AUSTRALIA
The Australian
CHRISSIE FOSTER
The Australian
March 6, 2017
My husband and I just spent the past three weeks in Sydney at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The hearing, Case Study 50, was the final examination into the Catholic Church and its failure to protect children from pedophile clergy.
We listened to church leaders explaining what they have done in response to child abuse by clerics over the past 4½ years of exposure in the royal commission hearings and the public exposure over decades.
When heads of provincial orders, bishops and archbishops were questioned by counsel assisting Gail Furness about the new systems they were putting in place, gaping holes appeared in these and their attitudes.
They had not enacted, or even thought about, implementing many of the suggested safety measures, nor had they considered any form of internal analysis to gather insight for change.
It was galling to hear from the archbishops in particular. We were disheartened and wondered if anything had changed. We were hearing once again the horrific Catholic clergy excuse for the atrocities that scar their history.
Their unique, weak and repetitive justification for the cover-up of the extensive rape and sexual assault by clergy was offered three times by Hobart’s Archbishop Julian Porteous during his evidence. “Nobody understood the seriousness of the effects of sexual abuse on children… ,” he said.
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