Australian Catholics seeking widespread reform of the Church have criticised its “continuing dysfunctional governance” in a paper submitted to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuses.
Catholics for Renewal Inc made the call in one of 44 submissions to the Commission that were published last week. They were made in response to a paper the Commission produced on factors that may have contributed to child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions or the response of the Church to such abuse.
A final hearing into the Church’s response to abuse is to be held in February 2017 – 10 months before the Royal Commission promises delivery of its final report.
“To date, the Catholic Church has evaded responsibility for ‘institutional abuse’, abuse actually facilitated at the highest levels through the dysfunctional governance of the Catholic Church, and has failed to acknowledge the fact of that institutional abuse, whilst attempting to assign all blame for acts of abuse to individual paedophiles and all blame for cover-ups to individual members of the hierarchy,” the Catholics for Renewal submission said.
“The Catholic Church has manifestly failed to protect children in its care and oversight from criminal abuse by clerics and Religious. Catholics for Renewal believes there is a need for substantial reforms to the governance and accountability arrangements, and to the pervasive culture of the Catholic Church.”
In another submission, the Independent Commissioners of the Melbourne Response – which operates only in the Archdiocese of Melbourne while the rest of the Australian Church uses the Towards Healing protocol for responding to allegations of abuse by clergy and other Church personnel – defended continuing to interview complainants in their legal chambers despite criticism by the Commission.
“Making the process of disclosure as comfortable as possible has always been at the forefront of our minds,” said the two Independent Commissioners, Peter O’Callaghan and Jeffery Gleeson, both of whom are Queen’s Counsel.
The chief executive of the Royal Commission, Philip Reed, said that submissions had been received from survivors of child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, advocacy groups, academics and other professionals, individual Catholics and one diocese.
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