Confessional Sanctity Targeted in Australian State

By Patrick Goodenough CNSNews.com Pacific Rim Bureau Chief

Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - Lawmakers in an Australian state are considering legislation that would compel clergy to report cases of alleged child sex abuse - including information priests hear in the confessional. Local leaders of the Catholic and Anglican churches oppose the move, while an Anglican priest who works as an advocate for victims of abuse in the church believes it should be supported.

Like many other areas of the country and the world, South Australia has grappled in recent years with cases of child sex abuse within the church, and especially in the country's two largest denominations.

State law requires people such as doctors, psychologists and teachers to report to a government agency if they suspect "on reasonable grounds that a child has been or is being abused or neglected."

South Australia independent lawmaker Nick Xenophon has introduced a bill that seeks to extend that requirement to include clergy, church workers and volunteers working with children.

"Clergy would not be exempted from reporting information of child abuse provided in a confessional," he said Tuesday.

"The current legislation suffers from glaring omissions that have been put into sharp focus with event involving child abuse by church workers," Xenophon said.

The lawmaker is challenging head-on one of the oldest tenets of the Catholic Church - the confidentiality of a conversation between a priest and penitent. Under canon law, "a confessor who directly violates the seal of confession incurs an automatic excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See."

"We don't want to step away from carrying out our responsibilities for the protection of children, but at the same time in the Catholic Church there is an absolute ban on priests saying anything that they have heard in confession," Catholic Archbishop Philip Wilson said in response to the bill.

In a statement provided by his office Tuesday, Wilson said: ldblquotelang3081 Every priest knows they can say nothing - even in the face of threat or punishment or jail."

But, he added, anyone coming folang3081 r confession in connection with a crime would be "strenuously encouraged" to go to the police and receive appropriate treatment.

Wilson's Anglican counterpart, Archbishop Ian George, declined to comment Tuesday, but pointed to an earlier statement in which he said that the confessional was an area of "utmost sanctity" for the church.

When he introduced his bill in the Legislative Council in the state capital, Adelaide, Xenophon was challenged by the leader of the opposition, Robert Lawson, who agreed that protecting children was of paramount importance but said he could not agree with the confessional aspect.

"Does [Xenophon] seriously suggest that pedophiles and the like would make confessions to their priests if priests were obliged by law to divulge that information to the authorities?" he asked.

The Rev. Don Owers, an Anglican minister who has played a leading role in exposing child sex abuse in the Anglican Church in South Australia, has come out in support of Xenophon's bill.

He said Tuesday both the sanctity of the confessional and the safety of children deserved the utmost consideration.

"However, the consequences of child sexual abuse are so destructive - child sexual abuse literally can destroy lives - that if this values conflict arose for me I would opt for the safety of children."

Asked whether a change in the law would not merely discourage molesters from confessing, Owers said he thought it extremely unlikely that an abuser would speak to a priest in a confessional situation anyway.

It was more likely that priests would hear about the abuse from the victim, or a third party.

When a priest felt bound to keeping such information confidential, "the result is that the abuse continues, more lives are distorted and perhaps destroyed," he said.

"Clergy in these situations have to realize that such confidentialities protect the abuser. If they want to rely on confessional privilege in such circumstances they -- and the church, if it wants to protect confessional privilege -- must be willing to take some responsibility for the wrecked lives of the children the perpetrator harms in the future."

Owers cited statistics that show the majority of child molesters are repeat offenders.

Xenophon says his amendment applied to child sex abuse cases only. He is not calling for priests or other clergy to be compelled to report confessions of other serious offenses.


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