AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times

December 22, 2012

Richard Wynne

A FRIEND came to my office unannounced recently. He is someone I see infrequently, although our work, political and social lives intersect. He arrived with a two-page, tightly written letter that was shocking and distressing. It was a chronology of the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church, things he had not spoken about or acknowledged for more than 40 years.

To understand the insidious nature of systemic abuse, in all its forms, we need to acknowledge the power the Catholic Church exerted over its congregations. My experience and that of my friend, growing up in poor Catholic families, was that the church was inviolate. The ancient rituals of the Latin Mass (such a foreign and inaccessible ceremony); our duty to attend every Sunday; the annual St Patrick’s Day parade through the city, marching like a…