The Riverine's Opinion

By Andrew Mole
Riverine Herald
February 8, 2017

http://www.riverineherald.com.au/2017/02/08/5806/the-riverines-opinion

THE Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sex Abuse has ground along its painful trail of tears since 2015.

We have all seen the highlights on the news, seen figures as lofty as Cardinal George Pell dragged into the witness box and seen the pain of the survivors, the people seeking some form of justice for childhoods so brutally stolen.

That its insidious reach would be into every corner of Australia was never in doubt.

But that it would land on our doorsteps with such a sickening thud must have come to most, not just Catholics, as a bolt out of the blue.

The Diocese of Sandhurst, which covers us and the many Catholic schools in the region, has been implicated in the findings of the Royal Commission as one of the worst areas in 60 years of church-institutionalised abuse of boys and girls.

Implicated in a way which must now have parents wondering if there has been something they missed in children they entrusted to the Catholic Church.

Siblings looking askance at each other, and friends looking at friends.

Clearly there were priests about whom students, in their innocence, must have giggled in private, given nicknames but never really understood what they were seeing from the outside looking in.

Many of those children, now adults, parents and grandparents, have probably also entrusted the same church with their children and grandchildren in the generational procession that is private and/or religious schooling.

And despite what the Commission says about the improved conditions in the church’s approach to this indelible stain on its pastoral reputation, the doubt must always linger.

Paedophiles have insinuated themselves into every corner of society.

The Catholic Church’s shame was that it knew about its own problem for generations and, apart from brushing it under the carpet, did little – or nothing – to protect the children in its care.

For both the Royal Commission and the Catholic Church to even suggest this is an historical problem and not an issue facing us today is to simply run the risk of a repeat performance.

The next stage in this social tragedy will be the Royal Commission’s recommendations, the dithering of whichever government is in charge of interpreting and then implementing them and the concerns it will have achieved little but turned over the rock under which so much evil was hidden.

As a society we all bear a responsibility in the protection of our children.

As long as one section of our society, as long as just one of us alone, pretends not to have seen, or heard, then those children will always be vulnerable to that evil.