Sex abuse in Catholic institutions: key questions for the royal commission

According Dr Geraghty, the underlying causes lie in the culture of the Church, particularly its "mangled theology of human sexuality", and poor selection and training of priests and religious. In the past, he believes that recruitment to the priesthood and religious life occurred at too young an age, and training (and priestly life) was isolationist and did not adequately allow personal development.

There does seem to be a link between being recruited to religious life at a young age and the subsequent risk of offending against children. High rates of recorded abuse by Marist Brothers and by Christian Brothers are probably connected (at least in part) to their past practice of widely recruiting adolescents (mainly from the schools they ran) to attend their "juniorate" (a secondary boarding school where boys prepared to become Brothers). Adolescents were effectively placed on a pathway leading to a lifetime as a celibate teacher in the orders' primary, secondary, and special schools. This was a difficult pathway to leave because a stigma attached (especially in Catholic circles) in those days to those who subsequently "gave up their vocation".

Convicted notorious Marist paedophile Kostka Chute reportedly was recruited in the 1940s at age 11-12 to attend the Marist Brothers juniorate at Mittagong, NSW. I myself can recall growing up in Ireland and, while attending a Christian Brothers' school in Dublin in the mid 1960s (at the age of 13), my class was subject to recruiting efforts by their vocations director. Much of this has now changed. No Catholic religious orders now recruit at so young an age, and there is now much more mixing between seminarians/novices and the general community. According to the Marist Brothers, the average age of a man entering their communities today is 28, and the average age of a man taking final vows in religious orders is 37.

In my view those who were recruited into religious or priestly congregations in their adolescence or teens were themselves victims. They were too immature to know whether they were suited to a life of celibacy, and in subsequent training were generally sheltered from contact with the opposite sex. Many of these victims of the system ended up stunted in their emotional and sexual maturity, and had no legitimate sexual outlet available.

A second key question for the Royal Commission relates to whether the cover up by Australian bishops of sex abuse within the Church was by their own volition or dictated in part by either Canon law or direction from the Vatican. A related issue is why the narrative of abuse by Catholic religious is so similar across countries.

A number of witnesses at the Royal Commission alleged that the Vatican orchestrated the active cover-up of child sexual abuse cases through secret archives and church law. Secreta Continere (pontifical secrecy), and Crimen Sollicitationis (crime of solicitation) were said to be elements of canon law contributing to secrecy by priests and bishops in matters of sexual crime. A panel of experts, specialising in canon law, appeared before the Royal Commission, agreeing almost unanimously that the directives from Rome were often geared to protect the Church rather than its victims.

In November 2009, the Murphy Commission in Ireland found that "the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated" the cover up of sexual abuse, and severely criticised the limited capacity of canon law to discipline offending priests. In March 2010, Pope Benedict wrote a Pastoral Letter to the people of Ireland, in response to the Murphy Report. He did not respond to the Commission's findings about the secrecy required by canon law or the inadequacy of the canonical disciplinary system. Instead he blamed the Irish bishops for the cover up, and for not applying "the long-established norms of canon law".

It will be interesting to see what our Royal Commission concludes.

A final key question (in my mind) for the Royal Commission relates to the links (if any) between the sexual abuse of adolescent boys and homosexuality among Catholic priests and brothers.

Taken at face value, the abuse of boys by Catholic religious (and other males for that matter) gives the appearance of being overtly homosexual, because of the nature of the acts perpetrated. It is often also claimed that evidence indicates that homosexual men molest boys at rates grossly disproportionate to the rates at which heterosexual men molest girls. Conservatives like Archbishop Silvano Tomasi (who was the Vatican's representative at the UN in Geneva) claim that the majority of Catholic clergy who abused boys were not paedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males. Similar claims are regularly made by some Protestant churches (such as the Baptists).

The gay lobby on the other hand dismisses such concerns, insisting that there is no connection between homosexuality and the sexual abuse of children. There is the complicating issue that many child molesters arguably cannot be characterised as having an adult sexual orientation at all, and may simply be fixated on children. Alternatively, they may have never developed the capacity for mature sexual relationships with other adults, or may only have opportunistically focussed on boys in the absence of access to the opposite sex.

The actions of clerical abusers of boys might be analogous to that of prison populations, where homosexual behaviour is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals. There are also cultures, where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.