AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph

BY SOPHIE TARR AAP SEPTEMBER 09, 2013

CATHOLIC leaders simply could not accept that ordained priests might commit child sex abuse, a senior church figure has told an inquiry.

And where they did, they believed it was a “one-off”.

Asked whether there was a “cultural disinclination” among senior Catholics to confront claims of abuse in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Monsignor John Usher replied: “It was not so much cultural but spiritual”.

The monsignor on Monday fronted the special commission of inquiry into how church leaders and police handled child sexual abuse allegations against two Hunter Valley priests.

He said that 20 years ago the first response from bishops and other senior Catholics to claims of child sexual abuse by a priest was disbelief.

“(They thought), ‘this couldn’t be true’,” he said.