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Written by ASP Staff
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Friday, 03 July 2009 11:47 |
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So K Rudd is going to use his time with the Pope to push for the canonisation of Sister Mary McKillop. I’m sure that Ms McKillop was a dedicated nun and probably had a very high level of awareness. But if she were around today I reckon she’d be telling the PM to use the time with the Pope to talk about the terms and conditions of a Royal Commission into child sex abuse in the church. The thought of two world leaders spending time and valuable resources debating whether 19th century nun should be given the equivalent of a secular knighthood, when there are still thousands of people suffering as a result of sexual abuse by this women’s colleagues, shows how far out of touch they both are. The first Christian Brothers arrived in Australia in 1843, the year after Mary MacKillop was born. History now records that even in those very early days these Irish Catholic priests were planning the systematic abuse of young Australian children and that they laid the blueprint for over a century of ingrained and diabolical abuse. Almost every month over the past decade we have seen a Catholic priest in the courts for this heinous crime and there is no evidence that the church’s silly efforts to stop it are being effective. Or is there? Well….no one knows. Neither John Howard nor Kevin Rudd want to promote any debate about this situation let alone any kind of enquiry or research project to determine what it was in church life that caused all this abuse and whether or not it is stopping. The Australian Sex Party and the Broken Rites group are the only two organisations that are calling for an official enquiry. We believe that only a Royal Commission with its sweeping powers will be effective in finding out the truth about these issues. Any enquiry of a lesser nature has the potential to be got at by the powerful allies that the churches have in both Labor and the Coalition parties.
Fiona
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