AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
DAVID PENBERTHY SUNDAY HERALD SUN MARCH 22, 2015
IT IS difficult to imagine a darker scenario. Two adult men having a private conversation in which one reveals he has perpetrated sickening acts of sexual violence against a child, with the second agreeing that he will take the man’s secret to the grave.
A dark scenario and under Australian law, a wholly legal one.
Over the past few months there has been a lot of talk, fuelled in large part by the abject behaviour of radical Islamists, about how in a secular society such as ours the law should trump God every time.
There were those two ratbags in a Sydney court last year who refused to stand for the judge, saying the only authority they recognised was Allah. Whatever. Those men were denounced for their actions and rightly so, with the NSW Attorney-General investigating the application of contempt laws in that case.
If Australia is going to be consistent on this issue it seems bizarre that our laws currently doff their caps to the strictures of the Catholic Church when it comes to the question of information obtained in the confessional.
We can tut-tut about our rattier Muslim friends not respecting the primacy of law, yet when it comes to the Seal of the Confessional, we have the perverse situation where every state of Australia has deliberately structured its laws to run second to a theological tradition which places children at risk and lets bad people reoffend.
This week one of the most senior Catholic priests in Australia, Archbishop Peter Wilson, was charged with allegedly concealing allegations of child sexual abuse by the convicted paedophile priest James Fletcher in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese in the 1970s.
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