SMH: Calls for a Royal Commission over Catholic cover-up (Main Forum)

by James, Australia, Wednesday, July 04, 2012, 06:33 (322 days ago) @ Brian Coyne

The Australian bishops, and in particlar, Bishop Geoffrey Robinson have always deserved credit for requiring reporting to police through the 1996 Towards Healing protocol whereby they obtained an exemption from automatic excommunicaton for going to the police under Crimen Sollicitationis. Admittedly their hands were probably forced by the Bede Heather affair. Nevertheless, it was a step in the right direction.

What no one has ever known was the extent to which the hierarchy complied with that protocol. The Four Corners program seems to imply that the Church authorities thought that requirement only applied after 1996. I am aware of an ongoing investigation about a similar coverup in Newcastle prior to 1996 that may well involve one of the highest members of the Australian hierarchy.

S.316 Crimes Act was introduced into NSW in 1990, and it provides:

If a person has committed a serious offence and another person who knows or believes that the offence has been committed and that he or she has information which might be of material assistance in securing the apprehension of the offender or the prosecution or conviction of the offender for it fails without reasonable excuse to bring that information to the attention of a member of the Police Force or other appropriate authority, that other person is liable to imprisonment for 2 years.

http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/lrc.nsf/pages/DP39CHP2

It is a matter for the Director of Prosecutions to decide whether or not the three priests involved breached S.316, but I would have thought there has to be a prima facie case. The concerns expressed by Monsignor Peters about "grave harm to the priesthood and the Church", if the victims went to the police, would hardly be regarded as "reasonable excuses" under S.316. And, by the way, such expressions mirror exactly the culture expressed in Crimen Sollicitationis, where a priest was only to be defrocked if there was grave scandal to the faithful.

What is intriguing about the Four Corner program is the letter from Monsignor Peters, and George Pell's reference to an unproduced "file note", which flatly contradict each other. But this is not the first time His Eminence has been embarrased by documents that flatly contradict each other.

In January 2003, Pell received an independent investigator’s report supporting claims by two men that they had been assaulted many years earlier by Father Goodall. On February 14, Cardinal Pell wrote to one victim accepting his claim. On the same day, however, he wrote to the other victim saying his claim could not be substantiated because no other victims had been found. Pell's explanation was that the second letter was "badly drafted". It will be a bit hard for him to say that Monsignor Peter's letter was "badly drafted", and as yet we haven't seen the drafting of the "file note" that contradicts it.

It is pretty obvious that there has to be a national Royal Commission to determine the extent of the Church's cover up of these matters, whether before or after 1996, particularly since they seem to have involved so many suicides. And, while they are at it, the Commission might as well have a look at the "Ellis Defence".

But one thing that might finally come out of such a Royal Commission is that in 1992, the three priests were forbidden by Canon Law from reporting this matter to the police. This was clearly a Church investigation under the provisions of Crimen Sollicitationis, administered at that time by Cardina Josef Ratzinger. Neither the priests, nor Bishop Manning could go to the police if they wanted to avoid an excommunication that could only be lifted personally by the Pope.

Australia was the first country to tell Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, that they could not continue with the secrecy provisions of Crimen Sollicitationis. It will be interesting to see Australia pointing the finger at where the buck should have always stopped: at Pope Benedict XVI.