Company aims to make rogue priests do penance
Abuse survivors told their stories to the royal commission. Now there may soon be another outlet for their grievances. Photo AAP
A company in its “embryonic” stages will aim to hold Catholic Church authorities accountable by making audit reports public, a royal commission has heard.
Catholic clergy could face serious penalties if they don’t meet the mark set by a new professional standards body which will publicly name non-compliant dioceses and orders.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Monday heard Catholic Professional Standards Limited would audit the church’s authorities, with a view to holding them to account by publishing reports online.
Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge thinks bishops should consider entering formal arrangements with priests so they could be stood aside or have their faculties removed if they repeatedly flout the new standards.
“These are serious sanctions – to stand a man aside or to remove his faculties – but given the seriousness of what we are discussing, they are measures that I would consider,” he said on Monday.
Meanwhile in Melbourne, a judge described notorious pedophile Christian Brother Robert Best’s record of abuse as “breathtaking and gobsmacking”, adding that the 76-year-old he will likely die in jail.
Some of Best’s 20 victims, meanwhile, said they hated the ‘disgusting’ man, with one describing him as “a worthless predator of vulnerable children he had a duty to protect”.
Victorian County Court Judge Geoffrey Chettle told Best it was hard not get angry over his abuse, and said he was “blown away” by the fact that his legal fees were still being funded by the Catholic Church.
Best, already serving 14 years and nine months jail for sex offences against 11 boys over a 20-year period, pleaded guilty to a further 24 counts of indecent assault on boys between eight and 11 years. He molested them between 1968 and 1988 while teaching at St Alipius primary school in Ballarat, St Leo’s College in Box Hill and St Joseph’s College, Geelong.
The royal commission heard the professional standards company wouldn’t have disciplinary power over predators such as Best, but its “teeth” would be the publication of audit reports.
Counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness SC, questioned whether restriction clauses allowing the board to limit publication to protect church “contacts”, or if information was deemed confusing or misleading, were too broad.
Former Supreme Court judge and Truth, Justice and Healing Council chair Neville Owen says public reporting was meant to be the norm and the company – announced in November – was in its “embryonic” stages.
Archbishop Coleridge said he thought it was one of numerous parts of the new company that needed improvement. He said the church needed a cultural shift – not just a change in protocols and procedures.
“If that doesn’t lead to cultural change, the danger is that we go round and round and round,” he said.
“And the appalling prospect is that we could end up where we started.”
The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Catholic Religious Australia and other groups will be members of the not-for-profit professional standards company limited by guarantee.
The royal commission’s final hearing into the Catholic Church is expected to continue tomorrow.
– AAP