Vatican orders Sydney Archdiocese to reopen abuse inquiry

By Dan Box
Australian
August 25, 2014

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/in-depth/vatican-orders-sydney-archdiocese-to-reopen-abuse-inquiry/story-fngburq5-1227035127697

THE Vatican has asked the Catholic archdiocese of Sydney to review an investigation conducted under previous archbishop Cardinal George Pell, which criticised the credibility of two alleged victims of church child sex abuse.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is also investigating the matter, following the publication of the resulting church decree in The Australian this year.

This decree, provided to the ­alleged victims in January, provides a powerful and controversial insight into the secretive canon law processes used by the Catholic Church to ­respond to claims of child sex abuse.

After more than a decade of lobbying by one of the alleged victims, the Vatican’s powerful Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith authorised Cardinal Pell “to conduct an administrative penal process” into the case. Cardinal Pell personally appointed three senior Australian clerics to undertake the investigation and forwarded the resulting decree back to the congregation.

The decree itself states that its authors “decided not to see themselves as judges charged with ­determining the guilt or otherwise” of the priest alleged to have committed the abuse.

“What is being tested is the ­reliability, the credibility of those making the complaints,” the ­decree states. It describes one ­alleged victim as “an exaggerator” with “a detailed dossier of these ‘remembered’ events clogging his computer’’. A previous decision by the church to pay this alleged victim financial compensation was done “for actuarial reasons and to appear pastorally concerned”, the decree said.