Church has lost moral authority

This article was published in The Age 22 March 2010

There is only one conceivable reaction to the fast-spreading crisis in the Catholic Church: horror. After decades of obfuscation, the church has to be called to account for what has happened.

Since abuse allegations first emerged in the early '90s in Britain and Ireland — and later that decade in Australia — the denials, both those of officials and those which ordinary Catholics told themselves, have shifted several times. Initially, the church authorities declared it was just a few bad apples, but last year the Ryan report exposed decades of systematic abuse of thousands of children in Ireland. Another line of defence was that it was a particular Anglophone problem with roots in Ireland's excessively deferential Catholic culture, which had then been exported to the US and Australia.