AUSTRALIA
The Humanist
BY LUIS GRANADOS • 26 FEBRUARY 2015
You can get jaded reading too much news, especially too much religion news. Muslims murdering innocents in creative new ways … Jews kicking more non-Jews out of their Palestinian homes … Evangelicals squashing the teaching of basic science … the umpteen millionth manifestation of the Catholic sex abuse saga. Enough already!
Sometimes, though, an item is astonishing enough to command attention amid the squalor. Such is the case with the report of Australia’s “Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse” released earlier this month. This document is not the work of some quick-buck plaintiff’s lawyer or on-the-make journalist. It is a comprehensive, thoughtful investigation of how the response to these abuses unfolded, authored by the most respectable people in the land. The evil it reveals, at the highest levels, is hard to believe.
John Ellis was an Australian altar boy who was routinely assaulted by Father Aidan Duggan, starting at the age of thirteen and continuing for many years afterward. The psychological impact on Ellis was devastating, as it has been for many other victims—he could maintain neither a family nor a job because of his alternating depression and fits of uncontrollable anger.
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