AUSTRALIA
Catholic Herald
June 18, 2018
By Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith
If the Australian state wants to make martyrs over the seal, it will find plenty of candidates
The saga about mandatory reporting of child abuse in Australia, where it seems that the law will now compel priests to break the seal of confession, carries on.
It must give the virtue-signalers amongst Australia’s legislators great pleasure to say that the Catholic Church is not above the law, but this legislation will hardly help the protection of children. It will simply mean that no one who has abused anyone, or been tempted to do so, will ever dare to discuss the matter with a priest, still less confess to the sin in the sacrament of reconciliation.
Moreover, one Australian priest has a very good point: “The only way they [the states] would be able to see whether the law was being observed or not is to try and entrap priests.”
Quite so. Will the agents of law enforcement in Australia now pose as penitents and enter confessionals with tape recorders in the hope that of finding a priest who does not report child abuse? Such things have been done before, though in a different context. It is by no means impossible that this might happen, as it is hard to see otherwise how any arrests could ever be made.
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