Catholic Church sexual abuse scandals: Sydney Archbishop tells of legacy of shame and disgust
EXCLUSIVE: As he prepares to give evidence at the child abuse inquiry, Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher gives his searingly honest appraisal of how the Catholic Church failed its flock.
NSW
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ASHAMED. Humiliated. A kick in the guts. They’re some of the words Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher used to describe his reaction, and the reaction of many clergy, to new figures on the extent of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
In a frank interview that shows a marked departure from his predecessor Cardinal George Pell’s aloof approach, Archbishop Fisher admitted that he and other clergy felt contaminated, betrayed and demoralised by the paedophiles in the church.
He understood why Australians felt so angry.
“We knew (the report) would be bad, but it’s humiliating, it’s harrowing,” Archbishop Fisher said.
“We all feel that the priesthood has been demeaned, that people’s trust has been broken, that confidence in us is understandably shaken.
“It really has hurt me and it has hurt a lot of priests and bishops, but that’s tiny compared with how it’s hurt the survivors.”
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released figures this week on the extent of alleged abuse in the Catholic Church.
The numbers were shocking: 7 per cent of priests had been accused, and in some religious orders the rates were between 20 and 40 per cent. Between 1980 and 2015, some 4444 people reported being a victim, identifying 1880 perpetrators.
“They feel somehow tarred with this brush; they are kind of contaminated by it.”
The church co-operated with the royal commission. In a process that took the best part of a year, each diocese and order dug out and handed over their records.
Commission staff were still crunching numbers last Saturday, and senior Catholic bishops were not told the final figures until late on Sunday night ahead of their Monday release.
“I felt — probably this will be pretty universal among the bishops and the clergy — quite winded,” Archbishop Fisher said of the moment he saw the figures.
“You hear the individual stories and in many ways they are more affecting than the numbers are, but when you put it all together as a picture, it’s just awful.”
He has since spoken to many clergy and they are “feeling betrayed, demoralised by it”, he says.
“They’ve given their life to God, these people have given their all, everything they can be to be the best men they can be.
“They feel somehow tarred with this brush; they are kind of contaminated by it. And so part of my task with the priests is to say, ‘Your people still love you, the church still loves you, you are trying your best’.”
Community reactions have ranged from defensiveness among some Catholics, to such disillusionment towards the church from nonbelievers that, for some, the word priest has become synonymous with paedophile.
Archbishop Fisher said that, in a sense, they are both right.
“This is so awful that you lose perspective on everything else. On the really good things, the schools for poor kids, the orphanages, the hospitals where there were none, the wonderful things the church — and not just the Catholic Church — did in building the social infrastructure of Australia,” he said.
“It was all hushed up, there was a kind of unspoken deal.”
“But on the other hand, that people who were invested with such trust and reverence behaved like this is deeply disillusioning, so in a sense I don’t blame them — I understand that they feel so angry that they want to blame all bishops, all priests, all Catholics, the whole 2000 years of Christianity.
“People had a high expectation of the church. In a sense it’s a tribute, they wanted more, they wanted better, and instead they feel they have been betrayed, and so they are angry.”
The question of why the Catholic Church was so rife with sexual abuse is still being debated, but Archbishop Fisher has some theories.
In the 1950s and ’60s, churches were doing much of Australia’s social welfare work with schools and orphanages, so predators would have seen them as an easy way to access children.
The sexual revolution was under way at the same time as the Second Vatican Council sent priests, nuns and brothers out of convents and into the world, so “everyone was at sea about priestly identities, expectations and boundaries”, he said.
“I don’t think in those days we did a very good job of working out who should really be in this and who shouldn’t — who’s got the maturity — psychosexually, humanly, in lots of different ways.”
There was also a culture of cover-up. Not just in the Catholic Church, he argued, but across the whole leadership class in Australia, including the legal, medical and political professions.
“It was all hushed up, there was a kind of unspoken deal,” he said.
Archbishop Fisher said the royal commission has been an important process for the church because it has forced it to face the darkness of its past, and given survivors an opportunity to publicly share their stories.
But it might take generations for the church to regain public trust.
“Unless we can give people some assurance that we have faced up to it, that we are dealing with it as compassionately as we can, that we are determined it’s never going to happen again, and until that’s not just said, but people see it happening and are convinced we mean it, we are going to have a credibility problem even with our own people,” he said.
Every step the church takes will be watched. “We are scrutinised, well and truly, and deservedly.”
The archbishop said he could not guarantee that the church was “100 per cent” clean. “But I have put everything in place I can think of to prevent it happening again,” he said.
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