Andrew West: On the Religion and Ethics Report today, the Catholic Church appointed a child protection expert to review its protocols for handling abuse. He’s now withdrawn his endorsement. Hello from me, Andrew West.
There’s also a new Archbishop of Canterbury, an oil trader turned priest will lead the world’s 80 million Anglicans. And Part 2 of our interview with the leading American author and commentator, EJ Dionne, about his new book on the communitarians versus the individualists in American history.
But first today, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell says the church’s protocol for dealing with clergy sex abuse offers support and compensation for victims.
Towards Healing was established in 1996. It covers almost every diocese and religious order in Australia. But as you’ll hear, the child protection expert appointed by the church to review Towards Healing has withdrawn his previous support.
Sydney University law professor Patrick Parkinson says Towards Healing may help victims but it doesn’t deal adequately with offenders if they’re not reported to police.
Professor Parkinson supports a Royal Commission into institutional sex abuse. But he says it should focus on cover-ups inside churches and other organisations. Incidentally, his comments come the same day as the retired Catholic bishop Geoffrey Robinson, who’s himself a victim of childhood abuse, criticised Cardinal Pell for not being a team player. Bishop Robinson is one of the architects of the original Towards Healing and Cardinal Pell didn’t sign up to the national protocol when he was archbishop of Melbourne in the mid 1990s.
I spoke with Professor Parkinson earlier today; I wanted to know why he no longer endorsed Towards Healing.
Patrick Parkinson:
The issue which led to me withdrawing my support for Towards Healing was a very important one. Towards Healing was issued in 1996. That is a landmark year because the church collectively—every diocese except the archdiocese of Melbourne, every religious order except at that time the Jesuits—made a commitment to truth, to dealing with these issues properly, to care for the victims. Those promises were important. Those promises were bold. And in my second review in 2008–2009, I came across some cases which, in my view, represented clear breaches of those promises. And these were events which had occurred after 1996.Andrew West: So these were cases that were not historical, as Cardinal Pell suggests, but contemporary?
Patrick Parkinson: Yes, the issues that I tried to draw attention to, the main issues occur between about 1998 and 2005. And it seemed to me that as somebody who’s not a Catholic, as somebody who’s independent and whose reputation is invoked to support Towards Healing I needed to confront the church about these issues and insist that they do something. And I asked them to formally invite the Victorian Government to set up a parliamentary inquiry or some sort of inquiry, or to set up their own public inquiry into these issues. Now in the end, through some difficult negotiations, they agreed that I would write a report on the basis of documents provided to me by the religious order and that they would publish that. They then reneged on that agreement and 15 months or so, 14 months after I’d finished the report it still hadn’t been published. And at that point I went to the press and declared that they had suppressed my report.
Andrew West: Yes. Now this report dealt with one order in particular. Can you tell me about that?
Patrick Parkinson: Yes. The order was the Salesians. I’m not saying that this is the only order where there’ve been issues but there had been three cases which had emerged which caused me profound concern.
Andrew West: And these were cases, before we go on, of Salesian priests who were accused of offences who’d effectively been moved to overseas jurisdictions?
Patrick Parkinson: Well one of the issues is, were they moved and when? The first one was a man who had been convicted of offences against children, and who then subsequently moved to Samoa at a time when it appeared that the police were pursuing further investigations against him. Now there are different views on why he moved and when but essentially that was an issue. And a journalist from the United States had gone to Samoa and had reported that this man had pretty much uncontrolled access to children in his daily life. And that was a grave concern because it raised issues for me, first of all about whether Samoan children had been put at risk, but secondly, about whether there’d been any complicity by the order in some way interfering with the investigations by the Victorian Police.
The second issue was of a man who has since died, against whom allegations had been accepted by the Salesians. He was already in Samoa; he didn’t move there subsequently. He was already there. But my question was, why wasn’t he brought back? Why wasn’t this referred to the police? Why wasn’t action taken? Why did he continue in Samoa as if nothing had happened?
And the third issue was another priest against whom allegations were made. He was out of the country at the time; he moved to Rome. And I give credit to the leader of the order at the time who made real efforts to bring this man back, to require him to face his accusers, but that was blocked at the highest levels in Rome by that order.
Andrew West: Does this case of the Salesians represent a broader problem?
Patrick Parkinson: Yes, I think it does, because the issue is not about are the processes good enough in terms of compensation for victims and reaching out to victims towards healing; the issue is what happens to the alleged offenders. Now I was very clear and Towards Healing was very clear that victims should be strongly encouraged to go to the police, that they should be reporting to the police, even if the complainant doesn’t want to go to the police himself or herself, at least the name of the alleged offender should be made known to the police.
So Towards Healing’s got lots of detail in here about transparency and openness and as far as possible trying to encourage criminal prosecutions and working with the police. But if there isn’t a complaint to the police, what happens to the alleged offenders? And this is hidden; this is not something which is recorded because each diocese and each religious order deals with these issues on its own in a different way. And so I think a lot of the public concern about the Catholic Church is a worry that alleged offenders are moved elsewhere or not taken out of ministry or people just don’t know what happens.
In the Salesians case, my concern is that they were overseas, not, it appears, being adequately supervised and having access to children. And that was a grave concern for me.
Andrew West: Turning to the Royal Commission, which has been announced, you have long been an advocate of a public inquiry. Is a Royal Commission the right way to go?
Patrick Parkinson: I wouldn’t say I’ve long been an advocate. I think that after the Four Corners program when the Father F story came out, I thought, no there’s got to be a Royal Commission and I said so. I certainly had called for a public inquiry, as you know, into the Salesians. I think now, it is the right way to go; there has to be a national inquiry it couldn’t be state by state. It would have made no sense to have a Royal Commission in each state. But there are some significant problems, which I think people are beginning to realise about how we organise a national inquiry: its constitutional basis, and what its terms of reference should be.
Andrew West: Well the Jesuit priest and lawyer Frank Brennan—he says that such an expansive Royal Commission could dilute what should be a kind of laser probe into the problem areas. I mean, what do you think about that?
Patrick Parkinson: Yes, I agree. I think there is a need for a laser probe into the problem areas; it’s a nice way of putting it. I think it’s got to be very targeted. Otherwise the risk is that the Commission might get bogged down and just go on and on and on without really any healing, any resolve, any closure for anybody. That’s the great concern. People have talked about it maybe lasting 10 years.
Andrew West: And more specifically, how should the Royal Commission laser-in as we’ve said, on particular areas? I mean, what specifically should it be looking at?
Patrick Parkinson: That is a difficult issue. But surely one of the biggest concerns has got to be the issue of cooperation with the police. There have been allegations, and they’ve been made by police, that at very senior levels of church personnel discouraging victims from going to the police, interfering with police investigations, covering up to prevent the police from proceeding with their work. Now these are allegations of extraordinary seriousness. And it’s nothing to do with the policies or procedures of Towards Healing; those procedures make it clear that there should be absolutely full cooperation with the police. So these allegations must be explored, explored thoroughly, forensically, carefully, because they go to the heart of the issue of corporate illegality.
Andrew West: Now the other point that I wanted to raise which came out of your evidence to the recent Victorian inquiry was this vast discrepancy you found in the numbers of offenders. In fact you said the Catholic Church has a particular problem because even conservatively speaking it has six to seven times the number of offenders as say the Anglican Church. Do you know why that is?
Patrick Parkinson:
What I said in the Parliamentary Inquiry as an expression of my opinion, having been involved in this area for 15 years or more than that, is that there are roughly six times as many clergy or religious offenders [in catholic church] as in the entirety of the rest of the churches combined. And I think all the evidence bears that out. My view is that the Catholic Church has a huge problem with child sexual abuse, a problem which is disproportionately higher by many fold than any other institution or organisation working with children.Andrew West: Child protection expert Professor Patrick Parkinson of Sydney University. He’s withdrawn his support for the Catholic Church’s child protection protocol.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/pro ... transcript
