LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Guardian
December 15, 2017
By David Marr
[See the Royal Commission report.]
The commissioners’ immense work now needs all the help it can get to overcome the religious establishment
It’s huge. Don’t believe anyone who tells you they’ve already absorbed its lessons. Digesting the 17 volumes of the report of the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse is a work in progress for the nation.
It’s going to take time. Journalists and economists are given a head start on the Australian federal budget each year: a few hours’ lockup to help them get on top of the budget before it’s delivered. We – survivors, bishops, lawyers and journalists – should have been locked up with this for a week.
The danger is that after we’ve flicked through its pages for a few hours, checked out the recommendations and honed in on the more outrageous failings of the Catholic church, these volumes will fade from attention.
But this is a long game.
That’s clear even from the bulk of the thing stacked in two blue piles, threatening to tip over the governor general’s table while he shuffled papers about and signed something – a receipt? – for his summer reading.
At that point, Peter McClellan and his team of commissioners lost all their powers. For five years they’ve dug documents from their hiding places, quizzed the highest in the land, heard survivors map their horrors and researched the past in painstaking detail.
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