BishopAccountability.org

Pathetic excuses for the sins of the fathers

By Chrissie Foster
Australian
March 06, 2017

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/pathetic-excuses-for-the-sins-of-the-fathers/news-story/8c821d3cf491611533e4a341d95605cc


My husband and I just spent the past three weeks in Sydney at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The hearing, Case Study 50, was the final examination into the Catholic Church and its failure to protect children from pedophile clergy.

We listened to church leaders explaining what they have done in response to child abuse by clerics over the past 4½ years of exposure in the royal commission hearings and the public exposure over decades.

When heads of provincial orders, bishops and archbishops were questioned by counsel assisting Gail Furness about the new systems they were putting in place, gaping holes appeared in these and their attitudes.

They had not enacted, or even thought about, implementing many of the suggested safety measures, nor had they considered any form of internal analysis to gather insight for change.

It was galling to hear from the archbishops in particular. We were disheartened and wondered if anything had changed. We were hearing once again the horrific Catholic clergy excuse for the atrocities that scar their history.

Their unique, weak and repetitive justification for the cover-up of the extensive rape and sexual assault by clergy was offered three times by Hobart’s Archbishop Julian Porteous during his evidence. “Nobody understood the seriousness of the effects of sexual abuse on children… ,” he said.

Rape and child sexual assault have always been serious crimes, with extremely serious penalties for those convicted, because our society, including the church hierarchy, knows, as it always has, that the effect on victims is extremely serious.

This has been the case in Australia since English law arrived here more than 200 years ago and in England for hundreds of years before that. For a long time child rape was a capital crime: the punishment was hanging.

At least 31 men were executed in Australia for this crime in the period to 1961, when the hanging penalty was repealed and replaced with long prison terms.

And yet the church continues to claim ignorance of the effects of these crimes — a pathetic excuse for the criminal cover-up, under its watch, of the rape and sexual assault of tens of thousands of Australian children.

The first time we heard this excuse was from the vicar-general of Melbourne, Monsignor Gerald Cudmore, on June 25, 1995. He was quoted repeating this excuse two months later when speaking about the crimes and prison sentence of Father Kevin O’Donnell, the priest who raped our children.

Then as recently as February last year, only weeks before retired Bishop Ronald Mulkearns died, he stated in evidence to the royal commission hearing into the Ballarat diocese: “We had no idea, or I had no idea, of the effects of the indecent (assaults) that took place. We didn’t know the effect it (sexual abuse) would have on children.”

Why do they use this justification for child rape and molestation? What do they want us to believe by saying such a ludicrous thing? How can “not knowing the effects” be an explanation for their brother clergymen sexually assaulting thousands of children?

By excusing themselves in this way, they are admitting they knew about the assaults but did nothing because they didn’t think it hurt the children. We are expected to believe that now they understand the “effects”, they would stop it happening.

They always knew the extreme effects of these crimes on children, the potentially serious effects on the perpetrators if they were caught, and the scandal it would unleash on the church.

And they now want to avoid responsibility and accountability for themselves and their predecessors for the crimes and the cover-ups.

It is sickening to hear, as we have for decades, these pathetic words from the priests who failed to protect children from their fellow clergy and who today still protect and favour career pedophiles by paying for their defence in court cases against victims, and then welcoming the criminals back with housing and stipends when they leave prison.

At the same time they have been neglecting the needs of surviving victims by refusing to compensate them fairly for lifelong damages. Bishops and archbishops and the church must be held accountable for the injury rained down on children by pedophile clergy and for their part in prolonging and promoting their criminal behaviour.

As one, they decided to leave offenders working in parishes with children while knowing what was happening was criminal.

On the first day of Case Study 50, abuse statistics were read out; the shocking figures travelled around the world. There were 4445 child victims and 1880 identified clergy offenders reported to the church, with another 500 offenders unidentified. Counsel assisting later said the numbers were likely to be higher. The published statistics would indicate that each pedophile priest or brother had on average of only 2.3 victims. As we now know, so many of these pedophile clergy — O’Donnell, Gerald Ridsdale, Robert Best and many more — had dozens of victims.

Research has found the average is between 50 and 100. Using a historically conservative number of 20 child victims for each clergy offender’s criminal career, some spanning close to 50 years, would place the number of children sexually assaulted within the Catholic Church at 37,600 at least. If we were to assume each victim was assaulted a conservatively low 10 times, we would come to a total of 376,000 crimes committed by the Catholic offenders.

On one of the mornings, as we sat in the royal commission waiting area, before the day’s hearings got under way, Father Frank Brennan approached my husband, Anthony, and said: “I know your face. Your name is O’Donnell.”

Anthony was stunned. Kevin O’Donnell was the priest who raped two of our daughters for years at their primary school, resulting in Emma’s suicide and Katie being hit by a car while binge drinking.

Anthony looked at him and replied “My name is Anthony Foster”, to which Brennan responded “Oh yes, O’Donnell was that horrible priest”, as he walked away without so much as a grimace or apology.




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