It's been a big couple of months for the churches, with a couple of state parliament-level commissions and Monday's announcement of a federal Royal Commission into abuse of the young and vulnerable in various institutions. Of course, the most prominent institution likely to be investigated by the Commission is the Catholic Church.
There is a side of me that feels for Cardinal Pell. Ever since he became Archbishop of Melbourne, he has been exercised by dealing with victims of various sorts of abuse at the hands of clergy, not to mention various abortive suggestions that he himself might have been involved. He has attempted to act in ways that attempt to meet the needs of these people to be heard and have their stories acknowledged, and to make some degree of compensation. There can be no doubt that he has acted with sincerity in his own heart.
The problem is that the structures and protocols Pell initiated in Melbourne have fallen far short of vindicating the trust of those who have worked through them. When the Archdiocese submitted a dossier of 600 or so cases of proven sexual assaults by clergy to the Victorian parliamentary committee, the immediate question was whether these were really everything the church had to show, or simply all it was willing to acknowledge. More worrying, there are a number of clergy or religious who have been transferred out of Australia under fortuitous circumstances, leaving a trail of unanswered distress in their wake. Then there's the behaviour of the Melbourne Archdiocese's own Independent Commissioner. As long as any questions persist about the actions of the Commissioner in relation to tipping off clergy about potential police investigations, or of processes conducted in a way that effectively re-traumatises people, it is hard to avoid the feeling of taint about any process under his watch.
Cardinal Pell's press conference from yesterday makes interesting viewing. I admire the fact that he has moved from a position of denying the need for any investigation to cautiously welcoming the establishment of a Royal Commission. This is a big step to take publicly in a matter of days. His particular assertion that sexual abuse has occurred across the spectrum of religious institutions is quite right, but I would question his underlying suggestion that there is some sort of unpleasant sectarianism at play. To the extent that any sectarianism is involved, it is about time the adoption of secret agreements, gagging clauses, in-house investigations and all the things that have hung around the Catholic Church's protocols so far were exposed and tested in a public forum. He is right to have distributed copies of the protocols on sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Sydney at his press conference, but this won't be the end of unease with this document.
The really deep problem is that the Catholic Church has never consistently implemented a protocol for mandatory reporting of any sort of sexual or non-sexual assault. Actually it goes right to the heart of Catholic spiritual discipline. The Irish Church is currently embroiled in a massive argument about the role of the seal of the confessional with these sorts of offenses, and a similar discussion is about to open up here. I think it dubious whether a rapist would really regard their 'conquests' as something to be confessed; what if such a person believes their behaviour is of therapeutic value to the victim, and therefore probably morally neutral rather than sinful? One would hope that any confessor hearing a victim's testimony in the confessional really ought to make absolution conditional on them going straight to the police. To do otherwise is a massive betrayal of what confession is meant to be about: there is no grey area here. Moreover, the Cardinal's own rather curious perspectives about sexual orientation effectively condones the conflation of being gay with being a rapist, as if they are qualitatively the same thing. If you doubt, take a very deep breath and look somewhere like the mad little world of Australia Incognita, where the portmanteau term "homosexual paedophile" is not uncommon, and defended with all the ideological might of the right wing of the American church, where good methodology always defers to strongly-held opinion (which felicitously happens to coincide with the Magisterium). With friends prone to promoting daft self-validating 'research' like this, Pell hardly need fear any enemy.
The take-home message from the Cardinal's press conference might well have been to tell anyone likely to come forward in the future to do the right thing and report to the police before attempting any process of reconciliation with the Church. He could wait a day or two and suggest that it's time the Catholic Bishops talked seriously about taking sexual assault matters out of the hands of their lawyers and instead appointing a referral person for each diocese, whose sole function would be to send complaints directly on to the police without hearing or recording any information. Investigation, justice, and a non-negotiable commitment to integrity must come before reputation management. That would have truth on its side.
