BALLARAT (AUSTRALIA)
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
December 15, 2017
By Charlotte King
The Ballarat Catholic Diocese says it is open to a recommendation from the child sexual abuse royal commission that parish priests be stripped of their power over schools.
The diocese has been referred to as the epicentre of child sexual abuse, with hundreds of victims.
Earlier this month, the royal commission released its damning report into the Ballarat Catholic Diocese, describing its handling of clergy child sex abuse as a “catastrophic failure of leadership”.
The commissioners found a culture of secrecy and failures in the church’s structure led to children being abused across the diocese over a number of decades.
“That failure led to the suffering and often irreparable harm to children, their families and the wider community,” the report stated.
Catholic schools have featured more than any other institution in the number of child sexual abuse complaints.
When one of the nation’s most prolific paedophiles, Gerald Ridsdale was made parish priest of Mortlake in western Victoria, he had been sexually assaulting children for almost a decade.
The 1981 appointment put him at the helm of the local parish primary school, St Colman’s.
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