AUSTRALIA
The Australian
JULY 05, 2014
Dan Box
Crime Reporter
Sydney
THE Vatican has declined a request from a royal commission to hand over every document it holds relating to child-sex abuse committed by Catholic priests in Australia.
Speaking at a western Sydney meeting of the Care Leavers Australia Network today, commission chairman Peter McClellan will say that the Vatican has to date provided several documents, relating to two individual priests.
Justice McClellan quotes a letter sent by the Vatican to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, that “respectfully suggests that requests for all information regarding every case — which includes requests for documents reflecting internal ‘deliberations’ — are not appropriate”.
“The Holy See maintains the confidentiality of internal deliberations … and indeed depends upon deliberative confidentiality to ensure the integrity and efficacy of its judicial and administrative processes,” the letter states.
To date, half of the royal commission’s 14 public hearings have investigated the response of Catholic institutions or orders to instances of child-sex abuse.
The commission’s first interim report, released this week, found that more than two-thirds of the Australian faith-based institutions at which child abuse allegedly took place were Catholic.
Last month, the commission publicly examined the Vatican’s own response to one such case, where the Australian church’s attempts to discipline an abusive priest were held up for years by appeals to the Holy See.
“We have been told in evidence on more than one occasion that there was a view in the Roman Catholic Church, at least in the 20th century, that the sexual assault of children … was a ‘moral failure’ but not a crime,” Justice McClellan says today. “Why did such a view, which is out of step with community values reflected in the criminal law, emerge?
“Furthermore, if, as appears likely, that view was common in the Roman Catholic Church, was it a view held more generally in the community?” he says. “If it was, why was it not challenged in previous generations?”
In recent years, Justice McClellan says, the modern Catholic Church within Australia has done much to reform its handling of child-sex claims, including reviewing compensation agreements previously made with the victims of such abuse.
Giving evidence to the commission in March, the then-archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, publicly accepted the church should reconsider its use of legal defences against such claims.
“He acknowledged that there must be an effective institutional response to the damage done to an individual who is abused within that institution,” Justice McClellan says.
Many Australian dioceses and orders have provided documents in relation to requests by the royal commission. The Vatican has also indicated that other documents may be provided from copies held in Rome, he says.
In his speech, the commission chairman repeats the case made in this week’s interim report for the federal government to grant a two-year extension to its work beyond the current 2015 deadline.
Having received more than 3000 accounts of child abuse at over 1000 institutions, “the commissioners have been able to define the ‘project’ which we believe must be completed if the issues are to be adequately addressed”.
Originally published as Vatican rejects calls for abuse papers
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