NEW ZEALAND
Stuff
STEVE KILGALLON
As the Vatican’s “Promoter of Justice”, Monsignor Bob Oliver bears the “best job title I’ll ever have”.
Catchy title, unenviable occupation.
Oliver is out to capture paedophile priests, surrendering them to civil law, then exacting whatever punishment the Catholic Church can mete out. It makes him a lightning rod for anti-church sentiment, forces him to confront the church’s dark past and its worst miscreants, and means many meetings with victims, often talking of their abuse for the first time. “It breaks your heart,” he said.
It’s been a major worldwide problem for the church: in the US alone, they’ve paid more than $US3b in settling over 3,000 lawsuits from victims; in Ireland, there have been several government apologies and inquiries and estimates of thousands of victims. The new pope, Francis, has taken a hard line on abuse and Oliver, 52, was one of his first appointees.
Oliver visited New Zealand last week, for a conference in Wellington, and granted the Sunday Star-Times a rare interview. The church was once deeply suspicious of the media’s approach to sex abuse cases but Oliver believes media did the church a service: “It’s hard for any group over time to keep up the kind of energy that’s needed to do this work,” he explains. “What the media has been doing was to keep that energy up . . .”
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