The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard’s, decision to establish a royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has received overwhelmingly public support. We know, on the available evidence, that the wide-ranging and expensive inquiry will focus on past crimes and whether people in authority, in Gillard’s terminology, ”averted their eyes” with respect to abusers. Read more
A former priest told an Australian state inquiry into the Catholic Church’s handling of child abuse cases that more than one in 20 Victorian Catholic priests became a child abuser. Des Cahill, an intercultural studies professor and a former priest, said the Church’s senior leaders may have to go to jail for covering up the Read more
A parliamentary investigation into alleged cover-ups and failures to properly report child abuse by Church organizations in Australia opens today. Among recommendations that are put before the probe include a register for Church personnel and a program to monitor training for workers in religious groups. A parliamentary committee opens the hearing into the allegations after Read more
The Catholic Church in the Australian state of Victoria denied claims by police that it deliberately covered up paedophilia and talked victims out of reporting sex abuse. Church spokesman Father Shane Mackinlay said the church knew “bad decisions” were made in the past where accused priests had been given “treatment” and a “fresh start”. But Read more
This year’s Australian Catholic Bishops Social Justice Statement focuses on the family. It is put into useful perspective by the publication the Bishops’ Pastoral Research Office September E-News Bulletin headlining the 2011 Census statistic that only 50 per cent of Catholics aged 15 and over are married. The often talked about nexus between marriage, the family, and the Catholic Read more
The family is the first and fundamental school of social living: as a community of love, it finds in self-giving the law that guides it and makes it grow. The self-giving that inspires the love of a husband and a wife for each other is the model and the norm for the self-giving that must be practiced in Read more
I recently travelled to Darwin and was surrounded by the living and remnant artefacts of the indigenous faiths by which the first Australians ordered their lives. It was another example, if ever I needed one, of the power of spirituality and its necessity for many, or indeed most, communities. The doyens of New Atheism taunt Read more
Two Sundays ago many Christians heard a passage from the Letter to the Ephesians which opens the door to the very different world in which the Church first emerged: Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the Read more
A retired Australian priest, Tom Brennan, has been arrested on charges of failing to report two serious cases of sexual abuse of two children. Brennan, a former vicar-general in the NSW Maitland-Newcastle diocese, was school principal when former priest John Denham is alleged to have committed the sex offences in the 1970’s. ABC reports Denham Read more
Why am I still a Catholic? How should I answer this important question? In truth, sometimes I’m not sure why. Yet I know the Church frames my identity, as basic as that. It’s the source of consolation without peer. I can’t slough it off: it’s too embedded in the way I see the world and Read more