At long last......but they still don't get it!

Credited to Lindsay Foyle, New Matilda

After years of prevarication and evasion about what it has been doing to "clean up its act" in relation to widespread abuse of minors by priests over many years, the Catholic Church in Australia is now confronted with a Royal Commission - which was announced yesterday. The Commission will look into the whole subject of the way minors have been dealt with, not only by the Church, but also by other bodies, Church and otherwise (Government included).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Archbishop of the Church in Australia still doesn't get it, as this piece on The Punch so clearly shows.

"There is a textbook study in how not to handle allegations of systematic child sexual abuse and it was written by the retired Anglican bishop Peter Hollingworth. The mistakes made by Hollingworth cost him his job as Governor-General. They are now being repeated, arguably to an even graver and more offensive degree, by Catholic Archbishop George Pell."

****

"This was his (Pell's) quote in full:

“We’ll try and find out from the police how many cases of child abuse they have on their books – I believe it is thousands – and how many of them relate to Catholic priests and teachers. I suspect it will be very, very small indeed.”

It’s an extraordinary and arrogant request. What Pell is basically saying is that the cops should waste their valuable time tallying up the total number of cases so he can justify his institution’s shameful inaction.

Save for an easy apology and some hush money for victims, the key and continuing problem with this scandal is the church’s dissembling about the extent to which paedophilia was either covered up or even enabled with the transfer of known offenders from diocese to diocese. This is the crucial point. It’s not just the abuse, but the cover-up of the abuse."

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