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Updated: Australian Royal Commission recommends religious ministers be compelled to report child sex abuse and Vatican consider making celibacy voluntary

Updated: 12pm, 16th December, 2017

Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses in Child Sexual Abuse has handed down its final report with 189 recommendations, including that religious ministers be forced to report suspicions or knowledge of abuse gained in the confessional and that the Catholic Church consider introducing voluntary, instead of mandatory, celibacy for clergy.

Other recommendations in the 17 volume final report from the nation’s longest running Royal Commission include the creation of a National Office for Child Safety and a national website and helpline to report child abuse. It also calls for the creation of a national strategy to address the issue.

The recommendations include a number of specific recommendations for the Anglican and Catholic denominations as well as recommendations for all religious institutions in Australia.

These included that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference request the Holy See to consider introducing voluntary celibacy for diocesan clergy and that they clarify with the Vatican whether information received in the confessional that a child has been sexually abused is covered by the seal of secrecy and whether absolution of a perpetrator should be withdrawn until the perpetrator confesses to police.

The Royal Commission was announced by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2012 and commenced the following year. It examined allegations of abuse relating to more than 4,000 institutions. 

The commissioners, who held 57 public hearings, listened to the personal stories of more than 8,000 survivors and read more than 1,000 written accounts. 

“Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian institutions,” they wrote. “We will never know the true number. Whatever the number, it is a national tragedy, perpetrated over generations within many of our most trusted institutions.”

This included many children sexually abused in religious institutions. “Based on the information before us, the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions. In many religious institutions, the power afforded to people in religious ministry and the misplaced trust of parents combined with aspects of the institutional culture, practices and attitudes to create risks for children.”

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he honoured the courage of the survivors and their families who had told their stories to the Royal Commission, often for the first time.

The Royal Commission found that of those abused in religious institutions, some 62 per cent were abused in a Catholic institution.

Archbishop Denis Hart, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, said in the wake of the report that many of the recommendations would have a “significant impact” on the way the Catholic Church and others operate.

He said that the Vatican was already considering questions concerning the extent of the seal of confession and whether child molestors who did not confess to police could be absolved and added that while the issue of celibacy would be raised with the Vatican, he saw “real values” in it.

Clarification: The original report said there were more than 400 recommendations. This figure represents the total number of recommendations made in the final and interim reports. The final report alone contained 189 recommendations.

 

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