When I was growing up in the 1960s in a small NSW town, I didn't know there were adults who gained sexual gratification from abusing children. As a young secondary school teacher in the 1980s, I suspect I was almost as ignorant.
I realised early in the piece that not every child had the stable, loving childhood I had enjoyed. Some of the children I taught came from families who struggled because of poverty, addiction, relationship difficulties (the awful term 'broken home' was in use) or chronic illness.
However, as I learned some 30 years later, there were children attending that school — children whose upbringing resembled mine — who were victims of the heinous crime of sexual abuse. Even more horrifying is the fact that their abuser was a local Catholic priest.
Someone said to me, after that priest was convicted, 'If you had looked out of the classroom window and seen a student getting into a car driven by a priest, wouldn't you be suspicious?' My reply was, 'On the contrary, I would have thought that the student must have a good relationship with his parish priest.' As a billboard I often see while driving proclaims, 'Unsee this.' You can't.
I can't forget the lurid details I heard while attending the trial of that priest, working in a different role. Naïve no more, those weeks were a turning point in my journey of faith — a journey that, until then, had been a relatively straight line.
I can hardly count the number of cases of abuse by clergy and church personnel in my diocese. Many of the perpetrators and many of the survivors are personally known to me — and of course, not all victims are survivors. Many have taken their own lives, unable to go on because they are unable to forget.
For a long time, I have believed that abuse in institutions (abuse in the home is a different, more insidious story) was declining, not because adults in positions of power were any more honourable, but only because children and young people are less naïve. While Pope Francis' 'sexual abuse summit' in Rome can only be a good thing, the risk is that it's too little, too late.
"This crisis didn't begin to emerge last year or last decade, but last century. If appropriate official responses have yet to be discerned, perhaps it's time to widen the net."
I question the fact that only