AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
Shannon Deery, Herald Sun
THE Vatican orchestrated the active cover-up of child sexual abuse cases through secret archives and church law, the child abuse Royal Commission has been told.
It also tried to stop victims of abuse coming forward by imposing a strict limitation on bringing claims of abuse as the horrors of the global child abuse crisis began to be exposed, it was alleged.
On the fourth day of the 15th and final probe of the Catholic Church by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse a panel of witnesses is testifying about church discipline and secrecy.
In an opening address to the commission counsel assisting Gail Furness, SC, said canon law, the law of the church, regulated and proscribe the Church’s response to allegations of child sexual abuse.
She said among the laws was an obligation that each diocese must keep a ‘secret archive’ which is to be separate from the diocese’s general archive.
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