AUSTRALIAN Catholic leaders vowed yesterday that the church’s “shameful” history of child abuse and cover-ups will never be repeated, but rejected a national inquiry’s call to report such assaults disclosed in confession.
The church was formally responding to a five-year royal commission into institutional child abuse, ordered by the government after a decade of pressure to investigate widespread allegations across the country.
“Many bishops failed to listen, failed to believe and failed to act,” said Catholic Bishops Conference president Archbishop Mark Coleridge.
“Those failures allowed some abusers to offend again and again, with tragic and sometimes fatal consequences. The bishops and leaders of religious orders pledge today: never again.”
The commission was contacted by more than 15,000 survivors who detailed harrowing claims of abuse involving churches, orphanages, sporting clubs, youth groups and schools, often dating back decades.
Among the inquiry’s recommendations was that priests break the traditional confidentiality of confession if they are told of abuse, but the church said such a requirement impinged on religion liberties and was “nonnegotiable”.
“This isn’t because we regard ourselves as being above the law or because we don’t think the safety of children is supremely important — we do,” said Coleridge.
“But we don’t accept... safeguarding and the seal (of confession) as mutually exclusive.
Nor do we believe that abolishing the seal will make children any safer.”
The church argued that a perpetrator or victim might be less likely to raise abuse in confession if confidence in the sacramental seal was undermined.
“So an opportunity would be lost to encourage a perpetrator to self-report to civil authorities or victims to seek safety,” it said.
The inquiry also called for
celibacy among priests to be voluntary, and Australian Catholics agreed to seek expert theological and canonical advice in consultation with the Holy See on the issue.
Catholic Religious Australia president Sister Monica Cavanagh said the church accepted 98 per cent of the recommendations, calling the inquiry “an important and necessary period for the Australian community”.
“The process is already under way to reform the church’s practices to ensure that safeguarding is integral in all that we do as part of our ministry and outreach in the community.” AFP