Albanese Urges Catholic Church to Show Humility

By Jared Owens
The Australian
March 4, 2016

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Anthony Albanese has urged the Catholic Church to “show a lot more humility” about its handling of child sexual abuse, after his former school principal this week pleaded guilty to abusing 18 children.

The opposition frontbencher’s comments came after Bill Shorten this week shared “very personal” feelings about child abuse, noting his childhood priest allegedly abused 56 youngsters and was in jail.

Mr Albanese told the Nine Network: “It’s very obvious that for so many years, senior people in the Church put what they saw as the institutional interests of the Church before the actual parishioners and when you are talking about young kids it is very disturbing.

“The Catholic Church needs to come out and just say sorry, and make recompense and show a lot more humility than we have seen up to this point.”

Mr Albanese said his former principal at St Mary’s Cathedral College in Sydney, Brother David Standen, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to routinely sexually abusing boys in his care under the guise of tuition or discipline.