As usual, a cartoonist captured the reaction best. Tandberg, in the Fairfax press yesterday, sketched a child cowering as an arm clad in clerical black lunged from a church doorway.
The image was captioned with the euphemistic phrases that Catholic bishops have too often employed when conceding that church authorities concealed the sexual abuse of children: 'a past mistake ... an error of judgment ... a misdemeanour'. The admissions seem reluctant, and so lacking in compassion as to demean the suffering of victims and their families.
And it was in that vein that the world heard Cardinal George Pell respond to committee members' questions on the last day of public hearings by the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse. 'Do you agree that the Catholic Church placed paedophile priests above the law?' asked Labor MP Frank McGuire. 'In some cases, unfortunately,' was the understated, and underwhelming, reply.
As the man who, when archbishop of Melbourne, laid down the contentious 'Melbourne Response' protocols for dealing with complaints of abuse, Pell got a roasting from inquiry members. McGuire's Liberal colleague Andrea Coote asked how he could justify compensation for victims being capped at $75,000 when $30 million had been spent on a hostel for Australian pilgrims in Rome, in which an apartment is permanently set aside for him.
Pell's bureaucratically cautious reply — 'that the church has never claimed it would be unable to pay appropriate compensation' — seemed oblivious to the rhetorical force of Coote's question, as did his bizarre historical excursus on the tradition of building pilgrims' hostels in Rome, which he traced back to the ninth century Saxons.
It was McGuire's questioning, however, that went beyond the issues of concealment, compassion for victims and compensation to the causes of the abuse. He asked whether priestly celibacy might have had something to do with it. Pell conceded that 'in some cases' it may have, but insisted 'marriage is no deterrent to paedophiles'.
Even that very limited concession, which did not take issue with the 1000-year-old discipline of mandatory priestly celibacy among Latin-rite Catholics, is interesting. Such an admission has rarely been made by a senior cleric commenting on the abuse crisis. But Pell's reply, and perhaps McGuire's question too, ignored the real reason for suspecting that the origins of clerical sexual abuse lie in obligatory celibacy.
Of course marriage is no deterrent to paedophiles. It is well attested that most child victims of sexual abuse are molested