There is no excuse for this
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Australian abuse crisis
The Australian Royal Commission’s verdict on the Catholic Church in
Australia is truly damning. The Commission was set up after a series of
individual scandals suggested that a number of institutions were
incapable of protecting children from sexual abuse by paedophiles, and
they wanted to see whether there were common elements leading to a more
general diagnosis. And in the case of the Catholic Church they found
what they were looking for. It would be true to say, in summary, that
almost the entire culture of Australian Catholicism had contributed to a
dire situation in which countless children, probably far more than the
known cases, suffered indescribable harm at the hands of those they were
entitled to trust.In fact Australian Catholics were not being told anything they did not already know, or at least sense. They could add together the pieces of evidence as well as any royal commission could. Nor is the situation unique to that country. Investigation after investigation, including in the United States and Ireland, has identified a culture in which protecting the good name of the Church came first, the welfare of transgressing clergy second, and the protection of children a long way third.
The official inquiry into institutional abuse in the independent schools run by the English Benedictines has completed its first stage with an in-depth look at two schools in particular, Ampleforth and Downside. More will follow. The conclusions already reached are shaming – but not very different from the conclusions of the Australian Royal Commission.
A general climate of incredulity, which still insists on regarding abusers as rotten apples in an otherwise wholesome barrel, is still widespread in the Catholic Church, not excluding the Vatican itself. The papal commission set up to take charge of the issue has had a shaky start, and met abundant institutional opposition. It is not clear that Pope Francis himself fully appreciates the breadth and depth of the problem.
It is not surprising therefore that a tone of exasperation is sounded in the Australian commission’s findings, its unwritten question being, “What would it take to make these people take this issue seriously at last?” That might be the best way to view two of its proposals in particular: that the Australian Church should ask the Pope to make celibacy voluntary in the Catholic priesthood, and that the seal of the confessional should no longer prevent priests from reporting instances of child abuse to the authorities. There is no evidence that either of these two measures would make children safer at the hands of the clergy. Churches with married clergy also contain paedophiles; and if an abuser knew their confessor would be bound to report their abuse to the police, they would simply avoid confessing it. But that is not really the point. The Catholic Church has been shamed, and no detail of its practices can stand beyond scrutiny. If some part of the anger is misdirected, that does not mean it is not justified.
PICTURE: Australian Catholic Bishops Conference president Archbishop Denis Hart speaks to the media in Melbourne, Friday, December 15, 2017. Archbishop Denis Hart is responding after the final report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was released ©PA
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