Nazareth Catholic Parish

Grovedale, Torquay and Anglesea

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Catholic Church releases report in response to Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Friday 31 August 2018

Friday 31 August 2018  Australian Catholic Bishops Conference 

Read a brief report in Melbourne Catholic

There is a link to the full response at the end of the Melbourne  Catholic article

The Scandal of Child Abuse & Our Response

Our Church is being challenged by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, in its work of investigation, and in the long term we wll be blessed with their knowledge and recommendations. But what happens in th meantime?  Do we sit on our butts and wait for others to do the work...or do we seek to initiate solutions right now???
 
Catholics for Renewal recently asked us to put our names to their Open Letter to the Bishops of Australia, and many have already done so. Some may well be hesitating, feeling tht perhaps they need more information, so to help us all understand the extent of the problems that have arisen in our church over the last decades, please read the evidence of Fr Tom Doyle OP, as he gave it to the Royal Commission on April 7, 2017.
  
Alternatively, you could watch a video interview with Fr Tom Doyle OP titled 'Losing Faith: Abuse, Cover-up and the Catholic Church.'
 
Another option would be to borrow the movie "Spotlight" from the Parish Office and have a movie session with the family or some friends. It is an excellent movie and well worth watching.

Updates

Francis Sullivan: Reform and Renewal after Royal Commission.

3 February 2018

Fatima Measham, consulting editor of Eureka Street and host of the Eureka Street podcast ChatterSquare, spoke with Francis Sullivan, CEO of the Truth Justice and Healing Council, the body that is coordinating the Catholic Church's response, to reflect on the journey since the Commission was first announced in November 2012 and to consider what are the next steps for the church. 

La Croix International reports on that very honest and revealing interview and it is definitely worth reading and putting the following quotes into context.

"The Catholic Church leaders have railed against the fact that they are continually put in the frame as part of the problem. But the truth is that the church leadership for decades sought to deny this history, and they sought to somehow contextualise it as a thing of the past. They never fully acknowledged that the culture, structure, processes of the Church were part of the problem. Therefore the trust and credibility in Church leaders has continued to decline, and accelerated in that decline over this whole period, such that people are questioning whether the church leaders have assimilated what's gone on. I think there's still the question, Do they get it? You can only ever tell if individuals get things by what they do rather than what they say. And I think the jury's still out on that."

 "The biggest shock I had was the extent of the abuse in the Catholic Church. I really was completely shocked when I first saw the data that was going to be revealed at the Royal Commission. We had in excess of 1800 priests and religious with allegations of abuse against them since the 1950s; we had close to 5000 people with allegations of abuse. That really blew me away."

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