'A chance to clear the air'
Archbishop George Pell welcomes the royal commission, saying: 'We think it is an opportunity to help the victims'. Picture: Nikki Short Source: The Australian
"Are you near a TV?" the staff member asked. Sheedy wasn't. She was on a tram in Melbourne making her way to the airport to fly to Sydney, having spent the day at Victoria's parliamentary inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and Other Organisations.
"Hang on a minute," the staff member said, and put the phone to the television so that Sheedy could hear Julia Gillard's announcement of a royal commission into child abuse.
"I couldn't believe it," Sheedy says. "I was in shock."
She burst into tears, hugged a colleague, stepped off the tram and screamed out, "We've got the royal commission."
Sheedy is the executive officer of Care Leavers Australia Network, a group formed five years ago to represent people who grew up in Australia's orphanages, children's homes and in foster care.
The broad scope of the royal commission, ranging from the Catholic Church and other religious orders including the Salvation Army to state institutions, Scout groups and even sporting clubs, thrills her as she imagines what the commission may reveal.
Her scope is limitless. While the royal commission will be asked to investigate "institutional responses to instances and allegations of child sexual abuse in Australia", Sheedy believes it should go beyond child rape and into areas of neglect, psychological and emotional abuse and the unpaid labour of children in orphanages and laundries and farms.
She is already talking about a reparation fund. Expectations are clearly high.
"It's not just the churches and charities," she says. "It's a societal issue. That's why it's so great that it's a wide inquiry. I'm thrilled it's so wide.
"No one can escape the royal commission."
While Jesuit priest and professor of law Frank Brennan, on the ABC's Lateline on Monday night, questioned the wisdom of a national royal commission by "the feds", which is expected to last at least five years, Sheedy says, "We've got one chance to get this right and we've got to take it."
She says she fears the shredders are already busy in institutions and agencies around the nation.
In Sydney yesterday, the most senior member of the Catholic Church in Australia, Archbishop of Sydney George Pell, said bishops welcomed the royal commission and would co-operate with it.
"We think it is an opportunity to help the victims," he said. "It is an opportunity to clear the air, to separate fact from fiction.
"We are not interested in denying the extent of misdoing in the Catholic Church.
"We object to it being exaggerated, we object to being described as the only cab on the rank."
In relation to victims of child sex abuse, he said he hoped the commission would bring them some peace, but he questioned whether victims were helped by "a continuing furore in the press over these allegations", or whether old wounds were being unnecessarily reopened.
Pell, speaking exclusively to The Weekend Australian last Saturday, had already acknowledged that "the church is ashamed".
"The church leadership has apologised many times," he said. "Enormous harm has been done to the authority of the church, but the bigger thing is the harm to the victims. As a result of this crisis, we've got rid of a great deal of moral cancer."
This has been the church's strong refrain: that abuse is historic (although arrests were made in Sydney this week, the charges relate to abuse in 1985 and 1987) and that the church is dealing with its past sin through its 1997 initiative Towards Healing and, in Victoria, the Melbourne Response, which shortly preceded it.
But victims' advocates, for the most part, have been unimpressed.
Wayne Chamley has volunteered for Catholic victims' group Broken Rites for 20 years.
The organisation, which has been calling for a royal commission since 1998, has been at the forefront of exposing pedophile priests and members of religious orders.
One of the first was convicted sex offender Gerald Ridsdale, who is believed to have abused more than 1000 children in a 30-year career of crime and who was accompanied to court in May 1993 by then bishop George Pell, in what Pell yesterday called "a priestly act of solidarity".
When Chamley, who was subjected to "horrendous" physical but not sexual abuse as a child at a Christian Brothers school in Sydney, gave evidence to the Victorian inquiry last week, he described pedophile priests as "animals".
He told The Australian that, whatever it might say, the Catholic Church would want a royal commission "like a hole in the head".
"Elated" by the royal commission, which he says will go beyond the smaller state-based inquiries such as the Mullighan inquiry in South Australia, he says the church will fear a royal commission's investigative powers, ability to subpoena documents and testimony under oath.
He expects the commission to go beyond abuse to the complex financial structures of the church that prevent it being sued and failures by governments in child protection services. He expects it to expose a "prolonged cover-up" by the church and to "rewrite how we care for and treat people with mental impairment".
Giving evidence to the Victorian inquiry, Chamley said church abuse took place in a state of anarchy. "There is no compliance with the nation's laws, or their own canon laws, their own moral laws by these offenders," he says. "And others in the organisation don't force any compliance. That's anarchy."
In contrast, church spokesman Shane MacKinlay tells The Australian, "While there are clearly some people who are not satisfied with the response that they get, there are a great many people who are satisfied."
In this way, the church has described its internal processes as a pioneering attempt to recognise and heal child abuse, just as it has helped to pioneer restorative justice programs in its schools to deal with bullying behaviour. Interestingly, these programs involve a student listening to how his or her actions affected the victim.
While some police have condemned the church for hindering investigations, the church has argued that its processes for the past 16 years have allowed victims to receive acknowledgment and compensation, without shame.
In its mea culpa Facing the Truth, prepared for the Victorian parliamentary inquiry, the church admitted it was slow to respond, slow to believe victims, wrongly believed the denials of predators and has now put protocols in place for mandatory reporting of abuse to police, except for what is heard in the confessional.
"Child abuse in the Catholic Church has caused shock and sadness among Catholics and the wider community," it said.
"It is shameful that this abuse, with its devastating impact on those who were abused and their families, was committed by Catholic priests and religious and church workers.
"The church is committed to facing up to the truth and not disguising, diminishing or avoiding the actions of those who have betrayed a sacred trust."
Lawyer Peter Gordon, a lapsed Catholic who grew up with Catholic friends in the west of Melbourne, has taken action against the church in upwards of 400 such betrayals since 1993.
He represented 350 former child migrants who were placed in Christian Brothers institutions such as Bindoon, Clontarf and Castledare that he calls "the worst, most distressing, most debilitating cases I have ever seen" and intellectually disabled child abuse victims of the St John of God brothers.
Repeating a claim made to a Senate inquiry 10 years ago, Chamley told the Victorian inquiry last week he had been told that a ring of between nine and 15 religious brothers at St John of God were suspected of the unreported deaths of two boys who had been abused.
He said that two others, aged 12 and 13, after repeatedly escaping their abuser, were committed to Melbourne's Mont Park psychiatric institution by the "alpha" pedophile, where one was subjected to so much shock therapy he had little mental function left.
The order ultimately paid out more than $3.6 million in 2002 to 24 men who alleged abuse across a 30-year period from the 1950s.
Gordon says he has no knowledge of murders at St John of God institutions.
But he says defences put up by the Catholic Church and the Christian Brothers "only has its parallels in the most aggressive defences taken by the tobacco industry, in my experience as a lawyer".
He says those defences included "technical defences, threats and intimidation of witnesses, humiliation of claimants; there was virtually no depth to which they would not stoop".
Of the royal commission, Gordon tells The Australian, "I share people's satisfaction, joy and elation that a royal commission has been established.
"I hear the argument that it is a witch-hunt. I think that is nonsense. I think that there has been an unparalleled epidemic of criminal behaviour that has never been properly addressed. I welcome it for that reason.
"I hear the argument that it is going to re-traumatise victims. In my experience, the victims that I have spoken to, though they are traumatised by talking about these events in ways which are almost hard to describe, the overwhelming majority of them demand accountability and will welcome this despite the trauma that it raises.
"I have noted the somewhat political correct-speak of many people saying it is not just going to focus on the Catholic Church.
"I think that if we are going to be frank about it, we need to recognise that whilst sex abuse has been a problem throughout the community, it is exponentially greater in the ranks of the Catholic Church than in any other religion or institution in which these allegations have been levelled."
Gordon believes the commission will inevitably find there has been "an unacceptable level of predatory pedophilia in the Catholic Church over the past 60 years", and it reached epidemic proportions in some institutions.
He believes it will also find predatory pedophilia "was only made possible and was aggravated by co-operation and active collusion between perpetrators at the institutions and the substance of that collusion went not just to the sharing of information about vulnerable targets but also to the suppression of information and to the threatening and intimidatory dealing with complaints from victims about the conduct of other pedophiles".
He says pedophilia was also aggravated by the church relocating suspected pedophiles "to new regions where their reputations were unknown to the unsuspecting congregations", by denying or downplaying the extent of pedophilia, and by the church "exploiting its wealth and its privilege to obtain unfair advantage in the adjudication of claims".
At Broken Rites in Melbourne, volunteer John McNally is staffing the phones and dealing with his own ricocheting emotions. McNally, who was sexually abused as an 11-year-old, has been through the Catholic Church's internal processes.
He says he emerged from it with a sense of "validation" that his abuse was accepted, compensation he describes as "paltry" and a nagging disillusionment that the process was ultimately about protecting the church.
Asked how a royal commission will be any different, he says, "Bishops will have to tell the truth."
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