Police-Church ‘arrangement’ investigated in New South Wales

A public hearing has been told that police in New South Wales and church officials may have colluded to prevent the prosecution of individuals who abused children.

Counsel assisting the New South Wales Police Integrity Commission, Kristina Stern SC, on the opening day of the hearing last Monday, 13 October, said: “One question to be considered within the context of this hearing is whether or not, to the knowledge of officers of NSW Police Force, information which may well have been of material assistance in securing apprehension or conviction of an offender was withheld by the Catholic Church from the NSW Police Force, and whether or not the NSW Police Force in fact encouraged or condoned this state of affairs.”  The hearing continues.

Meanwhile Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane told Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is “a gift, a kind of searing, scouring gift, but a gift”. “Our credibility is in tatters, and when I say ours, I mean primarily the bishops’, and we have a massive task to rebuild trust,” he said. “It’s not a matter of spin; it’s a matter of being and doing what we are supposed to be and do.”

n Archbishop-elect Anthony Fisher of Sydney says the biggest challenge to the family today is that people have forgotten how to love “the cross-shaped Easter sort of loving rather than the heart-shaped Valentine’s sort of loving”. In “Challenges Facing Families Today”, on the Archdiocese of Sydney website, he wrote: “We are less and less willing to commit, for the long haul … I think the big pastoral challenge is to teach people how to love again.”