your schools than it will ever hold with one small playhouse.

Your petitions run on one word: perception. Christians “reasonably see” mockery. Many Christians “perceive” ridicule. I don’t doubt the feeling is real. But feeling cannot be the standard, because the moment perceived offence becomes a veto on public art, every religious group in this country holds a kill switch over creative expression — and that switch would take out satire, history, theatre, and much of Christian art itself, which was called blasphemy by other Christians in its own time.

Last year, I stood in an ancient English cathedral, awed by the magnificence with which faith had been honoured in architecture. I was devastated to learn that the original stained glass, so painstakingly made as an expression of divine love, was smashed centuries ago by Puritans acting in the name of the very same faith. They perceived, in full sincerity, that this art was an abomination that had to be destroyed to honour God. Sincerity of perception is not proof of mockery, and it has never been a moral licence to destroy what we do not like.

You have drawn the boundary of the sacred around this venue and placed the queer artists who operate it outside of that. Your Church chose to deconsecrate this space in 1932. Your Church has allowed it to be used as a theatre for the last 70 years. Your Church chose to sell it for a profit to luxury developers in 2017. Yet, the sacredness of 420 Kent Street was suddenly rediscovered on the day the queer artists, the outsiders, crossed the threshold.

Every adult who was scandalised by the Divine Playhouse chose to look at it, chose to target it. Children do not choose their classroom or how God made them in His image. A cabaret that plays with your symbols in front of a willing, paying, adult audience is not the equivalent of an institution telling a captive child under threat of punishment or damnation that they are disordered in the eyes of God. One is a provocation you are free to ignore; the other is a formation a child cannot escape. Both have been funded by the government.

You will say the venue and its operators showed contempt. Let’s look at what actually happened and the choices they made. It was to be called the Unholy Playhouse. The Christian and Catholic communities objected. The artists listened, and before opening night, in good faith, they renamed it Divine. That gesture was answered with a choice to escalate further with vigils at the door, cameras pointed at guests, your petition, and a pressure campaign on the landlord. When accommodation is met with escalation, it is hard not to see bad faith. Still, I take you at your word.

So here is my offer, and I mean it. I will stand beside you and demand a review of every public dollar that demeans a faith community, the moment you stand beside me and demand the removal of every public dollar that teaches children they are demeaned in the eyes of God. That is equal treatment. That is your principle, applied in full. Anything less is not a principle — it is a request for special treatment wearing equality as a costume.

Let me tell you what shocked me most, to borrow your phrase. Your petition describes the branding, the symbols, the offence — and never once mentions who made this venue, or why. The word “queer” appears nowhere. Religious trauma appears nowhere. That many of these artists were raised inside your Church, shaped by your schools, wounded in your institutions, appears nowhere. That silence is the entire story.

There is a world of difference between an outsider spitting on symbols that mean nothing to them, and people taking the symbols seared into them as children — the imagery they were told defined their sinfulness, their damnation — and alchemising it. Turning the thing used to break them into something they can play with, laugh with, heal with, belong with. You call that mockery. It has an older name: redemption. It is what wounded people have always done with the language of their wound.

The Church has millennia of money, land, and power to ensure its survival — one of the largest landholders on Earth, with wealth in Australia alone measured in the tens of billions. What do queer people have to ensure their survival? Humour, creativity, and community. The weapons of the powerless have always been symbolic. Look at the story of David and Goliath. Symbols are meaningful — your petition is proof. That is why art is so dangerous to the powerful. But when you plant the seeds of your symbols in living children, you do not get to dictate how wild they grow. We funded the wounding and called it education. We can fund the healing and call it art.

And while I am reflecting on what truly demeans the sacred, I cannot ignore the findings of 2017’s Royal Commission. It was established, from your Church’s own records, that “children were ignored or worse, punished,” “allegations were not investigated,” and priests and brothers were quietly moved to parishes and communities that “knew nothing of their past.”

I know that betrayal wounded the faithful in the pews as well. But the irony remains that some of the artists in that playhouse are the very people your institutions failed. Their art is not contempt for the sacred. Their art is what the sacred looks like when it survives.

It seems that whatever is coming for the sacred on Kent Street, it is not drag queens. It is likely a demolition schedule, and yet your outrage found its voice; not for the commerce but only for the outsider art. Here, your own scripture speaks louder than I can. There is one moment in the Gospels when Jesus flipped the tables of the profiteers, directing His anger not at the outcasts, not at the sinners, not at those who scandalised the respectable, but at those who conducted commerce in a sacred space. For almost 100 years, according to your Church’s own highest authority, this is no longer a temple but a blank canvas to be sold for profit.

Their art is not contempt for the sacred. Their art is what the sacred looks like when it survives.

The playhouse has since gone dark — not by any ruling, not by any finding against it, but by a landlord who terminated the venue’s lease claiming “offensive trade.” Notice what that concedes. You could not win the argument about principle, so you won the argument about property, and a 184-year-old law that has never been considered by a court in the context of “moral” offensiveness.

You pray that we might one day come to know Jesus Christ. Your prayer arrived late. We already know Him. We met Him as children, in your schools, in your churches, and we remember who was welcome at His table: the lepers, the poor, the sex workers, the ones the powerful turned away. His legacy is a universal love so powerful it can restore life itself. That is exactly why we cannot stay silent about the gap between what He taught and what was done to us. A five-year-old could see that gap. I know, because I was that five-year-old.

Fund us or don’t. Evict us or don’t. I promise we are not going anywhere. But if you want your principle, you can have it in full: we will fund our own art when you fund your own schools.

For those wanting to show their support for the Divine Playhouse and its artists, the venue is holding a peaceful ‘sing-in’ protest at Hyde Park at 12 pm on Saturday, July 25.