AUSTRALIA
Daily Life
April 21, 2016
Ruby Hamad
This week, a Melbourne Catholic priest compared priests who sexually abuse children to women who have extra-marital affairs. Apparently trying to make a point about mercy in the face of public outrage, Father Bill Edebohls, head of schools in his parish in East Malvern, referenced the tale of the adulterous woman spared from stoning by Jesus with the words, “He who is without sin. Let him cast the first stone at her.”
“For our generation, where adultery is not regarded as a crime – and many have lost the moral sense of the destructive harm adultery does to family and community… we probably don’t get the power of the gospel story,” he wrote.
“Remember this was a sin, a crime that carried the death penalty… Maybe to get the real drama and effect of the story we ought to replace the adulterous woman with a paedophile priest. Then we might begin to understand the mob eager to stone and the outrageous and profligate mercy and compassion of God ever ready to forgive,” he concluded.
It’s not the first time a clergyman’s words have minimised clerical child abuse by reminding everyone that women are the real enemy; Cardinal George Pell once called abortion a “worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people.”
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