State Must Intervene When Sin Is Also Crime

By Martin Mckenzie-Murray
The Age
April 19, 2012

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/state-must-intervene-when-sin-is-also-crime-20120418-1x7f8.html

IN EARLY February this year, leaders of the Catholic Church met in Rome for a symposium on sexual abuse. Called "Towards Healing and Renewal", the event was intended to help the church prevent further abuses, find "the best ways to help victims and protect children" and ultimately eliminate abuse from the priesthood.

There lies the problem. The church and the state - in any country you care to name - have different ideas about the "best way" to prevent and report abuse. While February's symposium repeated the Vatican's guidelines from last year on co-operation with civil law, the 2011 suggestions were not binding in church law.

The year before, in 2010, the Vatican artificially tweaked its internal laws on punishing abusive priests. But in a document codifying this, the gesture was hopelessly marred by listing the ordination of women as comparably offensive as child abuse. Sceptics are right to doubt the efficacy of internal processes in an organisation that rates the extension of equal opportunity alongside the rape of children.

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A week before the symposium in Rome this year, retired Supreme Court judge Philip Cummins submitted his year-long review on the protection of Victoria's vulnerable children. A segment of the report deals with religious organisations. It speaks of the tension between church process and civil law and recommends the government launch an inquiry into how churches have handled complaints and prevention. That was weeks before The Age revealed a horrific cluster of suicides by victims of church pederasty in Victoria.

On Tuesday, Premier Ted Baillieu announced a parliamentary inquiry into the Catholic Church and other religious organisations. Consistent with Cummins' recommendation, the year-long inquiry will have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence.

This is not an attack on the church. It will practically and powerfully demonstrate that the church is not above civil law, while providing the church with an opportunity to clean its house - or demonstrate that it's already clean - and mend its relationship with the community.

As repulsive as such abuses are, compounded by the negligent, often corrupt concealment of them in Europe and the United States, this issue is so emotionally charged that it risks melting the complexity of the Catholic Church - the variety of churches and opinions that reside in it - down to a simple, abhorrent symbol of hypocrisy and vileness. This would be divisive, unfair and intellectually dishonest.

The Catholic Church is not disproportionately diseased by paedophiles. Children run the same or greater risk of being abused at home, in the homes of relatives or in secular schools. The profile of the paedophile is disturbingly varied. Predators are as likely to be successful professionals as they are to be isolated failures.

But there's incidence and then there's response.

We rightly have enlarged expectations of a church's propriety, expectations that are unserved by the church's reliance on internal, publicly unseen procedures. This deepens a crisis of confidence, a crisis as much in the church's interest to resolve as it is in the public's.

What's more, religious organisations are disproportionately exempt from statutory measures designed to protect children, while the Catholic Church is unusually hierarchical and authoritarian in design, a structure - wittingly or not - likely to discourage whistleblowing.

In 1996 the Melbourne Archdiocese introduced its own internal process for abuse victims. Called "The Melbourne Response", it's overseen by an independent commissioner and provides investigation, counselling and compensation to victims. It has overseen more than 300 cases. We do not know how many of these have been referred to police.

When should the state intervene in church process? When a crime has been committed. There's a sacred word for child abuse. It's "sin". There's also a secular one, "crime", and there's a powerful line in the Cummins report that speaks to this: "Crime is a public, not a private, matter." The report continues to say that however well meaning private church responses may be, they conspire to make public matters private.

This means that the state must compel individuals in churches to report suspicions of abuse. This means amending the Victorian Crimes Act 1958 and extending it to include those who hold office in religious organisations, with an exception for information wrought from confession. This is recommendation 47 of the Cummins report.

Recommendation 48 has already been enacted by the Premier - establishing an inquiry - and the Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, says the church has nothing to hide. Good. It's important that the church reflects our secular sense of human dignity. Responsibility, accountability and equal measure before civil law.