Emmanual and another priest injured while trying to defend him were rushed to hospital after the incident.

The 16-year old offender was arrested at the scene.

"I think Bishop Mari will forgive the person who did this and will also expect him to be judged under the law" Syriac Catholic priest Fr Lenard Ina says.

"I know him personally and am convinced he will forgive his attacker, just as Pope John Paul II forgave the man who tried to kill him.

"He would want people to stay calm and let the police and governments do their work.

"I know his personality and I think he will use what has happened to him to show the face of Jesus."

Emergency service workers attacked

The knife attack was only the start of the problem for Sydney's emergency workers.

Police and ambulance staff also became victims as crowds formed after the initial incident.

The scene was described to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, several Cabinet ministers and heads of the Australian Defence Force and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation when they met in Canberra on Tuesday.

They heard an "uncontrolled" crowd surge of between 50 and 500 people formed against "police officers ... doing their job".

Projectiles were thrown at officers, vehicles were damaged and property stolen during the "public order incident".

NSW Ambulance said it attended to 30 patients in the crowd.

However ambulance staff "became directly under threat" and six were forced to retreat to safety in the church for three-and-a-half hours.

Faith leaders unite

NSW Premier Chris Minns says the attack is being investigated as an act of terrorism.

He and the Minister for Multiculturalism convened a meeting of faith leaders representing religious communities across Western Sydney.

They later issued the following statement which all NSW Faith Affairs Council endorsed:

"Places of worship are places of peace and prayer.

"The people who gather there should never feel threatened or unsafe, no matter what religion they follow.

"As faith leaders ... we stand united against all forms of hate and violence.

"Our prayers are with the victims and we call on our communities to extend our message of care and compassion to all.

"We have trust in our police and first responders and full confidence in their work.

"Police should never be attacked for keeping our communities safe.

"The scenes we witnessed after the attack are unacceptable to anyone, and especially to people of faith.

"For people of faith, religion is never a justification for violence.

"It has been a very difficult week but we are a strong community in New South Wales. We call on everyone to act with kindness and respect for each other.

"Now is the time to show that we are a caring and united community."

Source

• Catholic Weekly
• Echo
• ABC News

Murnane became a household name in New Zealand in 2010.

He had been charged with burglary and wilful damage to the Waihopai spy base near Blenheim - charges the High Court acquitted Murnane and two others of in 2011.

The first the 82-year old heard of his alleged involvement in the Blockade Australia demonstration was when two police officers turned up on his doorstep.

"They presented me with an eight-page charge sheet accusing me of being at a protest in Sydney in June this year," he says.

That late-June protest was one of two unauthorised demonstrations. Scores of climate demonstrators converged on Sydney's CBD, chaotically disrupting the morning peak-hour traffic.

If found guilty of causing serious disruption to roads, rail, and ports, he and others could be fined AUD$22,000 and be jailed for two years.

Murnane says he's been accused of blocking access to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and blocking George Street and other streets. He says he's also been accused of "walking about throughout a long protest playing a drum".

The police told him he was seen on CCTV, public media and Facebook live streaming.

"That was quite amazing to me. I was in Melbourne during those days and weeks so it was quite a puzzle to me."

He says he doesn't own or play a drum, either. Nor has he been involved in any Blockade Australia protests.

New South Wales (NSW) Police "deserve to be called to account for this pretty horrendous mistake" he says.

The head of the Dominican church community in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell, Father Mark O'Brien, is defending Murnane's innocence.

"I can confirm that this allegation is quite mistaken or false ... he was at St Dominic's on 27th June and so could not have been in Sydney on the same day," he stated on ABCs 7.30 programme.

Lawyer Mark Davis is acting for a group of Blockade Australia protesters and supporters.

He says he's asked for the Police to drop the charges against Murnane, but they have not responded.

The Police won't comment on the case to media either, as it's before the court.

Source

• ABC

A Police Integrity Commission has recommended that New South Wales police reconsider the practice of "blind reporting".

This involves the names of alleged victims of child abuse and other details being deleted from reports to police.

The PIC's Operation Protea found NSW Police and the Catholic Church had an informal arrangement.

This meant "attempts would not be made on the part of the Police Force to contact victims of abuse in circumstances in which a blind report form had been submitted" without first contacting the church's professional standards office.

"Blind reports" meant that "many of these complaints were not investigated", Protea Commissioner Bruce James, QC, concluded.

The complaints were simply filed as information by police, and, without victim and other details, were reduced to the level of hearsay.

The Protea inquiry heard that police ignored internal legal advice on a number of occasions warning that "blind reporting" breached section 316 of the NSW Crimes Act relating to concealing serious crimes.

The inquiry also considered one senior officer, Inspector Beth Cullen, engaged in misconduct in failing to investigate allegations.

This officer also had a conflict of interest in sitting on the church's Professional Standards Resource Group, which heard multiple allegations of abuse raised during meetings.

The commission noted that while Inspector Cullen had acted in good faith and had not engaged in any conscious dereliction of duty, her misconduct was "not trivial".

But it found there was no proof Inspector Cullen destroyed any evidence.

After the PIC report's release, former NSW director of public prosecutions Nick Cowdery accused the NSW police of being "party . . . to a Catholic Church conspiracy to thwart the criminal justice process".

Sources

• ABC
• Sydney Morning Herald
• Image: Betsportsnews

Archbishop Wilson, who is vice-president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, faces one count of concealing a child sex allegation made against the late Hunter priest Fr Jim Fletcher in the 1970s.

In May, 2014, a New South Wales special commission of inquiry found there was "sufficient evidence warranting the prosecution of a senior church official in connection with the concealment of child sexual abuse relating to Fletcher".

The inquiry's report on Fletcher was kept confidential to protect future potential criminal proceedings and it did not name the senior church official.

Archbishop Wilson issued a statement denying the charge and stating he would vigorously defend it.

"The suggestion appears to be that I failed to bring to the attention of police a conversation I am alleged to have had in 1976, when I was a junior priest, that a now deceased priest had abused a child," he said.

"From the time this was first brought to my attention last year, I have completely denied the allegation."

Archbishop Wilson also reaffirmed his commitment "to dealing proactively with the issue of child sexual abuse and the implementation of best-practice child protection measures which I have pioneered since becoming a bishop".

The archbishop has taken indefinite leave while he defends the matter.

He is due to appear in court in Newcastle on April 30.

He could face up a jail sentence of up to two years, if found guilty.

In 2004, Fletcher was jailed over the rape of a boy between 1989 and 1991. He died while serving his sentence.

The special commission identified at least five known victims of Fletcher, who had an "extensive history" of abuse dating back to the 1970s.

One of Fletcher's victims, Peter Gogarty, said the charge against Archbishop Wilson was a very significant occasion for Australia.

He did not believe a senior Catholic clergyman would ever be charged with concealing a child sex allegation because "it was like a hill too high".

Sources

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

Church leaders thought they had struck a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with police about what information would be handed over.

The unsigned draft memorandum said: "Church authorities shall make available the report of an assessment and any other matter relevant to the accused's account of events only if required to do so by court order."

But police deny there was any arrangement, saying such a deal would be been in breach of the Crimes Act.

Documents released under Freedom of Information laws show that the executive director of the Catholic Commission for Employment Relations, Michael McDonald, wrote to the NSW child protection squad in 2003 seeking confirmation that the memorandum of understanding was still in place.

In response, Kim McKay from the child protection squad advised no agreement ever existed.

"The arrangements proposed by the draft MOU appear to be in direct conflict with the explicit legislative requirement of section 316 of the Crime Act," he wrote back.

But Michael Salmon, who was the Catholic Church's point of contact for police at the time, confirming that the Church had operated under the unsigned agreement.

"The church assumed it was operational, we were practising the provisions of the MOU and dealing with the police under those provisions," he said.

"We had an understanding from police it was approved."

Mr Salmon, director of the Professional Standards Resource Group of the Catholic Church in NSW, said: "We had a line of communications with the police and all indications from the police were that the MOU was approved from their end."

However, a spokesperson for the NSW Police said: "The Church continued to co-operate with NSW Police but it did so without any protections assumed in an MOU, as such protections would not have been valid given the requirements of Section 316 of the Crimes Act."

Sources:

Radio Australia

ABC News

The Guardian

Image: Flickriver.com