Sins of the Fathers Abuse Inquiry

It's the only way to address an appalling history of sexual abuse," he said. "Openness and honesty is the only way both the church and survivors can recover." Nikki Wells, founder of Survivors Australia, said a NSW inquiry focusing on the "mishandling of abuse claims" was urgently needed. "The victims are subjected to grave abuse because these institutions want to protect two things: their power and their wealth," she said. The Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu, launched the inquiry on Tuesday following revelations that 40 members of the Catholic Church in Victoria had committed suicide. It took six seconds today to sum up what has been wrong with the Catholic Church for decades over the treatment of victims of sexual assault and the protection of paedophile priests by their Church leaders. Six agonizingly long, damningly silent, seconds that took me back 25 years to when I went to jail for campaigning against one of those paedophile priests. Those seconds ticked by in an interview that Neil Mitchell did with Archbishop Denis Hart on 3AW this morning. And the drawn-out silence occurred when Mitchell asked the Church leader if he knew of any paedophile priests still out there in the community. Men who had been protected by the Church. Criminal offenders against children whom the Church had counseled, removed from the Ministry (as the Archbishop kept reminding us) but kept in other jobs and protected from any Police investigation. Later, Mitchell went back to a Watergate <b>...</b>