BishopAccountability.org

Perth Catholic Archbishop Tim Costelloe says his mission now is to rebuild trust in the church

By Kate Campbell
PerthNow
August 26, 2017

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Catholic Archbishop Timothy Costelloe.
Photo by Justin Benson-Cooper

Australian cardinal George Pell who is accused of historical sex offences.
Photo by Riccardo De Luca

The confessional box

Thousands of people celebrate in Dublin Castle Square when Ireland voted yes for marriage equality.
Photo by Charles McQuillan

“IT’S more than shameful, because shameful is about how embarrassed in a sense you feel, it’s really horror that people’s lives have been so badly affected.”

Dealing with the child sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church to its core was Timothy Costelloe’s first priority when he became Archbishop of Perth in 2012.

Five-and-a-half years later and amid an ongoing royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, it’s still the biggest issue facing him and his church.

The 63-year-old former schoolteacher used words like “evil”, “shocking”, “confronting”, “shameful” and “painful” to describe how nearly one in 10 priests in the Catholic Perth archdiocese was accused of sexually abusing children between 1950 and 2010 and how “bafflingly inadequate” the response was from church leaders.

When asked if he could guarantee his archdiocese was now paedophile-free, Archbishop Costelloe said: “What I can guarantee is that in this archdiocese we’re sending out a message that today this is the most dangerous place for a paedophile to come because we’re on to them, we’re looking for them and we will deal with them.”

Talking in the same room where he has listened to the horrific stories of abuse survivors — which he described as a “difficult privilege” — Archbishop Costelloe said he believed the prevalence of child abuse was allowed to fester and run rampant in the past because of the trust people traditionally placed in priests and bishops which was “exploited” by “unscrupulous people”.

He accepted the church’s standing and reputation had been shattered in so many eyes, but believed trust could and was being rebuilt — with actions rather than words.

“I think that’s one of the biggest failures in this, is that the church which should be such an important part of people’s lives and has so much to offer is no longer able to do that for so many people because understandably they’ve walked away,” Archbishop Costelloe said.

“This now has to be a first-order priority for us, not just today, not just until the royal commission has finished, not until we’re just gotten over this because we’ll never get over it. But this has got to be a daily, always evolving feature of the church.

“My determination is to make sure that I do everything I can so that the past is never repeated, so that the future and the present are a different story. I also think this is an opportunity for me to perhaps be the archbishop that the church needs at the moment. I hope I am anyway in responding to this … ultimately I feel it’s my responsibility, I’ve got to get it right.”

Archbishop Costelloe noted that attendances at church Masses, especially on big occasions such as Easter and Christmas, had significantly risen across the archdiocese, while there had also been a marked increase in young men being ordained into the priesthood in Perth — 30 in the past six years, including 12 last year.

These men want to “help the church be the church it’s supposed to be”, he said.

The archbishop said many people still had trust, faith and hope in the church and their priests and were able to separate the horrors of the past from the current reality where “great strides” were being made to make the church safe.

“My impression is that certainly most Catholics, and I would imagine a lot of other people too, are able to distinguish between the few who are, let’s be honest, evil people and the vast majority (of priests) whose lives are lived with great dedication, self-sacrifice, courage and generosity ... and who never have and never would (abuse children),” he said.

The financial impact of this scandal has also been steep, with the Catholic Church in Australia paying $276 million in compensation between 1980 and 2015 to child sex abuse victims. Since 1980, the Perth archdiocese has made redress payouts to survivors totalling $1.96 million.

More than 200 “safeguarding officers” are stationed at the diocese’s 100 parishes, ensuring no child is ever alone with just one adult, while new churches are being designed with glass rooms so children attending will always be visible, he said.

BREAKING THE SEAL OF CONFESSION

Last week, the royal commission released 85 recommendations. One of them was that State governments should introduce laws to override the church’s seal of confession.

Archbishop Costelloe has great concerns about that, saying confession was a “privileged” and “sacred” encounter between a person and God. He’d been told by priests someone confessing to a serious crime was a “very rare thing”.

“I could give you a pretty watertight guarantee that if the law were to be changed, there would never be another case where a priest or anybody who was a child sexual abuser would come to confession,” he said, particularly if mandatory reporting of abuse was extended to the clergy — a move the archbishop supports.

He said the small chance that an abuser might be “open to persuasion” in the confessional would be lost.

CELIBACY

Archbishop Costelloe said he did not believe celibacy was a contributor to child sex abuse, but where the church had dropped the ball in the past was its assessment of whether candidates had what it took to live a celibate life. That’s why there is now a focus on psycho-sexual development within seminaries, he said.

Churches in the Eastern Catholic tradition allow married clergy and a small number of Anglican and other Christian priests have switched, been ordained into the Catholic Church and allowed to remain married.

“Celibacy is an enormously valuable contribution to the life of the Church. I would be sad to see it disappear. I don’t think it will ever disappear. I’m personally in favour of maintaining the approach we have at the moment but I understand many people would disagree with me on that,” Archbishop Costelloe said.

“I think Pope Francis is certainly indicating that he’s open to considering this question but perhaps not on a wide scale.”

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

Archbishop Costelloe has been a prominent voice in the public debate on the same-sex marriage plebiscite, but he wants to make one thing clear.

“I think it’s important for me to say as the archbishop I have no right to tell anyone how to vote,” he said. “Sometimes the church is characterised as wanting to force everybody into its position, I think that’s a bit unfair.”

He said like most people he had close friends who were gay and in same-sex relationships.

“We love these people, we want them to be respected, we want them to be treated with dignity ... this is instead about the nature of marriage and its relationship to family,” he said.

“It’s not always possible, but a child should be brought up in a loving and stable family relationship with his or her natural mum and dad. That’s an ideal which we believe is worth aspiring to.”

He said he was “not suggesting for a minute” that same-sex parents didn’t love their children or that the love between same-sex partners was not real.

Archbishop Costelloe said he understood some will dismiss the Catholic Church’s arguments and that because of its scandal-ridden past it had lost credibility in many eyes but he believed its voice had a right to be heard.

As chairman of the Australian Catholic Bishops Commission for Catholic Education, Archbishop Costelloe conceded if same-sex marriage was legalised and if an employee of the Catholic Church wanted to marry their same-sex partner there would be some “challenging conversations” ahead, but said that “no one is going to be summarily sacked”.

“Schools are places where young people are formed and parents choose to send their children to a Catholic school, knowing it’s a Catholic school,” he said. “There are other options for people to choose if they want to. No one’s forcing anyone to go to a Catholic school or seek employment in a Catholic school.”

EUTHANASIA

Euthanasia could be the next hot political issue, with the WA Parliament this month agreeing to set up a committee to examine the contentious issue. A parliamentary vote on end-of-life legislation could be on the cards as soon as next year.

And Archbishop Costelloe is preparing himself for another campaign — to spread the message that human life from “its very beginnings to its natural conclusion” is “inviolable”.

“This is a dangerous line for us to cross ... one thing that you can absolutely stand on is that our society will respect life and won’t do anything to destroy it,” he said.




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