Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site
Forgot your password?
Subscribe

Keywords: Sexual Abuse

  • RELIGION

    Compassion and justice after abuse apology

    • Frank Brennan
    • 21 October 2018
    25 Comments

    May the Lord have mercy on us all. May the day come when church officials and victims will be comfortable in each other's presence in our Parliament even if not in our Church. But let's dare to pray that all might belong both in the galleries of our Parliament and in the pews of our Church seeing the light in fullness of days.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Towards credibility and a clean conclave

    • Gail Grossman Freyne
    • 05 October 2018
    26 Comments

    The numbers show this is not a witch hunt, merely the tip of a conclave. Any man who becomes a seminarian, then a deacon, then a priest, then a bishop, then a cardinal, will almost certainly have bumped into, bounced off or blindfolded himself to the endemic problem within the Church of the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable persons.

    READ MORE
  • INTERNATIONAL

    China needs more than Vatican diplomacy

    • Jeremy Clarke
    • 28 September 2018
    4 Comments

    In light of the self-serving and at times criminal behavior of bishops around the world as revealed by the sexual abuse crisis, it might seem strange that the appointment of bishops is such a neuralgic issue for Vatican-China relations. But in China, the appointment of bishops has become the litmus test of a so-called orthodoxy in much the same way right-to-life issues are in the USA.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    What it will take to prove the Church gets it

    • John Warhurst
    • 02 September 2018
    47 Comments

    The question of the seal is seen as proof that the church leadership is still resisting the royal commission recommendations. That impression can only be allayed if the church's record in a decade's time can be shown to be impeccable in responding to the other 98 per cent. Already 98 per cent has been shown to be a rubbery figure.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Child abuse and the church, media and police

    • Frank Brennan
    • 01 September 2018
    23 Comments

    When the law and the media do their job competently, we can work together to ensure that children are safe and that initiatives such as the national redress scheme deliver truth, justice and healing for all. Once they join a populist movement without regard to the important role they play in ensuring that truth and justice are done, all society is in trouble.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Past is present for the Catholic Church

    • Jim McDermott
    • 31 August 2018
    19 Comments

    The Annabel Crabb-led Back in Time for Dinner has some perhaps inadvertent lessons for society — and for the Catholic Church. Amid the frothy wonder of it all come unexpected moments of pain and dislocation. We are always in the process of seeing and becoming.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Policy vs penance amid US church crisis

    • Jim McDermott
    • 21 August 2018
    22 Comments

    The idea of some sort of communal action by bishops does speak to the deepest desire of many if not most US Catholics: that leaders of the US Church might finally take responsibility for their actions, and demonstrate that the pastoral needs of their people and the Church are more important than their own status or position.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Circumscribing the seal of the confessional

    • Frank Brennan
    • 20 August 2018
    31 Comments

    There is no way I would want to defend a seal of the confessional so widely drawn as that defined by Archbishop Anthony Fisher. However, I do think there is a case for respecting the seal of the confessional tightly defined as done by the canonist Fr Ian Waters. But to do that, the Church would need to get its act together.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Catholic lobby the insider outsider

    • John Warhurst
    • 17 August 2018
    8 Comments

    Political insiders are those forces that use economic clout, political connections, extensive networks and reliable access to decision-makers to influence political outcomes. Outsiders, by definition, lack these characteristics. The Catholic lobby now doubts its own strength and influence. The education sector is a good example.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    What canon law is for

    • Justin Glyn
    • 08 August 2018
    21 Comments

    Canon law, not usually a household term, has come into the public eye of late, especially in the wake of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse. Given this newfound prominence, it seems a good time to have a look at what canon law is — and what it isn't.

    READ MORE
  • RELIGION

    Prayers for Peter Creigh and Philip Wilson

    • Frank Brennan
    • 23 July 2018
    4 Comments

    I can personally attest that Philip Wilson has been one of the good shepherds in recent years when dealing with the plague of child sexual abuse. But as a young priest in Maitland-Newcastle back in the 1970s, it turns out that he heard things that make you feel sick in the stomach and tormented in the head all these years later.

    READ MORE
  • MEDIA

    No media witch-hunt on Wilson

    • Suzanne Smith
    • 19 July 2018
    28 Comments

    In May 2018 Archbishop Wilson was convicted of concealing a serious indictable offence relating to the sexual abuse of a teenage boy by a priest in his diocese. Wilson is the highest ranking Catholic cleric to be convicted of such an offence. The Church's response to this episode should be of particular interest.

    READ MORE