The Catholic Church described paedophile priests working in parishes across Australia as ticking “time bombs”, damning minutes from a high-level meeting of top church officials in 1992 reveals.
Minutes tendered to the child abuse royal commission from a special issues committee meeting at the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference said it was agreed there were “serious ‘time bombs’ ticking away in a number of dioceses”.
The former second-in-charge of the Melbourne Archdiocese, Bishop Peter Connors, who chaired the committee, testified on Thursday that the reference applied not only to churches in Melbourne but also in other dioceses.
Senior counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness, SC, asked Bishop Connors if the minutes referred to priests and brothers who had serious allegations against them and clergy who were accepted within the church to be sexual offenders.
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“That would certainly be the case, I think, in particular the Diocese of Ballarat, the big time bomb was ticking away there,” Bishop Connors said.
Asked whether it applied to Doveton, where a succession of paedophile priests including Peter Searson were sent over three decades, Bishop Connors said: “I expect it would have been, but there would certainly be other dioceses where that problem, of time bombs ticking away, existed.”
The commission heard that the meeting, set up to deal with allegations against clergy, noted the importance of treating priests fairly.
Bishop Connors, who was vicar-general of the Melbourne archdiocese from 1976 to 1987, said advice from the Catholic Church’s insurers was to “admit nothing” in a bid to limit future compensation to abuse victims.
He admitted that he contributed to a culture of keeping accusations of clergy sex abuse against children in-house.
“I would accept that was almost certainly the way that I was approaching those kind of accusations,” he said.
Asked by commission chair Peter McClellan​ whether he recalled anyone in the church’s senior management ever expressing a contrary view, he said: “No, I don’t.”
Bishop Hilton Deakin testified on Thursday that he was told to refer complaints directly to Frank Little, who headed the Melbourne Diocese from 1974 to 1996, unless they were about a priest’s sexual behaviour.
“He said, ‘there’s one form of complaint you tell me verbally – and do it at breakfast or at dinner at night – and that’s the end of it; there’s no discussion, no analysis, no further’, and that was paedophilia.”
Bishop Deakin, vicar-general from 1987 to 1992, said complaints about Doveton priest Peter Searson were widely known within the church.
“You had to be in the parish for five minutes and you would hear about Fr Searson,” he said.
Bishop Deakin said when he was an auxiliary bishop he spoke to the Apostolic Nuncio, the Pope’s representative in Australia, about Fr Peter Searson.
“I was telling him about this priest, who was a most evil person, doing evil things to little children in a school and had been doing it for quite some time,” he said.
“I was hoping and praying that something would be done.”
He said the Apostolic Nuncio thanked him and walked away.
Complaints about Searson’s alarming behaviour date back to 1977 when he was parish priest at Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Sunbury and continued in the mid-1980s when he started at Holy Family in Doveton.
The church has paid out almost $300,000 to Searson’s victims, but he died in 2009 before facing any child sex abuse charges.
Archbishop Hart has previously accepted that children were put in danger because investigations under former Archbishop Little into several priests, including Searson, were not carried out properly.
Bishop Connors said on Thursday that until the mid-1980’s church officials did not fully understand the “horrible effects” caused to victims of child sexual abuse. “Most of us did not understand the horrible effects of sex assault of a minor,” he said.
He said it would take generations for trust in the Catholic Church to be restored.
“There has been a terrible abuse of the trust that people gave implicitly to priests, and that trust was sacred, but it was destroyed by priests, the way they acted; it will take generations for that trust to be restored,” he said.
The hearing in Melbourne continues.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/about-us/paedophile-priests-a-ticking-time-tomb-church-minutes-reveal-20151202-gle5ys.html#ixzz3tMo0qrWm

Last Sunday VP Rajeena, a journalist in Kozhikode, Kerala, put up a Facebook post where she described the sexual abuse of children that she had witnessed in a madrassa where she had studied many years ago. What followed was a vicious outpouring of hate and threats. Indeed, there was such an avalanche of complaints against her post, complaints that she was trying to besmirch her religion, that Facebook was forced to block her account.

Rajeena, who works in a Malayalam newspaper, wrote about a teacher at a Kozhikode madrassa who allegedly groped male students. Young boys would be asked to unzip their pants and the teacher would proceed to touch them, she wrote. She also talked about another teacher who apparently abused little girls.

This could be a snapshot of child sex abuse from anywhere in the world. It should have evoked shock and outrage, consternation even, that here was one more example of the fact that the schools where we send our children to study are not safe havens of scholarship; they often harbour sexual predators who may prey on them and leave them psychologically scarred forever.
However, the anger that Rajeena’s post evoked was not directed at the paedophiles she talked about. The anger was directed at her. Online lynch mobs quickly gathered around and rained invectives on her because it was felt that by turning the spotlight on the evil of child sex abuse in a madrassa, which is an Islamic school, she was trying to discredit the schools, and by extension, the religion itself.

A small incident of online harassment? A mere sideshow about an unknown journalist whose Facebook account was blocked because she said something which offended some people?
Not at all. In a sense, Rajeena’s experience encapsulates the dogma and intolerance that’s become almost the leitmotif of our society – a society where every community or group seems to be driven by zealots who cannot countenance any real or perceived criticism against any of its so-called institutions. The zealots are quick to mobilise and because they mobilise with such ferocity and focus, it’s their voice that gets heard – not the voice of the vast majority of sane people.

What was so earth-shaking about drawing attention to child sex abuse in a madrassa? After all, sexual abuse of children is a worldwide problem. For decades, the Catholic Church was flayed for protecting paedophiles who abused little boys and girls, and not taking any action against them. In the US, where the problem has been particularly rampant, the John Jay Report, commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2004, brought to light 4,392 priests accused of sexual abuse of a minor between 1950 and 2002.

Once prone to turn a blind eye to such incidents, the Catholic Church, faced with frequent allegations of paedophilia against its clergy not just in the US, but also in Canada, Australia, Ireland, South America, Britain and indeed, all over Europe, was forced to confront the issue. Eventually, the Vatican too weighed in on the problem. During a visit to the US in 2008, Pope Benedict said he was “deeply ashamed” about child sex abuse by the clergy. Moving from the earlier culture of impunity, today, the church takes punitive measures against those found guilty of child molestation. In November 2014, Pope Francis excommunicated Father Jose Mercau of Argentina for the crime of child sex abuse.

But it’s not just the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse of children is a horrifying crime that may take place at home, at school, and indeed anywhere at all. It is committed by all manner of men – the sordid and the superb. Michael Jackson, that immortal king of pop, whose voice throbbed with such purity of feeling that it could make you cry, stood accused of multiple instances of child sex abuse.

In India, there are regular reports of child rape and sex abuse – many of them taking place at home or in schools. A survey conducted by the ministry of women and child development in 2007 found that more than 53% of children in the country were subjected to sexual abuse. In most cases the abusers were known to the child or were in a position of trust and responsibility.
When child sex abuse is so endemic, is the idea of it taking place at a madrassa beyond the realm of possibility? Is an Islamic school distinct from the warp and weft of society at large, is it immune to its goodness and its evils?

A crime like child abuse has no religion. Once the Catholic Church too viewed this atrocity through the prism of religion – and refused to recognise it or take institutional steps to curb it. But it had to change with the times and recognise the fact that sexual abuse of children brings shame on its perpetrators — not on the religion to which they belong.

Rajeena’s post on the child abuse she experienced in that madrassa should have kickstarted a probe into the conduct of those teachers. It’s a testament to the raging bigotry of our times that all it did was to shut her up and shout her down.

Madrassa memories_ Why child sex abuse has no religion – TOI Blogs