Bishop Geoffrey Robinson said this during testimony to the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney on Monday.

Bishop Robinson worked with other bishops on an Australia-wide clergy response to abuse, Towards Healing, from 1994.

But when this was close to being announced at the end of 1996, Cardinal Pell dropped a "bombshell".

Cardinal Pell, then the Archbishop of Melbourne, announced the archdiocese would release its own protocol, known as the Melbourne Response.

"He destroyed our unity," Bishop Robinson said.

The commission heard then-Archbishop Pell was compelled to come up with a response after then-Victorian premier Jeff Kennett forced the issue.

"[Cardinal Pell] said to me Jeff Kennett had said to him, 'You fix it or I'll fix it for you'," Bishop Robinson recalled in evidence.

Bishop Robinson, who is terminally ill, also said then-Archbishop Pell also acted this way because he wanted to be seen as a leader on abuse.

"What he came up with has a lot to recommend it, but I had very big problems with it too," Bishop Robinson, 78, said.

"The major one was that the very first point of contact for a victim was a QC in a city office . . . ."

The former auxiliary bishop of Sydney also said Pope John Paul II handled the abuse crisis poorly.

Bishop Robinson told the commission to imagine how different things would have been if John Paul II had said outright in 1997 he had received reports of widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests and religious which had shocked him to the core.

He said that would have sent out a message to the whole Church, but instead there was "silence" from the Pope.

"A real leadership like that from the Pope would have been marvellous, and from subsequent popes, now we still don't have that kind of leadership, not even from Francis," he said.

Bishop Robinson also said he did not believe celibacy had anything to do with child abuse among clergy.

Sources

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

The group is led by Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who retired as auxiliary bishop of Sydney in 2004, aged 66, partly because of lack of recognition of the sexual abuse problem in the Church.

He is supported by Bishop Pat Power, retired bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, and Bishop Bill Morris, who was removed from his office as bishop of Toowoomba by Pope Benedict XVI in 2011.

Bishop Robinson, who launched the Towards Healing protocol in Australia and headed the Australian bishops' professional standards committee, has just launched a new book entitled For Christ's Sake: End Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church … for Good.

He says he wants a "Catholic spring" revolution, a people-power movement to force the Vatican to tackle the abuse crisis at its source.

"There has been so much abuse that it's impossible to blame just the individuals — we blame them too, of course — but it's impossible to limit ourselves to that," he said.

"We have to look at any systemic causes of the abuse. We have to take a really hard look at the Church itself and see what we can find there in the way of causes, factors which have in any way contributed to abuse."

Bishop Robinson, who was abused as a child, said millions of good Catholics have been "deeply disillusioned, both by the revelations of widespread abuse and even more by what they have perceived as the defensive, uncaring and unchristian response on the part of many who have authority in the Church and claim to speak in God's name.

"Catholic people all over the world are sick of the scandal and this is a chance for them to speak up and join a collective voice that will be heard in Rome."

Sources:

The Australian

ABC News

Sydney Morning Herald

Image: Daily Telegraph

However, while victims have been calling for a Royal Commission for a long time, and while the bishops have welcomed it, the fact that it has taken government intervention for a proper account of the crisis to take place represents in part a failure of the Church's response.

The Church's defenders point to the policies and procedures put in place to protect children, the establishment of the National Committee for Professional Standards, and the Towards Healing processes for providing compensation and support for victims unwilling to make complaints against abusers through the legal system.

Most abuse cases today are from more than 20 years ago, indicating a change in Church practice and in cultural attitudes, providing better protection for young people. The Church's current procedures are part of a laudable move towards a response centred on the needs of victims, and a greater awareness of the problem in general.

But its response has fallen short in other areas.

When Church authorities first got together to address the issue of abuse by clergy at the beginning of the 1990s, they developed a nine-point plan. One of the points was to research whether or not there were particular issues in the culture of the Church that might contribute to people abusing.

Yet more than 20 years later, we're yet to see a serious study of these issues that has grown out of the lessons learned. Nor have we been given an adequate account of the number of abuse cases the various dioceses and religious orders have dealt with through their formal processes, or the nature and distribution of the cases.

While changes have been made in the processes for selecting and forming priests and religious, and while there is a greater awareness of the nature of abuse and paedophilia, we're yet to see a serious institutional effort to explore whether the Church's approaches to sexuality, power and authority, allowed a climate of abuse to occur. Independent contributions such as that of Bishop Geoffrey Robinson have been marginalised and largely ignored. Continue reading

Image: Australian Catholics

- Michael McVeigh is editor of Australian Catholics

Australian Federal Attorney General Nicola Roxon said that a federal commission investigating sexual abuse would take up the question of whether priests should be required to disclose information from sacramental confessions.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard also said that the commission should discuss the matter. But Senator Nick Xenophon, a persistent critic of the Catholic Church, was more candid, saying that the government's recognition of the confessional seal is "a medieval law that needs to change."

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney has stated that the Church will never allow priests to disclose what they heard in the confessional. But the cardinal said that priests who suspect someone is involved in abuse should refuse to hear that person's confession.

One Sydney priest who works with street children disclosed that he never hears confessions because he would want to disclose any report of sexual abuse to police.

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, a retired auxiliary of the Sydney archdiocese, added to the public furor when he criticized Cardinal Pell's stand, and said that he would break the confessional seal for the "greater good" of reporting an abuser.

Another prominent Catholic dissident, Father Bob Maguire, said that he too would inform police about a penitent who confessed to sexual abuse.

Bishop Robinson, who stepped down in 2004, at the age of 66, has been an outspoken critic of Church teachings. The Australian bishops' conference took the highly unusual step of issuing a caution about a book the bishop had written, saying that the work misrepresented the Catholic position on "among other things, the nature of Tradition, the inspiration of the Holy Scripture, the infallibility of the Councils and the Pope, the authority of the Creeds, the nature of the ministerial priesthood and central elements of the Church's moral teaching."

Father Maguire, an elderly priest who had long resisted efforts by the Melbourne archdiocese to force his retirement, also has a history of conflict with Church authority—including an episode in 2005 when he "heard confessions" on a radio call-in show.

An editorial in The Australian argued that the heated debate about the confessional seal was "entirely confected" for political purposes, in a "proxy war" aimed at opposition leader Tony Abbott, whose Catholicism has been a frequent topic of discussion.

The Australian expressed confidence that the federal investigating commission would avoid a direct confrontation with the Church. "Those who see an opportunity to discredit the Catholic Church, however, will milk it for all it is worth," the editorial said.

Source: ucanews.com

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon labeled the seal of confession an anachronism and told reporters: "This is a medieval law that needs to change in the 21st century. Church law, canon law, should not be above the law of the land."

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, when asked whether the royal commission she has announced should examine confession, said: "It's not good enough for people to engage in sin of omission and not act when a child is at risk."

Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, who is charged with setting up the commission, said the community found the idea of a priest not reporting child abuse if told about it in a confession to be "really abhorrent", but she cautioned against too much focus on the issue.

Ms Roxon said there were "much more blatant and open failures" to stop abuse that needed to be examined and not just in the Church, but other institutions as well. These included turning a blind eye to abuse, not acting on complaints by victims and not acting on "open secrets" that a certain individuals within organisations were child abusers.

Even retired Bishop Geoffrey Robinson of Sydney, a former president of the Canon Law Society of Australia and New Zealand, said he would break the seal of confession for the "greatest good" of reporting an abuser.

On the other hand, Cardinal George Pell of Sydney declared that the seal of confession is "inviolable".

"The law of the land is also clear," he said. "Federal and state laws protect a member of the clergy from being forced to divulge details of a religious confession, just as it protects clients from being forced to disclose what they discuss with their lawyers.

"Religious freedom is protected by the Australian constitution; an essential part of the separation of church and state, which protects believers and faith communities from government dictating religious belief and practice."

Sources:

Australian Times

Sydney Morning Herald

ABC

Brisbane Times

Image: The Australian

Three-quarters the size of the United States, Australia is mainly uninhabited except along its coastline. While the U.S. shelters close to 313 million people, latest Australian census statistics report only 22 million persons on the continent's nearly 3 million square miles.

Australia's Christians — mainly descendants of 18th-century British settlers and Irish convicts, and of later émigrés from Germany and Italy — comprise 61 percent of the population. Australia's newest immigrants continue arriving from the United Kingdom and Italy, but also from New Zealand, China, India, Vietnam and the Phillippines. Read more

Sources

• Phyllis Zagano in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Panoramio

Phyllis Zagano is a Catholic scholar and lecturer on contemporary spirituality and women's issues in the church.

"For whatever mere words are worth, apologies have been made. Processes have been established that have enabled many people to have their stories heard. A number have found a measure of healing. All indications are that the number of new offences has significantly diminished, if not because of a rise in virtue, then at least because of a rise in the fear of being caught" says Geoffrey Robinson.

Robinson names:

• Seven factors contributing to abuse
• Five factors contributing to the poor response
• Six sensitive topics that it would be healthy if we could discuss more

Read Robinson's article in The Swag

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson is the former Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney Australia. He was the advocate for victims abused by priests from 1994-96. He is the author of the book "Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church: Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus."

Image: Wikipedia