Law Will Fall Short - by Rev Alastair Pritchard, Templestowe
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Some of these are the destruction of a potential force towards perpetrators “owing up”, since confession of child abuse is unlikely to be made, thus driving child abuse further underground. Such a law may foster conspiracy, or on the other hand, a dangerous martyr complex in a compromised priesthood.
Moreover the provision in the law comes close to being ineffective as it depends for enforcement on the unlikely admission of a perpetrator that a priest heard a confession. Laws such as this weaken the public trust in the legal system through their impotence.
Hiden behind the proposed law is a vindictive attack on universal Catholic tradition, a diminution of religious freedom and another example of unworthy “church-basing” fashionable in this post-Christendom age of irreligious human hubris.
Rev Alastair Pritchard, Templestowe
This text was published as a letter to the editor in Melbourne's daily The Age (August 19).