UNITED KINGDOM
The Canary
AUGUST 17TH, 2017 Kerry-anne Mendoza
The Guardian has published a call that confidentiality rules should protect Catholics who admit to child sexual abuse in confession. While the author rightly calls on us to consider our own humanity, she neglects entirely the issue of widespread child abuse within the church. Abuse is about shame, and silence. And it’s time to break both.
The priest abuse scandal
First, we need to set the piece in the context of the priest abuse scandal. Representatives of the Roman Catholic church have engaged in child sexual abuse on an industrial scale.
The church abused children in the US, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Malta, Spain, Switzerland, Brazil, Ireland, the Dominican Republic and Australia. From local priests to cardinals, church leaders conspired to rape and sexually assault children; and protect each other (and the church) from justice. In 2012, experts advised the Vatican that there could be 100,000 victims of clerical child sexual abuse in the US alone.
Australia provided one of the most robust responses to the scandal. It launched a royal commission into both the abuse and the cover up, with extraordinary powers of subpoena. And it found that, between 1950 and 2015, 7% of Australian priests were accused of abusing children. In some orders, up to 40% of brothers had allegations of abuse against them. The commission later established a key reason that so few accusations ever made it to the police.
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