RCAU # 50 - 3

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 8:00 AM Gerry O'Hanlon SJ  24-5-2012 

 “How would I inquire of a priest what his sexual behaviour was if it hadn’t emerged in the public forum? I inhabit the external forum. Where the problems emerge in the external forum, I act. The difficulty is how to gain access to the internal forum, and to know that which is hidden.” 

 transcript day 244:    8 february 

"The figure of 4444 people reporting abuse at the hands of Catholic clerics between 1980 and 2015 has seemed staggering to some. I was surprised that people were so shocked.

It is important to note the figure only represents those who have come forward and reported their abuse to some 90-odd Catholic authorities.

The rule of thumb for police investigators like those from VicPol’s Sano Task Force, is for every victim who comes forward, at least four will not.

There are those victims who cannot come forward, who are deceased, their lives often ended by suicide or in a storm of recklessness.

There are others who won’t ever come forward. They may a feel a victim’s shame at the abuse they have suffered. More often they appreciate coming forward will come at significant personal cost, the prospect of family dislocation, the ugly business of clerical sexual abuse meeting religious clannishness.

What we can safely say is the real numbers of victims is much higher than the 4444 figure. We will never know the exact extent of it but a speculative figure somewhere north of 20,000 victims of clerical paedophilia since World War II is not an unreasonable one.

This was an epidemic of criminality and one wonders what moral authority the Roman Catholic Church in Australia has left.

For those who argue the Catholic Church acted in much the same way any number of institutions did, the truly damning statistic is, based on convictions and offences committed, a Catholic cleric is four times more likely to sexually abuse a child than a member of the general public.

But this level of abuse, culturally embedded within the clergy, could not have occurred in a vacuum.

In 1972 Victoria Police stymied a legitimate investigation into the paedophile priest, Monsignor John Day. Day was a degenerate, a thief, a conman and an active [...]"

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