AUSTRALIA
Eureka Street
Moira Rayner | 13 December 2015
Lord Acton said that ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ It was in correspondence about the then pope’s proposed new doctrine of papal infallibility. It is often overlooked that he added, ‘Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.’
Dr Kathleen McChesney with Truth, Justice and Healing Council CEO Francis SullivanWhen I was a child, the greatest misuse of priestly power imputed to the ‘RCs’ was the sometimes brutal violence used in the ‘care’ of disobedient pupils, unmarried mothers, illegitimate and ‘removed’ children and orphans in institutions run by nuns, brothers and priests.
Thanks to brave individuals and independent journalists, the sexual abuse permitted and distributed by some of these hands has been revealed in Australian parliamentary inquiries and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
It is unfair to profile the one, Catholic Church for the sins of so many more whose patriarchal culture and authoritarian practices are shared by those who professed to ‘suffer the little children to come unto me … for of such are the kingdom of heaven’.
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