Former Catholic Priest Gives Evidence at Inquiry

7 News
October 22, 2012

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A former Catholic priest has told Victoria's Parliamentary Inquiry into child sexual abuse, the Church might reduce the incidence of paedophilia by allowing clergy to marry.

Des Cahill is now a professor at RMIT University.

He was among those to give evidence on the second day of public hearings.

He said the Catholic Church had failed to deal properly with paedophilia and reassessing celibacy might be one way of limiting abuse.

"A celibate does not have the emotional support of a close community as a majority of people do in a marriage family context, then there's a greater likelihood of offending," he said.

Professor Cahill was also critical of the Church's in-house complaint systems, which he said were designed to protect the Church's reputation.

He says the Church should not handle such complaints.

For the past 16 years the Catholic Church in Victoria has handled complaints via two internal systems, called the Melbourne Response and Towards Healing.

Professor Cahill says there are several problems with both complaints systems.

"It's in-house, it's basically in-house design to protect the image and reputation of the Church and to contain financial liability, and secondly it's not transparent and open to the public," he said.

The Church has been criticised by police for not reporting any of the 620 cases of alleged abuse to authorities.