AUSTRALIA
9 News
By Belinda Grant-Geary
The Catholic church assumed those entering the clergy wanted to do “good things” for the congregation, giving paedophiles unprecedented access to children, a royal commission has heard.
Professor Francis Moloney, a senior fellow at Victoria’s Catholic Theological College, said before dozens of witnesses including Cardinal George Pell that he did not believe paedophiles used the church to get close to vulnerable children and instead thought people with “latent” tendencies realised their attraction to minors once they spent more time with them alone.
“I don’t think they were self-acknowledged paedophiles who became religious in order to be with young people. I think they come to us and these tendencies emerge,” he told the Royal Commission into child sex abuse on Tuesday.
“It is a psychosexual deviation there that is latent but then appears once they find themselves involved one-on-one with young people.”
Professor Maloney said of the 20 percent of Salesians of Don Bosco identified as perpetrators of sexual abuse were situational offenders while others “would-be paedophiles whether they were Salesians or not”.
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