AUSTRALIA
Red Flag
Mick Armstrong
The Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse has revealed some of the outrageous abuse of children at the hands of Catholic priests, brothers and nuns.
It was not just the abuse itself that was appalling, but the decades-long coordinated cover-up by the church hierarchy, and the penny pinching that has denied the victims anything approaching adequate financial compensation for their torment.
There are a whole series of factors that come together as a toxic cocktail to explain the scale of the crimes.
First, there is the authoritarian nature of the church, which gives virtually unfettered power to the hierarchy. There is absolutely no democracy in the church. Parishioners don’t get to elect their priest, let alone their bishop. They have no say over church policy.
This was even more the case in the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s. In those days, most Catholics were poor working class people who were often viewed with ill-disguised contempt, or at best paternalism, by the bishops and many priests.
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