AUSTRALIA
The Guardian (UK)

David Marr
theguardian.com, Monday 18 August 2014

It’s a telling detail: when the abused come to the witness box of the royal commission, they affirm.

They were born deep inside the church to families that never missed mass and sent their kids to the parish primary school over the road. But they don’t swear on the Bible when they come to give their testimony.

Chrissie Foster affirmed. She was the first witness on the first day of the first Melbourne sitting of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. She deserved her place at the top of the billing.

Two of her children were raped by Father Kevin O’Donnell, not in the dark ages but in suburban Melbourne in the 1990s. One is dead, the other is permanently incapacitated. The church, though it had known about O’Donnell’s criminal ways for at…