Canberra, Australia, Jun 1, 2010 / 22:44 pm
Outlining the Catholic cultural problems which he believes contributed to the failure to correct sexual abuse by clergy, Archbishop of Canberra and Goulburn Mark Coleridge has written a Pentecost Letter about sexual abuse to the people of his archdiocese. He called for sensitivity to victims and a purification of the Church.
Archbishop Coleridge recalled how the first case he knew of a priest abusing a child seemed “weird and distressing” to him, as it was “mind-boggling” that a priest entrusted with the young could abuse them. He thought it was a “tragic and isolated episode.”
As a church spokesman in the mid-1990s, he still insisted that abuse was a matter of personal, not communal or institutional culpability.
In his first meetings with survivors of sexual abuse, he saw the “extraordinary damage” done to many of them and was “taken aback” by the force of their anger.