Senator Andrew Bartlett
Saturday, October 29, 2005
 
Catholic church and child assault
If you wanted to predict a headline for a mainstream newspaper article in Ireland, you wouldn’t expect something like “Church Role in Schools Must End”, but that was an article in Thursday’s edition of the Irish Times. While removing the church from schools won’t happen, the fact that it can be seriously proposed gives an indication of the sort of impact that has occurred as a result of a report which has been produced into sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Diocese of Ferns, which is a bit south of Dublin. (more reports here with plenty of links to related stories).

This isn’t the first time there’s been allegations of sexual assault of children in Ireland, but it appears to be the most comprehensive investigation so far, dealing with over 100 allegations over a forty year period against 21 different priests, as well as the failures in the responses to these allegations from the Bishops in the Diocese, and in some cases failures from other officials such as police.

I managed to get a copy of the report, which due to legal advice has not been made available on-line. (correction: found a copy online at here at bishopaccountability.org ) It tells a story which is sadly familiar in Australia, the USA and many other places, and of course with many more institutions than just the Catholic Church. The corruption and cover-ups involved clearly went wider than church officials, and the general lack of seriousness given to many complaints is again not unique to Ireland.

Some of the media coverage I saw of it was reasonably impressive, with some mature debates wrestling with the fact that this is a societal problem rather than just a church problem. The Bishop of Dublin’s comments on the issue also seemed to be quite good to me, although how genuinely that translates through the church hierarchy remains to be seen.

It reminded me that we still have not properly tackled the issue of child protection in Australia, despite all the evidence about the scale of the problem caused by our lack of action and sense of priority. There has been some good action here and there, but not enough of a consistent, comprehensive and ongoing national approach. I believe there still needs to be a national Royal Commission into this to really make the sort of major leap forward and break with the attitudes of the past that are needed.

Given the pivotal role the Catholic Church has played in Irish society, history and politics for so long, this report is having a big impact. Hopefully it will lead to sustainable, positive change and the church shifting from seeing itself as somehow above society to just concerning itself with issues relevant to their religion.

The Irish government has announced some new measures as a result of the report aimed at better protecting children from abuse. There is a relatively dispassionate analysis of some of the issues flowing out the report in the Irish Examiner, and further information is now coming to light of abuse allegations in other Irish dioceses. I had read some talk of a possible comprehensive national inquiry, but haven’t seen any confirmation of it. I think that would be a good thing for Ireland to do, and the same should occur in Australia. There have been many inquiries in Australia, but they have been too piecemeal and confined to specific situations, localities or organisations. That makes it too easy for the cover-ups and criminality to continue.

Whilst this isn’t just a Catholic Church problem, it is a big problem for the Catholic Church and one they still have not properly come to terms with throughout their organisation. Check out this Editorial from the National Catholic Reporter for another example of this:
“with the release on Oct. 12 of a 155-page report describing decades of sexual abuse by clergy in the Los Angeles archdiocese, there now exists compelling and preponderant evidence that at least three living cardinals of the Catholic church in the United States have been complicit in what any reasonable observer would term criminal activity.”

This matter is also commented on by Catholic writer and blogger Amy Welborn – it is worth reading the many comments to her post too.

UPDATE: It looks like the same sorts of problems are now coming to light in Brazil, according to this article in the Sydney Morning Herald.


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