Victims tell their stories to Australia's royal commission on child sexual abuse

Accountability
World
Mar 21, 2016

As Cardinal George Pell testifies long-distance, Australia's church remains at the center of the royal commission on child sexual abuse.

Analysis

Response to abuse has been slow, stymied by Vatican

Accountability
Dec 5, 2012

Analysis: If the probe into the Australian church turns up something nasty, the church has only its leadership to blame.

Australians debate seal of confession in cases of sex offenses

Accountability
Dec 5, 2012

A statement by Australia's Federal Attorney General Nicola Roxon that the national royal commission into child sex abuse should look into requiring Catholic priests to break the seal of confession in cases of serious sex offenses generated much discussion inside and outside the church, even as Roxon tried to downplay the issue.

Morale falters in Australian church

Vatican
May 31, 2011

ANALYSIS

SYDNEY, Australia -- The energies of Catholic Australians in recent years have been absorbed by contradictory approaches to being faithful. The first is the church’s institutional integrity (requirements of obedience, orthodoxy and conformity); the second is its moral integrity (what should it be doing, for whom and how).

The church’s top leadership and its ordinary members have been concerned about these issues in almost inverse proportion. Pope Benedict XVI, like the late John Paul II before him, has been at pains to strengthen the church against the influences of secularism by insisting on stricter discipline in its ranks and a greater acceptance of official teachings on the part of the faithful.

Many Australian clergy and laypeople, on the other hand, regard the declining number of regular churchgoers, the shrinking number of priests and religious, and the scandal of clerical sexual abuse as compelling reasons to move away from old ways of being church and pursue fundamental reform.

The result of these contradictory approaches is often conflict.