ARCHBISHOP Mark Coleridge has defended the Vatican’s response to the United Nations report on the Church’s response to child sexual abuse cases in an interview with the ABC Radio’s The World Today recently.
A report from the UN released in early February urged the Vatican to “immediately remove all known and suspected child sexual abusers”.
Archbishop Coleridge said the report and its accusations showed the UN was “failing to understand the way the Church works”.
“This is where there are confusions it would seem in the report because the report was into the Vatican City state as a member state of the United Nations but it then speaks about the Church around the world as if the Vatican City state and the Church around the world were the same thing but they’re not,” he said.
Archbishop Coleridge said the report could not apply to the Church today and that it contained “confusions and a touch of interference that (were) unlikely to help”.
As for the immediate removal of clergy alleged to have been involved in sexual abuse, the Archbishop said it was “not possible” for the Holy See to remove all clergy for suspected or admitted child abuse.
“The Holy See can act only once local churches, like Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne, apply to the Holy See, in fact to the Pope, to have priests dismissed from the clerical state,” he said.
“Now that has been done and is being done.
“Pope Benedict alone dismissed 400 in the last years of his time.”
But Archbishop Coleridge said the Church was not “top down”, but instead awaited the requests from the local Church around the world before considering dismissals or not.
He welcomed “anything that (would) help to eliminate child abuse within the Church and beyond”, but said the UN’s report was not going to assist in that direction.
“… And if the Holy See having considered the report decides to offer a clearer and stronger reminder to people like me, to bishops, then I would welcome that,” he said.
“Again, my general position would be anything that is going to genuinely help in this area is welcome and I don’t know a bishop who wouldn’t say that.”
Archbishop Coleridge could not say with certainty that there were no child abusers among Catholic clergy, but said the Church was “certainly much more aware of the whole phenomenon and the pathology involved”.
“Pope Francis has spoken a number of times very strongly on the more general issues of the need to be vigorous and transparent in a way we were not in the past,” he said.
“We are much more vigilant, much more transparent, much more co-operative with civil authorities than we were in the past so that whilst the whole arrangement is much stronger, I can’t give fail-safe guarantees.”
Holy See spokesman Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi issued a statement on February 7, two days after the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child insisted the Vatican was not doing enough to prevent clerical sexual abuse of children and even suggested that for the good of children, the Catholic Church change its teaching on abortion, contraception and homosexuality.
Committee members went “beyond their competence and interfered in the doctrinal and moral positions of the Catholic Church”, he said, adding that the committee’s suggestions revealed an “ideological vision of sexuality”.
“Certainly, while the Holy See was the object of an initiative and media attention that, in our view, was unjustly pernicious, it must be recognised that the committee itself has attracted serious and well-founded criticisms” for its February 5 report, Fr Lombardi said.
