AUSTRALIA
Church Times
by Muriel Porter, Australia Correspondent
Posted: 24 Mar 2017
THE Australian Primate, Dr Philip Freier, Archbishop of Melbourne, appearing before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, has warned against seeking simple answers about abuse.
On the final day of the four-day hearing on the Anglican Church’s responses, a panel of six witnesses was questioned intensively about the causes of child sexual abuse in the Church, particularly focusing on clericalism. Dr Freier cautioned, however, that the propensity to abuse children was found in all forms of human community because “it is a deep thing in our human nature that we need to be very vigilant to protect against.”
In response to the suggestion that the Church might need to reflect on whether distinctive clergy dress and church ceremonial created an impression of power on impressionable people, Dr Freier explained that the symbolism of clerical vesture did not so much indicate a unique status as that the priest was a representative of the whole baptised community.
Earlier, the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Glenn Davies, suggested that the Anglo-Catholic tradition of calling priests “Father” might have been a significant aspect of church-based child abuse, “particularly for vulnerable boys, where the fatherhood connection has been lost and the priest becomes the surrogate father”.
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