AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
Madonna King
Pope Benedict XVI was personally alerted to a shocking sex abuse case at a local Toowoomba school but dismissed pleas by local Bishop Bill Morris to stay on and deal with it.
Bishop Morris was controversially sacked by the Pope in May 2011, prompting international news.
The revelation that the Pope was informed of the case is among many penned by Morris in his book Benedict, Me and the Cardinals Three, which will be released this weekend.
Private correspondence between Bishop Morris and the Vatican show a stunning ignorance of the fallout from clerical sex abuse in Australia, as well as the birth of “Temple police’’ – local extreme right Australian parishioners who are taking notes in churches and complaining directly to the Vatican.
“There was no depth of understanding of the devastating effects that clerical sexual abuse was having on the lives of families and communities throughout Australia,’’ the Bishop writes.
He says he tried to “explain how abuse damages the psyche of a community, having a debilitating effect on some individuals to the degree that they mistrust the church and its ministers’’ but senior Vatican chiefs “would have nothing of this’’.
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