Archbishop Mark Coleridge sent a letter this week to all priests and deacons to comply with double-dose vaccination by December 15 or stand aside.

In the strongly worded letter on Monday, he warned that unvaccinated clergy "present a risk" to parishioners. He said that priests and deacons who failed to comply would have to show cause as to why they should not be immediately suspended.

Conscientious objection would not be accepted as grounds for exemption, he said.

"I will not consider conscientious objection to receiving the vaccination as a valid exception to the provisions set out here," wrote Coleridge. "I fully respect the right of conscience, especially when properly formed in the Catholic understanding. But I too have a conscience; and it is not just legal obligation but consciences which has led to my decision."

Leaders of other church communities have taken different approaches to vaccine mandates.

The Archbishop of Melbourne Peter Comensoli, heading Australia's largest Catholic community, said about 5 percent of clergy there were not fully vaccinated. While "strongly encouraging" priests to get the Covid shots, he had stopped short of mandating it.

"I have strongly encouraged vaccination for our clergy so that they can fully minister to our people in all circumstances. Most particularly for the care of the most vulnerable in hospitals and aged care," Archbishop Comensoli told The Australian. "To date, around 95 percent have achieved their double vaccination."

A spokesman for Anglican Primate, Geoffrey Smith, said the archbishop had "made his position very clear" that everyone should be vaccinated. But it is understood no Anglican diocese in Australia had made this compulsory.

Dr Coleridge recognised that vaccination was a "matter of personal choice," but, this was outweighed by legal obligations to civil law, state health directives, occupational health and safety requirements and the duty of care owed to parishioners.

"A pastor or assistant pastor in parish ministry is to know the faithful, visit families, care for the faithful, strengthening them in the Lord and refresh the faithful with the sacraments," he wrote.

"Diligently, he is to seek out the poor, the afflicted, the lonely and the exiled. He is to support spouses and parents in fulfilling their proper duties and to foster growth of Christian life in the family.

"That means that clergy engaged in parish ministry must be close to people. In the circumstances of the pandemic, clergy engaged in pastoral ministry who are not doubly vaccinated put the faithful of the parish at risk. They present a risk to the faithful to whom they minister, as well as to their families.

"Clergy not doubly vaccinated are failing in their duty of care for the faithful."

Sources

The Catholic Leader

The Australian

The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Archbishop Mark Coleridge as saying that it was wrong that insurers and lawyers had determined how much victims were paid out. His archdiocese had $52 million from which he was prepared to draw for victim payouts.

"In the end, I [as archbishop] decide whether a sum conforms to the criteria of justice and compassion," Coleridge said.

He said a "tsunami" of child sexual abuse allegations had caught bishops and other officials "like rabbits in a headlight."

The failures of the Towards Healing protocol, in use since 1997, meant other ways of dealing with victim complaints needed to be explored "if we are serious about coming to the aid of victims," the archbishop told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Bishops and church officials "didn't know how to respond" to child sex abuse allegations, he said. So when lawyers and insurers came forward with seeming solutions, "They breathed a sigh of relief and said 'Yes, that is right.'"

The Royal Commission has been examining the case of Mrs Joan Isaacs who was sexually abused from age 14 by the chaplain of her Brisbane convent school in the late 1960s.

Her treatment when she approached the church for an apology, counselling and compensation in 1999 was dictated by lawyers and insurers and was akin to reabuse, the Commission has heard. She received a reparations payment of $30,000.

Sources

The Sydney Morning Herald
The Guardian
ABC
Image: The Sydney Morning Herald