Catholic Church spokesman questions sanctity of confessional when used by paedophile priests who admit abuse

By Quentin Mcdermott And Peter Cronau
Yahoo! News
August 12, 2014

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/catholic-church-spokesman-questions-sanctity-033353899.html

The Catholic Church's spokesman on child sexual abuse has questioned its stance on the sanctity of the confessional when it is used by priests who make admissions of abuse.

Francis Sullivan, the chief executive of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, has told the ABC's Four Corners program in an extended interview that in his mind, "the child's safety is paramount and it's incumbent upon the church to explain to the Catholic community and beyond why the confessional and information in it is sacrosanct".

Wayne Chamley from Broken Rites, an organisation which researches the alleged cover-up of abuse in the Catholic Church, told Four Corners that "a deviant paedophile priest may use the confessional as a way to lock in his superior".

"It may be that tactically these people - because they're incredibly clever paedophiles, and they're incredibly devious - at times were able to use the confessional as a way of locking in the people who did have some authority over them, so that the person just didn't go near them because it was signed and sealed by the confession that had been made."

In a frank and wide-ranging interview, Mr Sullivan said his council's calculation was that "at least 4 per cent of clergy were child sex abusers", a figure that he describes as "absolutely shocking".

"It's very confronting actually," he said.

Mr Sullivan also described the way solicitor John Ellis was treated by the church's legal team as "unforgivable".

Mr Ellis was abused by a priest in the 1970s but lost a legal battle in 2007 when the Court of Appeal ruled the church was not an entity that could be sued.

The church's lawyers used aggressive strategies to resist Mr Ellis's claim.

And in one of the strongest statements to date by a senior Catholic Church representative, Mr Sullivan described the flood of child sex crimes by the clergy as a "major, major crisis".

"It's not only a crisis of scandal and crime, it's also a crisis of faith and credibility," he said.

"You can call it what you like. Ordinary Catholics and ordinary Australians in their guts know that this is something the church needs to confront openly, honestly and atone for, and do it in such a way that we all see that they mean it."

Next week the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse begins hearings into the principles, practices and procedures of the Melbourne Response.

The Melbourne Response was set up by Cardinal George Pell when he was archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, and allows complaints of sexual and other abuse by priests, religious and lay persons under the control of the archbishop of Melbourne to be investigated by an independent commissioner.

A fuller, edited version of Mr Sullivan's interview can be seen on the Four Corners website.