BishopAccountability.org

Church leaders swept issues under someone else’s rug

By John Feguson
Australian
February 2, 2020

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/church-leaders-swept-issues-under-someone-elses-rug/news-story/7f098524502c4c64b034a633779d90b3

The Warren report is another depressingly familiar indictment of old school religious dysfunction and mendacity.

No minutes, no records, plenty of complaints and plenty of victims. Got a problem? Shift it around like a bishop on a chess board.

The net effect is twofold.

First, children’s lives are destroyed and then the modern church leadership must deal with the bitter carnage that flows from the sins of the fathers.

The Jesuits deserve credit for opening up their books to determine the who, what, when, how and why of the Victor Higgs scandal.

The truth, as much as it can be told decades later, is uncomfortable but it provides a platform for the society and the victims to move forward.

What most survivors want is simply to be believed and for the church to accept that it got things terribly wrong.

The saddest aspect of the Catholic abuse crisis is that there just doesn’t seem to be an end to the misery or to the offending or the scandals within the broader scandal.

For Higgs’s victims, the report will make for frustrating reading. It’s just another tale of church leaders knowing what sexual offenders were doing and deciding that shifting the issue to another location would somehow solve the problem.

It would be a fascinating court hearing to get the word from people like Higgs’s provincial in 1970 who was likely aware of some significant offending within his purview.

How could he possibly justify visiting such pain on so many children?

Suggesting it was an accident of history and circumstance doesn’t quite make up for the personal and intergenerational fallout.




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