AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)
By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 27 June 2014
A senior Australian Catholic lawyer has outlined how the Vatican has used a culture of silence to prevent the world discovering the sordid details of its investigations into pedophile priests.
Canon law expert Sister Moya Hanlen, chancellor of Wollongong diocese in NSW, took to the witness stand at Sydney’s royal commission into child sex abuse on Friday.
The inquiry is looking specifically at the conduct of John Gerard Nestor who was defrocked in 2008 after becoming mired in sex abuse allegations.
Sister Hanlen revealed how in 2001, when the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) took the lead in managing abuse investigations, rules were put in place preventing their details and those of punishments being published for at least 10 years.
“Does that mean effectively that the church throughout the world is not learning, as it happens, about decisions that are being made?” chair of the royal commission Justice Peter McClellan asked Sister Hanlen.
“It does seem to be that way,” she replied, adding that she expected some of the investigations from 2001 to start being made public soon.
Sister Hanlen also outlined how so-called ‘pontifical secrets’ – part of an omerta or silent culture among the church’s most senior identities – had been used to hush-up key details of abuse investigations.
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