SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
Eternity News
December 15, 2017
By Anne Lim
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse handed down its final report this week. A long-time campaigner for and supporter of survivors of abuse by clergy is retired Catholic bishop Geoffrey Robinson. He spoke with Eternity’s Anne Lim:
Bishop Geoffrey Robinson was born into a world of faith. But in another life, it’s quite likely that he would have been happier as a family man and may not even have been a priest.
The retired Catholic bishop is aghast when he looks at 12-year-old boys today because at that tender age his mother, a good Irish Catholic, sent him to the seminary.
“Looking back, I would say that my mother belonged to that category of Irish descent who desperately wanted to have a child who was a priest,” says the bishop, who went on to reject his mother’s brand of Catholicism and campaign for a radically reformed Catholic Church.
One thing he will never regret – being a crusader for justice and healing for the victims of sexual abuse by clergy.
He believes his father would have stopped her sending him away so young if he had not died from a heart attack the year before.
The young Geoffrey thought little of the consequences, though they came to weigh on him later. “It means that at the age of 12, I was committed to a life of celibacy,” he says.
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