AUSTRALIA
Sky News
Australia’s most senior Catholic leaders will ask the Pope to settle the issue of whether the seal of confession can be broken to protect children from sexual abuse as one likened it to bugging the confessional.
Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher said for a priest to repeat anything that has occurred during confession would be a very serious breach of trust and the sacrament.
Archbishop Fisher said he could not withhold absolution from someone who confessed to abusing a child and if they were genuinely contrite would forgive their sin, as he would a terrorist or a murderer.
‘What I can’t do is effectively bug the confessional on behalf of the state to use it to a way of reporting crimes retrospective or prospective,’ he told the child sex abuse royal commission.
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