A retired bishop has said Cardinal George Pell destroyed the unity of the Australian Church’s response to child sex abuse. 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, Read more
Three retired Australian bishops are calling for a new ecumenical council — including lay people — to “confront the issues that contribute to the causes of systemic sexual abuse” in the Catholic Church. The group is led by Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who retired as auxiliary bishop of Sydney in 2004, aged 66, partly because of Read more
The Royal Commission into child sexual abuse in Australia can only be a good thing for the Catholic Church. It is a chance to account for the betrayal and crimes of priests and other church representatives who committed acts of abuse against the vulnerable, and for the careless, even callous way in which many church Read more
Politicians, pundits, and even a few dissenting Catholic clerics are calling upon Catholic priests to break the confessional seal in sex-abuse cases. 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 Read more
As the controversy over the sexual abuse of children continues in Australia, politicians and editorial writers are calling for Catholic priests to be forced to break the seal of confession in sex-abuse cases. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon labeled the seal of confession an anachronism and told reporters: “This is a medieval law that needs to Read more
Distances and demographics combine to tell the story. 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 Read more
It is now thirty years since revelations of sexual abuse of minors by priests first began to appear. How far have we progressed in the task of eradicating this cancer? What lessons have we learned? “For whatever mere words are worth, apologies have been made. Processes have been established that have enabled many people to Read more