AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
IAN KIRKWOOD
9 Sep 2016.
THE Royal Commission’s hearings into the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic diocese have concluded, and its Newcastle Anglican hearings resume in Sydney on Wednesday, November 16.
After watching 16 of the commission’s 18 sitting days at Newcastle Court House (I had two days off to cover the ICAC Operation Spicer findings) it is clear to me that while the details of every act being examined were different – obviously enough – the underlying pattern was the same, no matter if the perpetrator was a priest or a brother, an Anglican or a Catholic.
These were men with gigantically over-inflated self-importance – thanks largely to the pedestal of “clericalism” – whose gross sexual perversions were either ignored or covered-up by bureaucracies whose instincts and actions made the reputations of themselves and their organisations the cornerstone of their responses (if any) when forced for whatever reason to account for themselves.
And while the commission heard its share of apologies from various high-ranking church figures during the Newcastle hearings, it seemed to me that at least some of the contrition was grudging, at best. A good example of this came two Fridays ago when the chairman of the commission, Justice Peter McClellan, put it to Bishop Bill Wright that there were some Catholics “who don’t really accept that the spotlight . . . should have shone on the church to the extent that it has”.
I doubt I was the only one expecting the bishop to say the spotlight was warranted. Instead, he said: “I myself, your honour, you know, wonder – it sometimes seems that so many of the case studies are delving into matters of 30 and 40 years ago and I kind of wonder where the more contemporary spotlight should be falling.”
He had “this awful misgiving that there’s an awful lot of stuff going on out there now and we spend so much time on decades ago”. Justice McClellan saw things differently: “Thank you for that, but we have been charged with, and the community wanted the church, your church, amongst others, to face up to what happened in the past in a public way.” It was, as they say, a telling exchange.
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