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Bishop Wright Says Child Abuse Not Just a Catholic Issue

By Ian Kirkwood
Newcastle Herald
September 2, 2016

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/4139298/bishop-under-the-spotlight/

HAVING delivered what he said was an unreserved apology for the “devastation” caused by paedophile priests in his diocese, the Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, Bill Wright, then left the Royal Commission while the statement of one of Vince Ryan’s victims was read to the hearing.

Asked about it afterwards, Bishop Wright said he had already read the statement and knew it was to be given by the victim’s solicitor, rather than the man himself, but it was “a fair question” the Newcastle Herald was asking about his decision not to stay to listen.

The third day of the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic case study hearings began with Dr Peter Evans, the head of a Franciscan retreat in Melbourne that Ryan was sent to in 1976 after serious child sex allegations against him.

The commission has heard that Ryan had a single consultation in Melbourne and returned to an adjoining parish to the one he’d been sent from about a year before. Next up was Maureen O’Hearn, from the diocese’s survivor support organisation, Zimmerman House, who said that many counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists did not understand the true impact of child sexual abuse.

Bishop Wright then spent an hour either side of lunch in the witness box, much of it answering questions about his interpretations of what two senior clergy, Monsignor Patrick Cotter and Bishop Leo Clarke, knew and did about Ryan’s prolific abuse.

Bishop Wright said he could see what the various documents on exhibit were saying but he could only speculate what was in the minds of both men.

Things became more combative, however, when Bishop Clarke said he sometimes wondered why the commission was spending so much time on things in the past when there was an “awful lot of stuff going on” in the broader society that could be under a “contemporary spotlight”.

The commission’s chairman, Justice Peter McClellan said: “Thank you for that, but we have been charged with, and the community wanted the church, your church, amongst others, to face up to what happened in the past in a public way.”

Justice McClellan said that 40 per cent of the cases being revealed to the commission in private sessions involved Catholic institutions. He said paedophilia had been a problem for the church for many centuries, and that this was “reflected in the whole history of the confessional [and] reflected in provisions in canon law”.

Asked about “clericalism” – or the maintenance of priestly power – Bishop Wright said the “the old thing that ‘you cant say that to me, I’m a priest’ would now incite derision”.

 

 

 

 

 




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