AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)
By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
There was a time when the Catholic Church knew exactly what to do when one of its clergy molested a child.
“A cleric or monk who sexually molests youths or boys is to be publicly whipped, his head shaved, spat upon, and kept in prison for six months in chains on a diet of bread and water,” wrote Basil the Great, the Greek bishop of Caesarea in the 4th century.
He also recommended the offender be watched and not let anywhere near young people once released.
Basil’s solution is extreme by today’s standards, but it leaves you asking how, 1600 years later, secrecy and cover-up became the Catholic Church’s modus operandi with errant clergy.
So overarching is the church’s operating style that it’s worldwide news when a Catholic archbishop in Australia – Philip Wilson of Adelaide – is charged with concealing the crime of child sex abuse.
NSW Police allege Wilson knew about it, yet failed to report priest Jim Fletcher for abusing boys in the 1970s, when both were working and sharing a house in the Maitland Diocese, near Newcastle.
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