Like the Catholic Church in Australia, the Church in France is embroiled in a Church-State conflict over the seal of the confessional. The same could easily happen in the United Kingdom. If the law imposes a legal duty to report a reasonable suspicion of child abuse to the authorities, should disclosure in the course of the rite of confession be exempt? The presumption is that priests hearing a confession may have grounds for believing that a person is abusing children. Not to report that abuse is in effect to permit it to continue.

If only it were that simple. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in Britain has produced numerous reports, uniformly devastating, where the issue of mandatory reporting has been raised on behalf of survivors. The inquiry has postponed dealing with the issue until its final report due next year. Yet very few priests, appearing before IICSA as witnesses, had come across a case where this issue arose.