AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times
March 27, 2013
Barney Zwartz
Religion editor, The Age.
Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church gets covered up through a system of blackmail and ”sacred silence”, according to the founder of the Broken Rites advocacy group, Chris Wilding.
She said sexual activity by priests and bishops set up a pattern of institutional secrecy and a system of blackmail that reached the highest corridors of the Vatican.
Ms Wilding told the Victorian inquiry into how the churches handled sex abuse that celibacy was a myth, and that when a priest was promoted his sexual partners could also advance.
”It is this system of blackmail that is central to the response of bishops, locally and around the world, relocating paedophile priests. If the bishop is compromised because he is known to be sexually active, the predatory cleric resorts to blackmail,” she said.
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