AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
July 17, 2014
David Ellery
Reporter for The Canberra Times.
Archbishop Christopher Prowse does not know how the Catholic Church may move forward in the wake of its recent sex abuse scandals but he is convinced the victims will be a part of any solution.
“We are going through an unprecedented crisis in the Catholic church,” he said this week. “There is so much shame, there is so much humiliation with the criminal acts of some of us [that] for us to stand alongside victims, to encourage them to come forward and to listen to their story, is absolutely imperative.”
Appointed to lead the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn last September, Archbishop Prowse said he had been humbled and inspired by “the raw courage of so many victims of clerical sex abuse as children”.
“They have been very heroic in trying to refocus on their life and to instruct us as a church [on] where we have failed and what we can do to ameliorate a very difficult stage of our history.”
He said the victims “who are able to be courageous enough to share with us their stories” are “the new missionaries”.
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