AUSTRALIA
The Catholic Church has
failed to fully accept the horrific impact of child sexual abuse and its own
role in a tragedy of “epic proportions”, a member of the royal commission has
said.
In a surprisingly frank
speech, Robert Fitzgerald - one of the six commissioners that oversaw the
recently completed, five year inquiry - has slammed the church’s approach to
abuse survivors, and its failure to tackle practices that contributed to the
scourge of abuse and the secrecy around it.
Speaking at a Catholic
Social Services Conference in Melbourne late last month, Mr Fitzgerald
highlighted the ‘’disease’’ of ‘clericalism’ - the belief that the church’s
male-only clergy are mystical beings, accountable to the Pope and to God, not
to civil society or church laity.
Mr Fitzgerald, a
practising Catholic, described the leadership of the church as
"arrogant’’:
"A church that
placed its own reputation above the interests of those victims and survivors
and did so knowingly and willingly in a way that would cause further harm to
those victims.’’
The final report of the
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, delivered
last December, made 400 recommendations to secular and religious institutions.
But already the Catholic
church has rejected any changes to celibacy or to the seal of confession.
Archbishop Denis Hart
said even if a priest admitted to acts of child abuse during confession, the
seal was ‘’inviolable’’. Instead he would encourage the abuser to admit
their crimes outside confession.
Mr Fitzgerald, in his
speech, described a church divided between those that accepted the evidence of
abuse and the need for reform - including a greater role for women - and those
conservative Catholics who were "yet to fully understand what has just
occurred’’.
He said the church was
the only institution he’d ever known to have the answers to such major problems
"but refuse in fact to look to those answers, look to those solutions’’.
The scale of abuse
recorded by the royal commission across all institutions, secular and
religious, was immense, affecting countless, tens of thousands of abused children,
most of whom were now adults.
But such abuse was
particularly prevalent in Catholic institutions. Nearly 62 per cent of all
people who notified the royal commission of abuse in a religious setting were
abused in a Catholic institution……
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The legislation, dubbed
the “Hidden Predator Act,” extends the statute of limitations for victims from
age 23 to 38, and creates other avenues for adults to sue long after that age.
It passed 170-0 on the floor of the House of Representatives, despite what
those close to the process say was quiet lobbying by the church, the Boy Scouts
and other entities that would face increased exposure to liability….
The bill’s chief author,
Rep. Jason Spencer, R-Woodbine, had accused them of working behind the scenes. He blames
them for amendments that reduced the exposure of organizations, but he had no
evidence of their efforts beyond word of mouth until Friday morning. He shared
an email with the AJC from the office of the senator whose committee will
determine the bill’s fate.
Sen. Jesse Stone,
R-Waynesboro, chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. His assistant forwarded
Spencer an email from Perry McGuire, a lobbyist for the Catholic Church.
McGuire’s amendments would strike the extension of the statute of limitations
and make it even more difficult than it is now to sue organizations.
“If they adopt that
language from Perry McGuire as a substitute bill, then Georgia will continue to
be a predator-friendly state,” Spencer said. It shows “that the Catholic Church
is continuing to cover up wickedness.”
Archbishop announces
opposition to Georgia HB 605
ATLANTA—Archbishop
Wilton D. Gregory has released the following letter in response to HB 605, a
bill that is under consideration in the current session of the Georgia General
Assembly.
My dear brothers and
sisters in Christ,
When I am called to
stand before our Heavenly Father to make a full and final accounting of my
priestly life and ministry, I will first humbly ask His Mercy for all the times
I’ve fallen short in my service to Him and to His people. If I’m asked what I
did to bring people to Him, I’ll recall the countless Sacraments I’ve
celebrated with so many of you, the faith-filled social interactions we have
shared, the remarkable opportunities to teach and to lead and to be present
during moments of incredible joy and incalculable sorrow.
And when He asks me that
for which I am most thankful in my service to His Church, it will have been my
work in restoring trust to His people, assuring safe environments in Catholic
settings that serve as examples to the wider community, and helping to bring
about healing and hope to those in our faith family who have been sexually
abused by members of our Catholic clergy – work I still wish more than anything
on earth had never been necessary, work that we can never call complete.
In our Archdiocese of
Atlanta, the Office
of Child and Youth Protection helps us carry on our Promise to Protect and Pledge to Heal by creating and
maintaining safe environments and walking alongside survivors of sexual abuse
on their journey to healing. The efforts of this office, along with all
dioceses in the United States, are audited on a yearly basis by an independent firm who
verifies compliance with the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
Our Victim Assistance director ministers to those who have
suffered abuse without question, no matter when or where the abuse took place.
Our Office of Safe
Environment ensures compliance of all individuals working with
children, youth, and vulnerable individuals by offering comprehensive abuse
prevention training and background checks. We continue to operate a 24-hour
hotline (888-437-0764) for anyone, Catholic or not, who has been abused by a
member of the clergy, a man or woman religious, or a lay associate. I am
pleased to say our child and youth protection program is among the most robust
anywhere – within the Catholic Church or outside it – and our audit record for
the past two decades speaks for itself.
With that commitment to
safety and healing in mind, I write to inform you of an extraordinarily unfair
bill currently pending in our state legislature. If passed, House Bill 605
could drastically damage our ability to carry out the mission of our Catholic
Church in the state of Georgia because of the following:
HB 605 would allow
lawsuits against churches, private schools, businesses and non-profit
organizations for actions asserted to have occurred many decades ago,
potentially as far back as the 1940s, and the accused are very often deceased.
Recognizing that these lawsuits can be very difficult if not impossible to
defend, and risking grave injustice, the vast majority of states simply do not
permit them.
HB 605 discriminates
between the Church and the state. All governmental agencies – park districts,
public school districts, care facilities, and so forth – are inexplicably
immune from the potential devastating effects of these lawsuits. Churches,
religious and private schools, non-profits and businesses are affected.
We have always fully
supported criminal prosecution of and lawsuits against any individual abuser of
children, no matter how long ago the abuse is alleged to have occurred.
Additionally, for the past two decades the Catholic Church in Georgia has had
what may be the strongest safe environment program, non-profit or otherwise, in
the state. Our Church and our schools have strict zero tolerance policies
regarding sexual abuse of any vulnerable person. HB 605 does not protect
anyone. Rather, innocent people and the organizations to which they belong will
be radically impacted based on allegations against individuals who may no
longer even be alive and cannot speak for themselves.
In short, HB 605
represents a policy that is bad for the citizens of Georgia. As your
Archbishop, I implore you to contact your state senator and other elected
officials to let them know you join me and over one million of your fellow
Catholics in opposition to HB 605. Here is a link that will help
you locate the state senator in your district.
Sincerely yours in
Christ,
Archbishop Wilton D.
Gregory
Archdiocese of Atlanta
BRITAIN
The Catholic Church and
British local authorities have been accused of using a legal loophole to avoid
paying compensation to victims of child sex abuse.
The Criminal Injuries
Compensation Scheme, a government agency, has denied some children financial
settlements because it said the victims had “consented” to the abuse, a
group of charities has warned.
Lawyers representing
victims have warned that this line of defence is becoming increasingly common…….
“No child ever gives their ‘consent’ to being
abused, and the increased use of this line of defence, although still quite
rare, is worrying,” said Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for
England. "I have contacted the Ministry of Justice previously and again
recently about this issue and the Government should look urgently at what can
be done to tackle it.”
The Sunday Telegraph reported that it had seen
documents regarding two cases where the defence was used. A claimant who was
raped at the age of 15 was told by lawyers representing the Catholic
Archdiocese of Southwark that his abuse "actually occurred in the context
of a consensual relationship (albeit one the claimant in retrospect now appears
to regret)".
The victim said "I
was below the legal
age of consent anyway and there's a grooming element to that kind of
situation. It was totally disregarded and it made me feel really small."
The case was finally settled, with the Catholic
Church paying out £80,000.
IRELAND
Soca is angry about a
deal between the Catholic church and the Irish government in 2002 that resulted
in the taxpayer footing most of the bill for compensating those abused in religious
institutions.
The deal resulted in the
church having to pay out €128m of a €1.3bn compensation bill.
Last year, Ireland’s
comptroller and auditor general found that only €85m had been paid out of
church funds. On top of its criticism of the deal, Soca said the church should
at least be forced to pay out in full the agreed €128m.
BACKGROUND
The Royal Commission
into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse accepted Mr Tapsell’s
evidence that for 15 centuries before 1917 church law required child sex
offender priests to be stripped of their status as priests and handed over to
civil authorities for punishment.
It accepted Mr Tapsell’s
evidence that Pope Pius XI in 1922 imposed the first blanket secrecy
provisions over Catholic Church child sex cases which stopped reporting to
civil authorities; they were expanded by Pope John XXIII in 1962 and Pope Paul
VI in 1974, who told bishops there was no room for the exercise of conscience
on the matter, and reinforced by the now sainted Pope John Paul II in 1983.
In September, 2014 Pope
Francis rejected requests by two United Nations’ human rights committees to
abolish the church’s secrecy provisions.
