AUSTRALIA
lewisblayse.net
At a meeting of the Catholic Church’s discredited “Towards Healing” protocol for dealing with clerical sexual abuses, a member proudly announced he had personally destroyed over 40 boxes of evidence that morning, according to a church consultant.
Dr. Robert Grant, a U.S. psychologist who has previously advised the Catholic Church in several countries, said that he was “shocked, I was dumbfounded, not only the timing – I realized it was a statement to me how things were going to be run.”
Dr. Grant also revealed that meetings were attended by officials of the Catholic Church Insurance (CCI) company, and its lawyers. CCI officials would object to language used in the Towards Healing document “that would put the church at risk in terms of admitting culpability.” He said that “At first I thought maybe they were there to advise the church about the risk of taking certain pastoral stances, but I began to realize quite quickly that they were dictating policy.”
Clearly, the church was more interested in costs incurred by its insurance arm, which enjoys tax-free status in Australia, than in the welfare of victims. As Dr. Grant noted, “Quite to my amazement, I never heard victims talked about. I never heard victims being – people being concerned about the well-being of victims or how the document would affect victims. I heard more about Church liability and also I heard about priests that were victims. There was talk about priests that were being unjustly accused. I’d hear this every so often, but I hardly ever heard – and I even brought up a couple of times, aren’t we missing sorta the whole population that this document is designed for, which is the victims? But that again was not picked up or developed.”
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