Sex Abuse Inquiry Offers an Insight into Evil

Daily Telegraph
June 3, 2014

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/sex-abuse-inquiry-offers-an-insight-into-evil/story-fni0cwl5-1226942049517

PETER Fox, the wannabe whistleblower cop who claimed a “Catholic police mafia” in the Hunter Valley was protecting paedophiles, was revealed last week as a self-aggrandising zealot unfairly smearing his colleagues.

But the special commission of inquiry he triggered may yet prove valuable.

Not only did it clear the names of innocent police officers smeared by Fox’s wild accusations, but it highlighted the failure of senior clergy within the Catholic diocese of Maitland-Newcastle to protect children from two paedophile priests from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

Commissioner Margaret Cunneen SC’s final report offers an insight into how such evil could exist, undetected, within the church for so long.

What she found was that victims came forward to complain of being sexually abused, but their accusations were not reported to police.

She notes that Father Brian Lucas, now the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, and a lawyer, had a “general practice of deliberately not taking notes of his meetings with priests accused of child sexual abuse’’.

“The purpose of this practice was to avoid the creation of documentary records … that could later reveal to church outsiders (including the police or complainants in civil litigation) matters that might bring scandal on

the church …

“Lucas and the diocese failed to have proper regard to what should have been the overriding consideration: The protection of children,” the report said.

Fox was misguided and his evidence found to be untruthful, but Cunneen and her team have ensured the inquiry was not a pointless exercise.