AUSTRALIA
ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
July 13, 2019
By Alan Weedon
Key points:
– Egregious crimes were perpetrated by some Catholic leaders in Latin America
– This happened during the Cold War, a period where the Church was fighting Communism
– Vatican factional fighting has stymied responses to the crimes of clergy
Over the past few years, Australians have been largely pre-occupied with revelations of decades of misconduct by the country’s Catholic Church.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, running from 2013 to 2017, found that 7 per cent of all Australian priests — or 1,880 alleged perpetrators — were accused of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2010.
It determined that the Australian Church was responsible for “catastrophic failures of leadership” over decades, where civil authorities were actively kept away from numerous allegations of abuse in parishes around the country.
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