WE are right in the middle of the latest public hearing of the child sex abuse Royal Commission.
The examination of paedophile priests in the Melbourne Archdiocese has almost finished and next week abuse in the Ballarat Diocese will come under the microscope.
Two weeks into the hearings and there is a strange sense that the constant stream of abuse stories and maladministration by Church officials is becoming “old news”.
Even seasoned journalists, like David Marr, have written of the sense of public fatigue that now surrounds the hearings. Public coverage has changed with stories about the hearings now appearing well towards the back of the news sections in the papers, little or no coverage on the nightly TV news bulletins.
Archbishop Denis Hart described the ad hoc approach taken to complaints at the time as ‘wholly inadequate’ and that none of the cases before the Commission ‘were properly investigated’.
This, he agreed was ‘a terrible failure’. He accepted that the response of church leaders had often been inadequate and had often left children in danger. He also accepted that church leaders had failed to act on credible information about criminal abuse by priests.
These dark days will never, and should never, be “behind us”. They are a painful part of our reality.
More importantly, they are the painful reality of the victims/survivors. These people will never forget and neither should we.
We must now live our new reality and mask the past. But living our new reality keeps us humble and aware that we are all sinners constantly in need of reconciliation.
The new reality gives voice to a Church that knows itself to be constantly vigilant and self consciously aware of the dangers of power and prestige too often shown in clericalism and hierarchy.
The new reality is redefining the Church as a humble servant Church. Is this not the way Jesus would have wanted the Church, his Body, to be?