At the recent royal commission hearings Cardinal Pell was pressed on how much he knew of cases of abuse in the Melbourne Catholic Church. His response was that he knew very little, and that the responsibility for his ignorance lay with his predecessors who did not inform him, and with the Diocesan officers who worked under him but failed to report matters to him.
Religious leaders have repeatedly avowed a similar ignorance. Their claim has been received with incredulity by commissioners, victims and commentators. To most Catholics it has all been pretty dispiriting.
The royal commission will draw its own conclusions from Cardinal Pell's evidence. But if our priority is to prevent further abuse, our concern is not simply to decide whether the Cardinal and other religious knew of abuse, but to consider the reasons why he and other religious leaders might not have known. A culture in which responsible officers are not told of abuse would pose a continuing threat to children.
It is easy to understand why Catholic bishops might not have been told of offending priests. Where an offending parish priest had responsibility for the local primary school, teachers who wished to complain about his behaviour had no local church authority to register a complaint. If they reported it to higher educational or church authorities, they could reasonably fear for their position in the school.
School children who complained of abuse were treated as unreliable witnesses and in many cases were beaten for their impudence. And complaints were almost always followed by an inadequate response. In this climate people learn that it does not pay to notice or report misbehaviour.
This deplorable situation is not confined to the Catholic Church. When such institutions as the army, workplaces with apprentices, big law firms and hospitals have been investigated for bullying, harassment or abuse, the same patterns have been evident.
Whistleblowers are ostracised, dismissed as unreliable and petulant, and isolated. In detention centres people who make public abusive behaviour face a jail sentence of up to ten years. Where complaints are settled out of court the complainant is often bound to keep silence about the case.
In such an environment it requires exceptional moral courage to allow oneself to notice abusive behaviour, to report it and to follow it up.
In the Catholic Church, however, specific qualities of the pattern of relationships between bishops, officers of church institutions and the people whom church and its institutions should serve have