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Opinion: Confessional seal does not protect children from predators
By Terry Sweetman
[with video] POLITICS is where good ideas go to die, to be crushed by raw numbers, suffocated by belief or prejudice, or left to perish in the face of expediency. One such good idea is the recommendation by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse that priests be forced to accept the same legal responsibilities as the rest of us. Among its wish list of 85 recommendations was that failing to report child sexual abuse be a criminal offence and there should be “no excuse, protection, nor privilege” for priests who fail to alert police because the information was received in confession. The commission noted evidence of multiple cases in which priest penitents went unreported, unpunished, and protected. Worse, it heard of cases where abuse disclosed by child victims was kept close to the confessional chest. “We are satisfied that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt,’’ it said. “We heard evidence that perpetrators who confessed to sexually abusing children went on to reoffend and seek forgiveness again.’’ Most would recall that too many offenders were aided in their serial abuse by the misguided policies of a protective church. “We have concluded that the importance of protecting children from sexual abuse means that there should be no exemption from the failure to report offences for clergy in relation to information disclosed in or in connection with a religious confession.’’ Priests might take comfort from the 1st century Latin moralist Publilius Syrus who said “confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence” but it wouldn’t cut too much ice in the real world. There are more potent changes in the commission’s recommendations, but this privilege, granted to about 3000 priests ministering to 5.5 million Australian Catholics, is shaping up as a bitter squabble between church and state. Francis Sullivan, head of the Australian Catholic Church’s Truth and Justice Healing Council, is a man who has had the scales lifted from his eyes by revelations before the commission. But he believes in the seal of confession as one of the universal laws of the church and that priests should be prepared to suffer the consequences of disobeying the law. Bring it on, he says. He is but one of many laymen, clergy and bishops to warn that breaking the seal of the confessional does not fit into their notion of rendering unto Caesar. And legal martyrdom would not be an unwelcome prospect for many priests. Apart from obedience to canonical law, I see no evidence that the confessional, or its seal, is in any way constructive in the struggle to protect children from predators. Some see confession as some kind of safety valve and a rehabilitative opportunity for those driven by guilt to report themselves. But I saw nothing in the commission or in my experience to support that. To the contrary, the commission pointed to psychologists’ evidence that for some clergy perpetrators the act of confession was part of a pattern of offending, because after confessing they would feel a degree of absolution. Another recommendation that would apply to the clergy is the removal of “good character” as a mitigating factor in sentencing “where that good character facilitated the offending’’. We’re all of good character until we demonstrate otherwise and it is the cynical abuse of that very character (reinforced by the authority of the church) that is hideously demonstrated in evidence given to the commission. In the face of predictable criticism of just one contentious element of its report, the commission was able to tartly respond that it made recommendations to governments, not the church. How many of our 5.5 million Catholics go to confession isn’t known but what we do know is that priests have been statistically over-represented among abusers and that some have been protected by the seal of the confessional. Despite the in-built contradictions of the church’s stand, it would be a brave politician who lightly dismissed the concerns of a weighty, if indeterminate, number of religious adherents. It is a clash between secular and canonical authority that has troubled jurisdictions around the world. Agreement and uniformity on reeling in the presumed privileges of the Catholic Church at a time of rising political/religious sectarianism is probably a bridge too far for Australia. I defend the rights of people to believe, but I reserve the right to reject their beliefs. Putting the seal of the confessional before the safety of children is one of those beliefs I reject.
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