AUSTRALIA
The Age
Martin McKenzie-Murray
April 19, 2012
Opinion
IN EARLY February this year, leaders of the Catholic Church met in Rome for a symposium on sexual abuse. Called “Towards Healing and Renewal”, the event was intended to help the church prevent further abuses, find ”the best ways to help victims and protect children” and ultimately eliminate abuse from the priesthood.
There lies the problem. The church and the state – in any country you care to name – have different ideas about the “best way” to prevent and report abuse. While February’s symposium repeated the Vatican’s guidelines from last year on co-operation with civil law, the 2011 suggestions were not binding in church law.
The year before, in 2010, the Vatican artificially tweaked its internal laws on punishing abusive priests. But in a document codifying this, the gesture was hopelessly marred by listing the ordination of women as comparably offensive as child abuse. Sceptics are right to doubt the efficacy of internal processes in an organisation that rates the extension of equal opportunity alongside the rape of children.
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