AUSTRALIA
The Courier-Mail
Terry Sweetman, The Courier-Mail
POLITICS is where good ideas go to die, to be crushed by raw numbers, suffocated by belief or prejudice, or left to perish in the face of expediency.
One such good idea is the recommendation by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse that priests be forced to accept the same legal responsibilities as the rest of us.
Among its wish list of 85 recommendations was that failing to report child sexual abuse be a criminal offence and there should be “no excuse, protection, nor privilege” for priests who fail to alert police because the information was received in confession.
The commission noted evidence of multiple cases in which priest penitents went unreported, unpunished, and protected.
Worse, it heard of cases where abuse disclosed by child victims was kept close to the confessional chest.
“We are satisfied that confession is a forum where Catholic children have disclosed their sexual abuse and where clergy have disclosed their abusive behaviour in order to deal with their own guilt,’’ it said.
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