Speaking to America magazine last week about the abuse crisis in the United States, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference (ACBC), said: “You may become and may have to become, like us in Australia, a smaller Church – in other words: a humbler Church, a purified Church, a Church that is able to listen and not just speak.”
The Catholic Church in Australia was under inquiry by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse from 2013 to 2017, when a final report was issued. The ACBC has started discussions with the Holy See about the report’s recommendations. The commission called on the Holy See to make a number of changes to canon law including that the “pontifical secret” does not apply to abuse allegations and to consider voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy. But Australian bishops will not yield to the call to break the seal of confession, even if priests face the prospect of criminal charges.
The ACBC and Catholic Religious Australia (CRA), the leading body for religious orders, said it was the one Royal Commission recommendation they could not accept, “because it is contrary to our faith and inimical to religious liberty”.
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