Matthew Abraham: Archbishop Philip Wilson would fail a police check so how can he stay?
ALL Catholic Church volunteers need a police check — but their top boss, the Archbishop Philip Wilson, would fail one for covering up historical child abuse, says Matthew Abraham. So why hasn’t he resigned or been sacked?
- PM, Premier urge Philip Wilson to resign
- Greens want Church punished if it defies child abuse laws
- The letter that led the Archbishop Wilson’s downfall
BLESSED are the volunteers for they, like the meek, shall inherit the earth.
But only if they’ve had a police check.
The regime of police checks in Australia is now so entrenched that you feel naked if you leave home without one. They have mushroomed into a form of institutionalised but most necessary paranoia, where the innocent must repeatedly prove their innocence.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide is a vast organisation, the largest single employer outside of the state government, and so its net of police checks is cast very wide.
From Fred’s Van feeding the homeless, to the ladies who scrape the candle wax off the altar cloths, all Catholic Church volunteers now need a police check.
Volunteers rostered for the Bible readings during Mass must have a police check every three years. So must those who take up the collection or give worshippers communion alongside the priest.
The archdiocese even has a dedicated Police Check Unit and a special website explaining the rules to volunteers.
Which brings the Adelaide Catholic Church to the uncomfortable case of the archbishop who will not resign.
Because right now, Archbishop Philip Wilson would not pass a police check. Not without divine intervention, at least, and that seems to have gone absent without leave.
On Tuesday he was sentenced to 12 months’ jail, with a six-month non-parole period, after being found guilty of concealing child sex abuse. He will now be assessed to serve it as home detention. The Newcastle District Court found that between 2004 and 2006 while Adelaide archbishop he did not tell NSW Police what he knew of the dreadful abuse of children in the 1970s by the paedophile priest, the late James Fletcher.
A day later, the archbishop declared he will appeal his conviction, will not resign until that is over and only if it fails will he “immediately offer my resignation to the Holy See”.
The stepped-aside archbishop says he is “entitled to exercise my legal rights and to follow the due process of law”. Of course he is, even though one option in the “due process” is to cop it sweet.
Even in the parallel universe of the Catholic Church hierarchy, these are strange days indeed. What is the end game here? If his appeal succeeds, as it indeed may, does Philip Wilson really believe he can simply pick up where he left off?
His good friend and head of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Brisbane’s Archbishop Mark Coleridge, doesn’t think so.
Interviewed in Rome recently, he said the Church was facing its #MeToo moment, when abuse survivors were “willing to speak and they are believed”.
He said the symbolic impact globally of Wilson’s trial was colossal but he believed some of the things said about him were “unjust, untrue and cruel”.
“It’s affected him physically, and I think it has destroyed his capacity to govern in a permanent way, no matter the result of eventual appeals,” Archbishop Coleridge said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Premier Steven Marshall all want him to go. But they’re mere mortals.
Perhaps more importantly, some of his senior priests, increasingly bewildered as the Archbishop’s three-year legal battle has unfolded like a slow-motion train wreck, finally believe enough is enough.
Monsignor Rob Egar, a respected former Vicar General with 60 years as a priest, has sent me a statement saying many, if not most, of Adelaide’s priests want the Archbishop to offer his resignation to Pope Francis.
He says while they have sympathy for him and recognise his leadership in the field of child protection, his resignation would be “a demonstrable sign of the Church’s compassion towards the victims of abuse”.
For now, Archbishop Wilson, a priest who at this time would not pass the rigorous police check system that he personally and laudably drove to protect children and the vulnerable, is having none of this.
Police checks are one thing. A reality check is quite another.