AUSTRALIA
The Age
[Submission: Truth Justice and Healing Council]
October 4, 2013
Those, including this newspaper, who welcomed the announcement of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse are entitled to feel some sense of vindication at the formal submission of the Catholic Church to the commission, made public yesterday. As demands for the commission became increasingly strident late last year, Sydney Archbishop George Pell was arguing, right up to the last minute, that it was not needed.
He maintained that the Catholic Church had fixed the deficiencies in the two protocols it introduced in 1996, the Melbourne Response and Towards Healing. The admissions of failure, and an openness to listen ”to criticism and advice”, that were promised in Thursday’s submission to the commission show how flawed that claim was.
Cardinal Pell was irked by what he said were suggestions that the Catholic Church was ”the only cab on the rank” when, in his mind, it had done more than most to combat this scourge that has so damaged our society. Of course, it was not so much the abuse – appalling as it was, with devastating effects on victims and their families – that diminished the church’s public standing. It was the cover-ups, the silencing of victims, the moving of paedophile priests to unsuspecting parishes that most disgusted the faithful and non-believers alike when, thanks to the media and police, they began to emerge. That behaviour is unlikely today.
The cardinal was correct that his church is not the only cab on the rank. Most churches and secular institutions, particularly orphanages, have had their share of perpetrators, and it is right that the royal commission is casting a wide net. Yet it is also true that the Catholic Church has been disproportionately represented – its clergy and religious offended at six times the rate of all the other churches put together, according to evidence to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into how the churches handled child sexual abuse.
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