Australia’s Grim Toll in the Church’s Sex Abuse Scandal

New York Times
February 13, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/opinion/australias-grim-toll-in-the-churchs-sex-abuse-scandal.html?_r=0

Cardinal George Pell after meeting with victims and their families in Rome last year.

The global scale of the Catholic clergy’s sexual abuse scandal becomes harder for the Vatican to deny with each shocking national inquiry. The latest, from Australian government investigators, found that from 1980 to 2015 there were 4,444 victims of abuse and at least 1,880 suspected to be abusers, most of them priests and religious brothers.

Through this period, the haunting subtext is the culpability of bishops who did nothing about the crimes. The abused children were ignored or punished while priests who raped children were protected by supervisors.

“Secrecy prevailed as did cover-ups,” said Gail Furness, senior counsel to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The inquiry, which began six years ago, has been meticulous, with hearings investigating 116 institutions, including government agencies responsible for children’s welfare.

The findings show harrowing patterns of abuse. Forty percent of religious brothers from the order of St. John of God were accused of sexually assaulting their wards in residences where some of the most vulnerable youngsters were housed. Of all the chilling statistics, one stands out: 33 years is the average time it took for victims to overcome decades of personal despair and go to authorities with complaints. And many might never have filed complaints but for the emergence of other victims as the scandal grew churchwide in the wake of news media investigations.

The Australian inquiry underlines the question of whether the Vatican will ever discipline offending bishops. One of Pope Francis’s confidants, Cardinal George Pell of Australia, who is now the Vatican treasurer, testified last year before the government inquiry. “I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” the cardinal declared. He termed the abuses a “catastrophe” for the church, but denied that he knew of priests abusing children during decades of work at his country’s diocesan and parish levels.

In late December, Pope Francis called for “zero tolerance” by bishops of the sexual abuse of children and spoke of “the sin of covering up and denial.” Earlier, in 2015, Pope Francis approved the creation of a special tribunal to investigate offending bishops who routinely shielded pedophile priests and paid hush money to victims. But Francis stirred skepticism when he dropped the tribunal plan last year and assigned the task to the Vatican bureaucracy.

The devastating findings in Australia raise yet again the question: Will the church faithful ever see diocesan leaders brought to account for protecting the abusers and not the children they victimized?