If the process was going to take years, then fair enough, in the Prime Minister's view - there could (and should) be no shortcuts in this business.
It was an appropriate way to announce a royal commission, because the immediate provocation for one was that there had been more reports of abuse involving the Catholic Church.
They were hellish reports: of Catholic brothers committing pack rapes of children in orphanages, of offending priests being posted to new parishes where they offended again.
Premier Ted Baillieu in Victoria has an investigation under way and his NSW counterpart Barry O'Farrell has announced one too. Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, independent senator Nick Xenophon and independent federal MP Tony Windsor had all called for a royal commission.
So Gillard rang the Catholic Cardinal and Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, to say it was on. Early on Monday afternoon, Tony Abbott had said the Coalition would support it but that it should not have an exclusive focus on one body.
Is Gillard, who has gone up in the polls since she accused the Opposition Leader of misogyny, attempting to use this issue as a net to catch Abbott, given his famous Catholicism and one-time candidature for the priesthood? It would be uncharitable to think so.
And, besides, Abbott is not that kind of mad monk. No, the Prime Minister's remit for the royal commission was impeccable, as far as it went. God knows, it needed to be.
Within a day we had Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten, that resplendent product of Xavier College, saying the royal commission could not respect the traditional seal of confession. And, amazingly, the manager of opposition business in the house, Christopher Pyne, a Catholic, agreed with him. Even more amazingly, Attorney-General Nicola Roxon said the question should be looked into.
A day later, Frank Brennan - who ranks high in the list of those in the Catholic Church who want the horror of child abuse cleared up - said he would go to prison rather than break the seal of the confessional.
In fact, the seal of confession is guaranteed under the Crimes Act, so Roxon would have to do some radical undoing of our democracy to get rid of it.
The absolute secrecy of the confessional makes abundant sense because confession involves the sinner acknowledging his offence to the priest who, as the minister of the most high, has the power to forgive the sin. This is keys-to-the-kingdom stuff.
Its scriptural basis is Christ saying to Peter: "Those sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; those sins you shall retain, they are
Its scriptural basis is Christ saying to Peter: "Those sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven; those sins you shall retain, they are retained."
The priest is not obliged to give absolution. In some cases he may withhold it, but it is the church's fundamental teaching that where there is contrition a sin - whether it is murder or rape, treason or terrorism - is forgivable.
This has been central to the Christian core of Western civilisation since it took shape, and the practice of confession (and its secrecy) remains central not only to the Catholic but to the Orthodox and High Anglican varieties of Christianity.
These days - since Vatican II - there has been more emphasis on general public confession than there is on the individual sinner pouring out the unspeakable horrors of their heart to a priest in a stole in the confession box. Never mind.
Those bearded Russians who held out against the Soviets and the smells-and-bells Anglo-Catholics, like the Catholics, would go to jail rather than break the seal of confession.
You don't have to be a Christian to think it's a good thing if people acknowledge to themselves and whatever power they believe in that they have done grave wrong.
But the confession issue highlights the risk that the royal commission into child abuse could turn into a witch-hunt. The issue is one politicians should keep out of. In practice, a priest who suspected one of his fellows of sexual abuse could refuse to hear a confession and, if he had cause, could contact the police.
By the same token, a child molester could confess to a priest he did not know - in the odd event that repentance was his primary concern.
But all this indicates how easily, as a society, we can lose our heads over this issue. That we could want to violate the seal of confession over it, whereas it doesn't worry us in the case of murder, speaks for itself. Why? Because at some level we are inclined to believe that what is involved here, in the case of the Catholic Church in particular, is a massive conspiracy to defraud victims of sexual abuse of the right to their pain and of a systemic cover-up of the church's responsibility.
That is why Pell says the church is willing to accept responsibility for the crimes that have been done under its aegis but that it objects to the kind of media treatment that presents it as the primary offender in the case of the sexual abuse of children.
There are risks here on every side. There seems little point in denying not only that there have been terrible things done to children by members of the church but that there have been degrees of institutional cover-up, as well as mistakes of judgment.
Any religious body sincerely believes it is the purveyor of a great truth - and there are many people outside the circle of faith who have a "by their fruits shall ye know them" attitude to the good works of the church.
But it's not hard to see how a belief in the organisation that built the great cathedrals and ministered to the poor and sick might sometimes degenerate into a self-serving protection of the church's brand. Or seem to. It's a fine line.
Yet it is crucially important that the royal commission retain its breadth and scope as well as the Prime Minister's commitment that it take as long as necessary.
One of the things we know about pedophilia is that the sexual abuse of children is likeliest to come from a family member or family friend. Maximum risk, for what it's worth, comes in the vicinity of maximum care.
And this is, of course, pertinent in the case of the church. The Catholic Church is a massive organisation that in its time has done great good and great ill, but it is involved in every level of humane care - from nuns saving children in war-torn Africa to the great teaching hospitals of Melbourne and Sydney.
We should beware of witch-hunts, more particularly in a climate where we fear witches.
The sorry likelihood, after millions and millions of dollars are expended on a royal commission, is that we will discover what we more or less know: that wherever there is great and genuine care for children there will be risk of abuse.
Dedicated football coaches, impassioned scout masters, people who give their hearts and minds to the care of the young, whether it's someone young and fit pushing the hockey team on or an old, tweedy bachelor schoolmaster uncovering the beauties of Latin and Greek: somewhere, sometimes, there will be a worm in the bud.
This should not lead to hysteria. A couple of weeks ago on the BBC's Dateline Sunday, Ann Leslie of Britain's Daily Mail recalled how, in the 1970s, it was the policy of civil libertarians to push for the decriminalisation of consenting sex between children and adults. She also recalls being interfered with by a "dirty old man" of a senior army officer when she was a girl.
The context was the scandal that has rocked Britain recently in the wake of revelations about child molestation by Jimmy Savile, the pop music compere who died last year.
No one was seeking to minimise the offence of pedophilia, but Leslie's was a reminder that the past is an adjacent country and that we should not simply surrender to the mythology of the moment.
The context of the contemporary horror about pedophilia is that we live in a society that sexualises almost everything but at the same time wants to hang on to the ideal of the innocence of childhood.
At one level, this leads to the kind of lunacy that makes people think it is intrinsically suspicious if someone is taking pictures of the school swimming carnival. It seems never to occur to a lot of bystanders that such people may be somebody's relative or friend, let alone that they may have a disinterested love of children. It is as if we have already sexualised children in our own minds.
This leads to a climate of opinion - rife in Britain and growing here - where for someone to coach a football team they have to undergo Star Chamber-type checks that may reveal some shoplifting or dope-smoking offence 20 years ago in the process of proving to the authorities that they are not a child molester.
Feeding into all this potential hysteria - the hysteria that had politicians and feminists reviling Bill Henson, long after his eminence as an artist and his integrity as a person had been established - there is also the suspicion, widespread in some quarters, of Christianity in general and of a celibate Catholic clergy in particular.
The kind of evangelical atheism that sees any form of religious belief - but especially Christian belief - as life-denying and degrading is naturally inclined to take the crimes of a small fraction of Catholic priests and brothers not as aberrations but as quintessential, if extreme, expressions of the delusion that religious adherence represents.
This form of anti-clericalism is objectively crazy, quite apart from any question of belief or non-belief. It would be universally condemned, for instance, if it were applied in the same way to Muslims or Buddhists.
And all this is quite separate from the structural strains that may inhere in Catholic clerical celibacy (or any predisposition, institutionally nurtured or not, towards sexual aberration).
We should disown as intellectually contemptible any tendency we have to think of religious people as perverts because they are religious. The danger of doing this in a society such as Australia - so much less churchgoing than the US, for instance - is added to by our tendency towards conformism. Dreadful instances of sexual abuse involving the church do not prove the church is a corrupt institution; nor do the abundant examples of mistaken handling of the problem.
Catholics believe in free will and that they should hate the sin but not the sinner. If this sometimes led to the ghastly situation where a dangerous priest was reassigned to somewhere where he might find fresh victims, this should be seen as a sincere misjudgment. It does not invalidate the philosophy.
Of course there is the debt we owe the victims who may have had their lives ruined, who may have suffered an annihilating degradation of their sense of their own worth. But we should also - and this is what the Bible calls a hard saying - try to rise above a mythology of victimhood.
It may be that we need an exhaustive and soul-searching royal commission into child abuse. It may be that we owe this to desecrated innocence, and it's no doubt true that the horror is greater when it comes from people who are supposed to be ministers of love.
The likelihood is that it will reveal that the church has no monopoly on this crime. It simply has greater visibility.
But what we want for people who were subjected to abuse is not the horror of perpetually recycled victimhood.
When the youths who had survived the Nazi concentration camps and had been taken to London were feeling alienated and angry, the wise Jewish people who looked after them said: "So you suffered. It was terrible, it was evil. Now get over it." The Holocaust, of course, can never be forgotten. And the crimes committed against children cry out for justice. But, at the end of the day, what we want from a royal commission is a healing process. We want that for the victims
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