Peter FitzSimons: When will the madness end?

AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald

Peter FitzSimons

So, I’ve got this right, yes? On the one hand, we have the Catholic Church maintaining it will make no change in its protocol about the sanctity of the confessional. And it maintains that, despite the fact that – as just revealed by the Criminal Justice report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse – it has presided over cases like the one in Rockhampton where Father Michael McArdle was forgiven no fewer than 1500 times by 30 of his fellow priests for raping children in his care.

“I was devastated after the assaults, every one of them,” Father McArdle affirmed in a 2004 affidavit, quoted in The Australian on Tuesday. “So distressed would I become that I would attend confessions weekly. [After every confession], it was like a magic wand had been waved over me.”

Now, as not a single one of those priests called the police – sanctity of the confessional and all that – McArdle continued his atrocities for decades, devastating the lives of ever more children.

And, on the other hand, we have the Catholic Church waving a flag upon what it sees as the moral high ground, warning the rest of us of what will happen to society if we vote for marriage equality. And its warnings include the dangers to children of gay couples.

I ask this seriously. How long can we, as a society, BEAR this?

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