AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
To people unschooled in legal and canonical niceties, mounting evidence about the Catholic Church’s approach to child abuse surely beggars belief.
Australians will soon need to decide whether they still trust the church to do what is best to protect children or whether new laws are needed to ensure police and other investigators become involved whenever there is potential risk.
By placing so much weight on protecting its own reputation and respecting the privacy of victims, the church looks increasingly out of step with community expectations.
Those concerns have been raised by evidence to commission of inquiry into Hunter region paedophile priests from Brian Lucas, general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference since 2002, qualified lawyer and ordained priest.
During six years from about 1990, Lucas’s work with the Archdiocese of Sydney included dealing with about 35 priests accused of sex crimes.
Lucas admitted he had never taken notes during the meetings, in some instances ”so that a subsequent legal process that would compel production of them cannot be successful”.
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