AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
June 4, 2013
Gerard Henderson
Executive director, The Sydney Institute
Cardinal George Pell in Sydney and Archbishop Denis Hart in Melbourne have become public targets for criticism concerning sexual abuse by priests and brothers within the Catholic Church in Australia. The evidence suggests that paedophiles have been active in religious and secular institutions and elsewhere over the years, particularly between the 1950s and the 1980s. The situation within the Catholic Church has been particularly serious.
During their recent appearances before the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse, Pell and Hart were subjected to hectoring by some parliamentarians, along with occasional demonstrations and generally hostile media coverage, particularly on the ABC and in The Age. Yet it appears they were among the first Catholic leaders in the world to address the issue in a serious way.
A lot of the commentary on this issue has been replete with an ignorance as to how the Catholic Church operates by those who should know better. For example, on ABC1’s News Breakfast last week Wayne Chamley of Broken Rites said the Church “runs on anarchy”. It doesn’t. Last July, the Four Corners program ”Unholy Silence”, by Geoff Thompson and Mary Ann Jolley, failed to make the point that Pell is not responsible for archdioceses or dioceses other than his own. Each bishop reports direct to the Pope in what is an authoritarian structure.
More seriously, Four Corners refused to run Pell’s comment to this effect, either in the program itself or in the extended interview which is on the Four Corners website. The latter omission looks like censorship. This was important since the cases of sexual abuse covered in the program pertained to crimes committed by a one-time priest identified as “F” in the dioceses of Armidale and Parramatta, which are outside Pell’s immediate control.
The bishops of Armidale and Parramatta commissioned a report into the management of F by retired Federal Court judge Antony Whitlam, QC, (a non-Catholic).
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