AUSTRALIA
The Record
Archbishop Timothy Costelloe has this week encouraged the Perth Catholic community to pray for the work of the Royal Commission, as it begins to bring its public hearings to a conclusion.
In a Pastoral Letter issued to all Catholic parishes across the Archdiocese of Perth, the Archbishop said a call to prayer must never be seen as a substitute for decisive, transparent and effective action in relation to the horror of sexual abuse.
“Our faith assures us that if our actions are deeply grounded in our openness to God’s grace then they will produce the fruit we, and the whole of our society, so desperately want to see,” the Archbishop said.
“I ask you too, to continue to pray for the victims and survivors of sexual abuse in our Church,” the Archbishop said.
The final hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse are scheduled to run for six weeks from 6 February, with the first three weeks to be devoted to an investigation into the response of the Catholic Church in Australia to the tragic scandal of sexual abuse in Catholic parishes, schools, orphanages and other institutions.
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