Inquiry Will Test Catholic Church's Good Faith
By Terry Sweetman
CHRIS Masters, of The Moonlight State fame, wrote that when Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen was trying to scuttle the Fitzgerald inquiry he warned colleagues that if you lifted an old piece of tin you were likely to find a dead cat or an angry snake. Prime Minister Julia Gillard is doubtlessly aware plenty of stinking cats and venomous snakes will be exposed when her Royal Commission lifts the rusty iron of institutional responses to child abuse. The difference is Gillard will not be overly surprised by what the inquiry turns up. After a litany of complaints, exposes, court cases and plain old humbug stretching back decades, the only surprise for any sentient human might be the breadth of institutional inaction and the depth of the cover-ups. Rarely can Australia, or any of its states, have embarked on an inquiry where so many of the answers have been so evident for so long. It will touch on areas that have been randomly investigated in probably every state - including Queensland with the Forde inquiry and the ongoing inquiry under Tom Carmody - with horrifying findings but problematical results. The inquiries have been partially unsatisfying because they are inadequate when it comes to investigating and regulating national or international institutions. And they can be fatuous in giving false substance to the fiction that pedophiles and institutional corruption somehow recognise state boundaries. For a brief moment, it seemed the federal commission might equally fatuously pretend the protection of child abusers was restricted to the Roman Catholic Church. It quickly and wisely morphed into a broader inquiry that can only serve the nation and its children well. Having seen their fears addressed by Gillard's wide-ranging, although still ill-defined, inquiry, it would be nice if some of the church's leaders and leading adherents shut up and stopped peddling nonsense. In particular, it would be nice if Archbishop George Pell, the loudest noise in the Australian Catholic Church, turned to contemplative silence. While he talks of the inquiry separating fact from fiction, he gives the impression he wouldn't know one from the other. Pell's accusation of a persistent press campaign against his church is self-protective nonsense. This inquiry has the potential to embarrass everyone from Boy Scouts to police, catching up all in between, including the happy clappers and the Protestants who sometimes seem to think women and gays are more threatening than pedophiles. But the initial focus will be on the Catholic Church because the inquiry's catalyst has been infamy in the church in two states, and particularly in a small NSW region. But why should we be shocked when the Catholic Church is the nation's largest with, reportedly, nearly six million members, almost 28 per cent of the population? If nothing else, a roll call of 3000 or so priests, 9000 men and women in Catholic institutions and 650,000 students in Catholic schools across the nation stack up the mathematical odds against it. It, along with every other institution, will be judged not so much on the sins of its followers and workers but on the response of its leaders and the adequacy of its own bureaucracy. And into the inquiry the church will carry with it the peculiar institution of the confessional, which Pell is at pains to protect. He has declared the Seal of Confession inviolable and, in what is little short of hypocrisy, advised priests to protect it by avoiding hearing confession from colleagues suspected of committing child sex abuse. "That would be my advice, and I would never hear the confession of a priest who is suspected of such a thing," he said. Surely the responsible thing to do would be to urge priests to report their suspicions to police given that the church's own protocols seem so ineffectual. Such sophistry would seem to weaken faith in the confessional. It all has a resonance with the cowardly and discredited "don't ask, don' tell" policy towards homosexuals in the US military. Our national inquiry into a national disgrace will be ultimately futile if the Catholic Church, or any institution, believes it can continue to exist in a parallel universe where dogma takes precedent over law. I trust the Government will fund this inquiry generously, give it the same sort of investigatory resources that Fitzgerald used to turn over the rusty iron in Queensland's paddocks and strongly affirm its powers of coercion over even those who bow to another authority. Australian children, their families and, ultimately, the institutions that sometimes betray them deserve it. Contact: sweetwords@ozemail.com.au
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