AUSTRALIA
The Guardian
A victim reacts to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse report into the Catholic Church response, including Towards Healing
Wednesday 11 February 2015
I take this opportunity to thank the royal commission for exposing the true nature of my Towards Healing process. Towards Healing was introduced in 1996 by the bishops and religious institutes of the Catholic Church of Australia under the appearance of bringing healing to those affected by clergy sexual abuse. I entered this program in 1999 having already achieved a conviction against my perpetrator the previous year. The royal commission has shown that the Catholic Church of the archdiocese of Brisbane departed substantially from the undertakings they gave in their Towards Healing document. It is now public knowledge that the Catholic Church invited me into a situation which brought me more pain and suffering.
I am extremely grateful to the royal commission for upholding the finding on “justice and compassion” in my case. The Catholic Church in its protocol, Towards Healing, gave the community an undertaking that victims would be treated with justice and compassion. The church also asked that they be judged on the way that they adhered to their documented principles and procedures. Despite that, “the church parties said that no accepted or objective meaning of either ‘justice’ or ‘compassion’ was proposed or established and it was necessary to establish, ‘by evidence’, what is meant by and required by ‘justice ‘and ‘compassion’ before any adverse finding could be made that there was a failure to meet those standards.”1
The royal commission did not accept this argument. In their report the royal commission stated: “Towards Healing commits to the Catholic Church in Australia, and its various formations, to a ‘just and compassionate’ response to victims of child sexual abuse. It is the ordinary way in which readers of that public commitment will understand it that matters. That is the standard to which the formations of the Catholic Church in Australia and its personnel are accountable.”2
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