AUSTRALIA
Fox News
December 15, 2017
An Australian inquiry into child abuse could rock the Roman Catholic Church.
The panel on Friday called on the church to repeal its celibacy requirement for priests, and said clergy should face prosecution if they fail to report evidence of pedophilia heard in the confessional.
Australia’s Royal Commission into Institution Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released its 17-volume report and made almost 200 recommendations following a five-year investigation into how the Catholic Church and other institutions responded to sexual abuse of children in Australia over 90 years.
The Royal Commission is the country’s highest form of inquiry and the voluminous report it produced followed testimony from more than 8,000 survivors of child sex abuse.
Sixty-two percent of those abused in religious institutions were Catholic, the study found. Catholicism is the largest denomination in majority-Christian Australia.
“We have concluded that there were catastrophic failures of leadership of Catholic Church authorities over many decades,” the report said.
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