An Australian inquiry into child abuse yesterday recommended that the Catholic Church lift its demand of celibacy from clergy and that priests be prosecuted for failing to report evidence of pedophilia heard in the confessional.
The Australian Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivered its final 17-volume report and 189 recommendations following a wide-ranging investigation. Australia’s longest-running royal commission — which is the country’ highest form of inquiry — has been investigating since 2012 how the Catholic Church and other institutions responded to sexual abuse of children in Australia the past 90 years.
The report heard the testimonies of more than 8,000 survivors of child sex abuse. Of those who were abused in religious institutions, 62 percent were Catholics.
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“We have concluded that there were catastrophic failures of leadership of Catholic Church authorities over many decades,” the report said.
Recommendations include that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference request that the Vatican consider introducing voluntary celibacy for clergy.
The bishops’ body should also request clarity on whether information received in the confessional about a child who has been sexually abused is covered by the seal of secrecy and whether absolution of a perpetrator should be withdrawn until the perpetrator confesses to police.
Catholic clerics who testified to the royal commission gave varying opinions about what, if anything, a priest could divulge about what was said in a confessional about child abuse.
The commission’s recommendations, which with interim reports total 409, include making failure to report child sexual abuse a criminal offense. Clerics would not be exempt from being charged.
The law should exclude any existing excuse or privilege relating to a religious confessional.
Pope Francis’s former finance minister, Cardinal George Pell, last year testified in a video link from the Vatican about his time as a priest and bishop in Australia.
Pell this year became the most senior Catholic official to face sex offense charges.
Through his lawyers, Pell has vowed to fight the charges.
The commission found that the church’s responses to complaints and concerns about clerics in Australia were “remarkably and disturbingly similar.”
President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Archbishop Denis Hart, said many of the commission’s recommendations “would have significant impact on the way the Catholic Church and others operate in Australia.”
The Vatican was already giving “serious consideration” to questions raised by the commission about the extent of the seal of the confession and whether child molesters who did not confess to police could be absolved, Hart said.
“I cannot break the seal. The penalty for any priest breaking the seal is excommunication; being passed out of the church,” Hart said. “I revere the law of the land and I trust it, but this is a sacred, spiritual charge before God which I must honor, and I have to try and do what I can do with both.”
He said that the Australian bishops would put the celibacy recommendations to the Vatican.
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