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	Culture LED to Sex Abuse Cover-Up in Church By Peter Jean Canberra Times May 24, 2010 http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/culture-led-to-sex-abuse-coverup-in-church/1837957.aspx Canberra's Catholic Archbishop has confessed it took "people like me a tragically long time" to see the faces and hear the voices of sexual abuse survivors in the Church. In a deeply personal letter to parishioners published at the weekend for Pentecost Sunday, Archbishop Mark Coleridge said a culture of discretion had been used to conceal crimes by paedophile priests and protect the reputation of the Church. Archbishop Coleridge said victims had sometimes been treated as if they were to blame for abuse at the hands of priests and members of religious orders. The former Vatican official said it had taken him decades to realise the scale of sexual abuse within the Church. "For too long they [victims] were unseen and unheard. To see their faces and hear their voices has taken people like me a tragically long time," he said. Archbishop Coleridge said that triumphalism, institutional pride and "clericalism understood as a hierarchy of power, not service," had all contributed to inadequate responses to sexual abuse. Charity often commanded that discretion be used to protect the dignity of people, Archbishop Coleridge said. "Yet this culture of discretion turned dark when it was used to conceal crime and protect the reputation of the Church or the image of the priesthood in a country that has never known the virulent anti-clericalism of elsewhere," he said. "The Church may also have underestimated the power and subtlety of evil." Several factors had combined to make the problem of paedophilia cultural rather than merely personal within the Australian Church, including a poor understanding of the Church's teaching on sexuality. "The discipline of celibacy may also have been attractive to men in whom there were paedophile tendencies which may not have been explicitly recognised by the men themselves when they entered the seminary," Archbishop Coleridge said
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