Feature Archbishop Coleridge on Church Culture and Sexual Abuse, CathNews, May 24, 2010

Feature - Archbishop Coleridge on Church Culture and Sexual Abuse

CathNews
May 24, 2010

http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=21512

On the feast of Pentecost, the Christian feast that gives birth to the church, Canberra Goulbourn Archbishop Mark Coleridge addresses his community, acknowledging that many of the causes of abuse can be located in the Church's culture.

The ABC'S Encounter program asks experts about the ways culture is a determining factor for sexual abuse. What has been learnt? What ought to be done?

Archbishop Mark Coleridge: The story of sexual abuse of the young within the Catholic Church has been the greatest drama of my 36 in the priesthood. So let me tell my own story of growing awareness of the reality; the story is mine but I suspect it is not unlike the story of many. I speak in retrospect but with no illusions about the present or the future.

I cannot say that abuse of the young is not still happening in the Church or that it will not happen in the future. What I can say is that the bitter lessons of the past have made it more likely that I and the Church will deal sensitively with abuse and its aftermath now and in the future.

Encounter: Catholic bishops in Australia are writing to bring people up to date on the Church processes for dealing with sexual abuse complaints. In and around Canberra and Goulbourn this week the people and priests of Archbishop Coleridge's community will have further reading - his account of "the reality".

Archbishop Mark Coleridge: The first case I heard of was in the 1970s when I was a young priest in Melbourne. When the news broke, I thought it was weird and distressing. I had hardly heard the word paedophilia in my early life and seminary training; I knew what it meant but I would have struggled to spell it.

If I thought of paedophilia at all in the Church, I would have found it mind-boggling that a priest, to whom the young are entrusted in a special way, could abuse children. But there it was undeniably, and I thought it was a tragic and isolated episode.