AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
Joanne McCarthy
10 Feb 2017
THE child abuse royal commission would not be “beyond its remit” if it recommended obliging priests to break the vow of secrecy if a person confessed to sexually abusing a child, senior Australian Catholic priest Frank Brennan said in evidence on Thursday.
“I don’t think it would be beyond your remit, and if parliaments were minded to pass such a law,” Father Brennan said during the final Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearing into the Catholic Church.
Father Brennan warned commission chair Justice Peter McClellan that a recommendation instructing priests not to give absolution to a person confessing a child sex crime until it was reported to police could be “a fundamental interference with the usual separation of church and state”, but “these things can be done”.
Father Brennan warned that while the commission would have the authority to do it, such a recommendation “could become politically problematic”.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.