AUSTRALIA
Courier-Mail
CARLEEN FROST, The Daily Telegraph
February 6, 2017
AN American priest who lifted the lid on systemic child sex abuse throughout Catholic churches in the US has slammed the Vatican for the lack of support it has offered to its victims.
Father Thomas P. Doyle was the first witness to appear at today’s royal commission hearing in Sydney and has told the public gallery those forgotten survivors had suffered “profound spiritual damage”.
Dr Doyle was one of the first people to bring attention to the rise of sex abuse in church ranks across American in the early 1980s, and has spent decades ministering to victims and their families.
“I will say that one of the massive holes in the Roman Catholic Church’s approach to this issue still today is the failure to completely comprehend the depth of the spiritual damage that is done to their victims, to their families, especially their parents, to their friends and to the community itself,” Dr Doyle told the commission today.
“There seems to be no ability to even ask the proper questions.
“I have never seen anything coming out of the Holy See dealing with the spiritual damage.
“All I’ve seen is ‘Get them to go back to church’, which is nuts. That’s crazy.
“I’ve seen a lot of people, both priests and religious, who have tried to figure out how to deal with this and bringing aid and comfort and support to the victims.
“But as an institution, I have seen nothing.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.