THERE are times when you experience a “gut feel” about the evidence given by people in court.
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You come away with the feeling that what you have heard comes from genuinely held beliefs from deep inside witnesses who are determined to provide the “whole truth” as they see it, without fear or favour.
Anyone watching Bishop Geoffrey Robinson’s evidence on August 24 to the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse would have come away with that feeling.
An inspection of the numerous documents tendered to the royal commission on that day confirms his evidence and his frustrating struggle.
On July 24, 2013, 10 months before the publication of my book, Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, I went to see Mr Robinson, my old canon law teacher from St Patrick’s Seminary, Manly.
Canon law had become a source of fascination for me by that meeting.
I was hunting for an answer to why, in 1994, a good and honourable man, my former seminary teacher, Bede Heather, who had become Bishop of Parramatta, had refused to hand over to the police a report by a canon lawyer into the sexual abuse of children in his diocese, and why this pattern of behaviour was the same throughout the world.
I suspected at the time that it had to be canon law, and by the time I went to see Mr Robinson some seven years later, I was convinced that it was. I spent an hour and a half with the bishop.
There was one thing upon which we were in determined agreement, and it appears in his statement to the royal commission: “However great the faults of the Australian bishops have been over the past 30 years, it still remains true that the major obstacle to a better response from the Church has been the Vatican.”
This was not something the current Australian bishops were prepared to admit in their submissions either to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry or to the royal commission.
The courage they had shown under the leadership of MrRobinson had abandoned them.
They followed the blueprint handed out by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2010 pastoral letter to the Irish people: blame “bad apple” bishops, like Ronald Mulkearns, who had made “terrible mistakes”, and say nothing about the fact that prior to 1996, he and others were complying with canon law.
Mr Robinson told the royal commission that church law was so inadequate for cases of sexual abuse that it was a sham.
In perceptive notes of a meeting in the Vatican in April 2000 to discuss child sexual abuse, he wrote that most bishops saw the problem as a moral one, and if a priest offended he was to repent, be forgiven, and restored to his position.
They did not show great understanding of the abuse of power involved or the harm done to the victims.
The claim that the Vatican has a policy of zero tolerance is pure spin.
A reading of the many documents tendered to the royal commission provides even more evidence that the Vatican’s all but useless disciplinary system caused far more children to be abused than would otherwise have occurred.
Mr Robinson came away from his meeting at the Vatican knowing that the Australian bishops had no choice but to continue to go it alone.
He told the royal commission that Towards Healing (the Church’s guidelines to deal with sexual assault within the Church) was initially successful because a number of offender priests accepted that they could not continue to work as a priest.
But Towards Healing “later fell down because both sides changed”.
Priests started to defend themselves with canon lawyers, and the victims went to civil lawyers.
Robinson was particularly critical of Pope John Paul II for a lack of leadership on this issue, and said that the Church has still not had the appropriate leadership from subsequent popes, not even from Pope Francis.
Mr Robinson fought the good fight, but ultimately he was defeated and resigned, exhausted.
And sadly, when he resigned and decided to speak out, he was abandoned by many of his fellow bishops.
Australia has a peculiar cultural habit of creating heroes who struggle in vain and are defeated – from the bushranger, Ned Kelly to the soldiers who were massacred at Gallipoli in World War I.
The Catholic Church needs some heroes. Bishop Robinson, now terminally ill, is one of them.
Kieran Tapsell is the author of Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse