FOR the second time in three years, the former Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, Michael Malone, has taken the stand at a judicial commission to explain what he did when word of the paedophiles who had operated with impunity in the diocese began to assert itself in the outside world.
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As he did before the NSW special commission of inquiry in 2013, Bishop Malone positioned himself as an inexperienced bishop who arrived in the Hunter just as the lid was starting to come off some horrific secrets. He said, as he has before, that he felt torn between the need to defend the church or to serve the needs of survivors, but that he eventually chose the latter.
The chairman of this Royal Commission, Justice Peter McClellan, asked the bishop why there was even a choice. And under the chairman’s questioning, Bishop Malone conceded that the church had indeed engaged in a cover-up, just as the Newcastle Herald had alleged in articles the diocese had objected to after one of its most notorious paedophiles, Vince Ryan, was finally exposed.
This is not to gloat. But it is to argue that the Catholic Church, as a whole, has been a largely reluctant party to action in bringing its paedophile priests to heel.
For as Justice McClellan observed during the hearing, the church knew full well what was going on in its midst. As Bishop Malone acknowledged, the church had for centuries had its own culture and its own (canon) law that meant it saw the secular laws of the police, and of governments, as “impinging on the life of the church”.
The question, now, is this: to what degree has the church accepted that the game is up, and that the only way it can properly protect what reputation it may have left is to fully embrace the survivors its priests have vilely betrayed, and to make what reparations are necessary, as fully and as quickly as possible.
That said, the Herald acknowledges that Bishop Malone, both as an individual and as a leading cleric, has done a substantial amount – much of it behind the scenes – to push the church in the right direction.
Importantly, he played a leading role in the apology that Pope Benedict XVI gave in Sydney in 2008.
But as the heart-rending testimonies of two of Ryan’s victims to the commission show – and he was just one of more than 30 perpetrators in the diocese – the church has a lot to apologise for.
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