Victorian Parliament Legislative Council
FAMILY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
Inquiry into the handling of child abuse by religious and other organisations
Melbourne — 19 October 2012
I guess that brings me to the rift I had with the Catholic Church over these issues. When I was asked to review Towards Healing in 2009 and 2010, I came across some cases which worried me deeply with one religious order. They worried me deeply because they were cases which had all arisen since 1996, 1996 being the watershed because Towards Healing was published then, and it contains significant promises to the Australian people about how the church will respond to these things. One of the things it says is that those who have abused their power will not be given back the power that they earlier have abused. Even from what I had read — from the submissions and some documents which were given to me in the course of those submissions — I could see that there were priests who had never had the power taken away. Settlements had been made with victims, and they continued in ministry, in two cases in Samoa and in another case in Rome.
In the case of the man who went to Rome, in fairness, he has always denied the offences and the accuser died, but one of the issues, which I deal with at great length in my submission, is that the police wanted to interview him. At that stage Father Murdoch, who was the Provincial of the Salesians, did his best to bring that man back from Rome to face the police and asked him to face his accusers. The no. 2 leader in the worldwide Salesians, one of the largest orders in the world and one of the most powerful Church organisations in the world, said, ‘Why don’t we just move him to another province, another part of the world, where he will be out of reach of the police?’. You will see from Four Corners the letter in which Father Murdoch documents exactly that. That no. 2 man is now the Bishop of Ghent in Belgium.
I said, ‘This must be dealt with’. With Towards Healing the Catholic Church relied on my reputation, my independence and the work I have done to say, ‘Yes, we have got people other than Catholics who are involved in this’. A condition of that for me was that they had to deal with this. I recommended strongly that there should be a public inquiry. I recommended that the government of Victoria be invited to establish a public inquiry.
They were very, very anxious about that. We agreed that we would first refer those concerns to the Salesians. I wrote a five-page letter, which you are most welcome to have, in May 2009 setting out those concerns and saying, ‘My preference is for a public inquiry, but the first step is at least for the Salesians to give a response’.
There were lots of delays, but eventually Father Moloney, who was then the provincial of the Salesians, gave a very long response, an eight-page letter with 12 attachments, revealing all sorts of documents from his files. I said, ‘That satisfies me somewhat’, because I had been concerned that there may have been criminal offences committed by the leaders of the order, ‘but there still needs to be a public accounting for this’. Eventually we agreed that on the basis of the documents they provided I would write a report. It is now attached as an appendix to the submission.
The story from then is the story of a contemporary cover-up. The Salesians have been described by one of America’s leading experts as the most unrepentant and defiant order he has ever come across. Indeed on the issue of sexual abuse, I would absolutely endorse that. I would say they are not only unrepentant and defiant,
they are untruthful. The lies which were told, the cover-ups, the attempts made to suppress my report, were breathtaking. And Father Moloney, who is apparently a well-known theologian, was absolutely at the centre of that, telling untruths which were in my view completely slanderous. There was a campaign of vilification and misinformation. Take the journalist who exposed all of this in Samoa many years earlier: the rumours were spread that he had himself been convicted of sexual abuse. I have no idea what has been said about me, nor do I care. But my rift with the church on these issues was because at the end of the day they wanted to protect the Salesians and not protect children.
Is this ancient history? I would like to think it is largely so, and I want to say again how many people have made a real effort to cut this cancer out of the church, but I am afraid that the cover-ups go to the highest levels. At the end of the day I wrote to Archbishop Wilson, who was then the chair of the Catholic Bishops Conference, and said, ‘I’m going to go public on this unless you act’. Two months later he had not responded.
These are very serious issues. May I just say how we might go from here, how we can rebuild trust and give you at least a few ideas? First of all, I think there has to be a complete account of all offenders and alleged offenders against children. I think that somehow, in some way, we need to have all those names out — all the Father Fs, all the Father Kleps, whether they are in Samoa, Rome, wherever they are, Father Klep being one of the men in Samoa…..
I think that there then needs to be the resignations of everybody responsible for the cover-ups. I think the church cannot recover from this crisis unless there is a clean slate and, for the people who have covered up, even if they thought they were doing the right thing at the time, getting them out of the church. I think they have to go, and some of them are still in positions of highest leadership in the church today. Then there should be independent audits of diocesan and religious institute responses in the future…..
Transcript of Professor Parkinson’s 2010 Professional Standards Review report.
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