AUSTRALIA
The Age
October 11, 2012
Barney Zwartz
THIS IS the worst nightmare made real for the Catholic Church, its careful defences of its handling of clergy sexual abuse reduced to ruins by Victoria Police.
The police submission to the parliamentary inquiry explodes the careful strategy the church has run for years that, yes, it had made terrible mistakes, but these have been corrected by new protocols since 1996, and they can be trusted.
But the police say that even after 1996 the church hindered police investigations, protected paedophile priests and never reported a single complaint to police.
Despite constant church claims that all victims are encouraged to go to police, the police submission suggests that in fact, many are dissuaded from doing so and that the church’s independent commissioner, Peter O’Callaghan QC, has a conflict of interest. Where the church says abuse has almost disappeared – only 13 of the 618 confirmed cases the church admitted to in its submission to the inquiry occurred after 1990 – the police suspect the victims have merely been slow to come forward, in the usual pattern.
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