— The Catholic church and its plaques to abuse perpetrators

Across Australia child sexual abuse survivors have to contend with church memorials to their abusers and those who protected them

By Christopher Knaus and Nino Bucci

For the past 10 years, on the grounds of one of Canberra’s most prominent Catholic schools, a small plaque has paid tribute to the service of a man named Brother Jerome Hickman. Under the school sigil of Marist College Canberra, the plaque commemorates the work of the late Hickman, honouring him along what is known as “the Brothers Way”, a walk of appreciation for past clergy and staff.

The plaque, quietly removed in recent weeks, gave no hint of his darker past.

Hickman was the subject of multiple complaints of child sexual abuse and violence spanning his career in the Marist order.

The church has long held knowledge of complaints about him and has offered payouts and apologies to survivors in out-of-court settlements, according to Kelso Lawyers, a firm specialising in clergy abuse cases that has represented Hickman’s multiple victims.

In one of the cases run by Kelso Lawyers, a student at a Marist school in the Sydney suburb of Dundas, known by the pseudonym of Matthew, alleged he was violently raped and abused by Hickman from the age of just 10. The church has apologised and paid Matthew a significant settlement.

Despite this, the plaque remained on school grounds from 2012, when it was installed, until at least December, according to photos seen by the Guardian. The school says it has now been removed but could not say when, or whether it had only acted this week, after a survivor’s complaint and the Guardian’s questions.

For survivor Damian De Marco, a former Marist student, local Australian of the Year award winner and advocate for child abuse survivors, the plaque is evidence of a “deeply entrenched cultural problem” still rife across the church.

De Marco complained to the ACT government about the continued presence of the plaque this week, describing the commemoration of Hickman as “outrageous” and urging it to intervene.

“It is outrageous that yet again, for the third time in six years, Marist College needs to be asked to remove items celebrating paedophiles or those who have protected them,” he wrote.

It’s far from an isolated case for the church. In Ballarat, the centre of clergy abuse in Australia, plaques commemorating Bishop Ronald Mulkearns still adorn local buildings.

A survivor of paedophile Catholic priest Paul David Ryan, whom Mulkearns protected, says he started campaigning for the removal of the plaques in 2016.

The survivor, who wished to be referred to as BPD, as he was during the child abuse royal commission, would constantly see Mulkearns’s name on local churches, schools and halls. Mulkearns had ignored BPD’s complaints about Ryan, allowing him to go on to offend against other children.

It was a pattern Mulkearns repeated with other serial offenders, including Gerald Ridsdale, considered one of the worst clerical child sexual abusers in Australian history.

BPD says he’s had about 15 plaques with Mulkearns’s name on them removed since 2016.

“I’ll just drive around and stop at a church or a school and a hall and if I see the name I’ll call up the parish and ask, ‘Is this kosher?’” he said.

“I really don’t mind if I come across as a cockhead. What it comes down to is why do you honour a guy who cuts a ribbon to open a building when he has allowed people to go and hurt others?”

Sometimes action is swift but he has also met resistance.

He says when he approached one priest about removing a plaque adorned with Mulkearns’s name and provided him with a victim impact statement that outlined how Ryan’s offending had changed his life, the priest declined to remove the plaque but asked if he could use part of the statement for a sermon.

Time and again, it has been left to survivors to pressure the church to remove such plaques. In Hobart’s St Mary’s Cathedral, an artwork honouring the late Catholic priest Philip Green remained on display until 2017, 13 years after he pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting a former altar boy.

Also in Ballarat, survivors complained about the continued honouring of the bishop of Ballarat, James O’Collins, on the town’s buildings. The royal commission heard O’Collins also received complaints about Ridsdale in the 1960s but did nothing to report him to police.

In Western Australia, the Catholic church promised to remove a plaque memorialising the late Floreat priest Peter McCudden when it compensated a woman in 2002 after she complained McCudden abused her when she was 13. It was later revealed the church had simply removed the plaque from a church wall and mounted it metres away in a parish office. The plaque has now been completely removed.

The Blue Knot Foundation executive director, Cathy Kezelman, says the concept of commemorating such clergy is “annihilating for survivors”.

“If churches are really victim-centred and trauma-informed, they will act to remove any public recognition of perpetrators,” Kezelman said. “Without this, survivors will continue to feel that their own needs have not been honoured, nor the impact of the crimes against them truly acknowledged.”

The Safeguarding People Australia founder, Hetty Johnston, says plaques and memorials are trauma inducing for victim-survivors and “flies in the face of common sense, common decency and any kind of empathy”.

But it’s not just advocates who have concerns. The main body advising the church on the protection of children, Australian Catholic Safeguarding Ltd (ACSL), says its view is that there should be no commemoration of clergy who have been found to have abused children.

The ACSL chief executive, Ursula Stephens, said many Catholic organisations have already taken steps to remove images and tributes and rename buildings, but commemorative plaques or other permanent records that record historical events were less likely to be removed.

“The national Catholic safeguarding standards ask church entities to provide trauma-informed and victim-centred care to anyone bringing forward a complaint of abuse,” Stephens said in a statement. “It is ACSL’s view that this should preclude honouring anyone who has been found to have abused children or adults with a permanent memorial.”

Peter Poole, a pseudonym, complained more recently of abuse at Marist by Hickman, a claim that was finalised in October.

He struggles to explain his feelings about the plaque, which he says makes it impossible for him to go anywhere near the school.

“I can’t explain how I felt about it,” he said. “It was shock, I guess, that they just had such ignorance about glorifying someone who was a perpetrator.”

Marist and the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference were approached for comment.

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By Samantha Kamman

Priests and others within the Portuguese Catholic Church sexually abused more than 4,000 children over the past 70 years, and more than 100 priests suspected of child sexual abuse are still active in church roles, investigators estimate.

An investigation report published this month by the Independent Commission for the Study of Child Sexual Abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church found that priests and others have likely sexually abused 4,812 children within the church since 1950.

Through an online survey, investigators validated 512 victim witness statements and “estimate that the 512 victims knew of or were in contact with close to 4,300 other victims.”

“[T]he vast majority of cases took place on more than one occasion against the same child, to many thousands of instances of abuse,” the report states.

In a statement, Bishop Josè Ornelas apologized for the church’s failure to grasp the extent of the problem, promising more transparency in the future.

“We have heard things that we cannot ignore. It is a dramatic situation that we are living,” he said, adding that child sex abuse is a “heinous crime.”

The commission, founded by child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, began its investigation in January 2022 after Ornelas, president of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, invited Strecht to form the commission.

“There is an approximate (number of accused priests) and it will clearly be more than 100,” Strecht told SIC television, according to Reuters.

In 96.9% of cases, the abuser was male. The abuser was a priest in 77% of cases.

In 46.7% of cases, the abuser and the victim were acquainted with one another, with the average age of abuse victims being 11.2 years, according to the report.

The investigation found that boys were more likely to be victims than girls, with the former accounting for 57.2% of cases and the latter accounting for 42.2%. In 65.8% of cases, the commission reported no actions were taken to stop the abuser. However, over three-fourths (77%) of the victims never complained to people within the church or organizations. Only 4.3% of victims took their cases to court.

“The data on the incidence of sexual abuse uncovered in the ecclesiastical archives must be seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg,'” the report states. “It was thoroughly demonstrated that an indeterminate number of victims did not report the abuse to the Catholic Church.”

The report found instances of abuse in 129 districts across the country. The highest abuse rates were reported in Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Santarém and Aveiro.

While some incidents of abuse happened outside of the church (such as boy scout meetings), 23% of the incidents happened at a seminary. Other instances occurred at unspecified locations (18.8%), and 14.3% occurred at a confessional. Another 12.9% of abuse cases happened at a rectory, and 6.9% occurred at a religious school.

The type of abuse the victims endured varied, but most of the abuse consisted of “manipulation of the sexual organs, masturbation, oral and anal sex as well as full copulation.”

“In most cases, victims stressed that after the abuse had occurred they were expressly asked or ordered to ‘keep it secret,’ abusers commonly resorting to various forms of blackmail, often by threatening to reveal the child’s behavior to family members or friends,” the report reads. “Contempt and humiliation, making the child feel ridiculous in its always vulnerable relationship with adults, increase victims’ feelings of loneliness and abandonment.”

The commission said victims’ testimonies “bear witness to an emotional atmosphere of terror and to abusers’ regarding their crimes as mere instances of ‘the banality of evil.'”

Many victims said that they and their families considered themselves religious. Because the abuse they experienced was at the hands of church members, the victims reported that they developed a “basic mistrust” that persists to this day. That mistrust has also inspired feelings of protectiveness of their children and grandchildren, according to the report.

“The larger group among these revealed that they cut contact with the Church and partly or entirely ceased to be practicing, although they remain Catholic and express their faith by other means,” the report reads.

“The study shows that the Church lost faithfulness groups as a direct result of child sexual abuse perpetrated by its members. This effect extends to others who, while not having been abused themselves, are in sympathy with the suffering of the victims.”

A second group of victims, the report explains, who said they were able to make a distinction between abusers and the institution itself who remained practicing Catholics. A third group of victims was categorized as those who “cut off all faith and belief and became agnostic or atheist.”

The commission made recommendations, including ongoing training and supervision of church members, ceasing religious practices in closed locations, and providing psychological help for the victims.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests welcomed the report but found it “disturbing” that it didn’t name a single abuser.

“[W]e do believe there is a public interest in the identities of the alleged abusers and the places the abuses allegedly happened,” a statement from SNAP reads.

“The panel is to send to bishops by the end of the month a list of alleged abusers who are still active in the church. This is a good step in theory, but church officials clearly do the bare minimum when it comes to protecting children.”

The commission admits there is fear that abusers still active in the church may “continue to commit the same crimes.”

“[A] list was prepared on the basis of the data collected. Names were submitted to the Public Prosecutor as the work progressed, and a complete list of the names was provided to it on completion,” the report states.

The report comes as previous investigation reports have highlighted sexual abuse problems within Catholic churches in other countries.

In October 2021, an independent commission launched in 2018 found as many as 3,200 pedophiles had worked in the French Catholic Church since the 1950s.

A grand jury report released in 2018 detailed how 301 priests abused more than 1,000 children over the past several decadesinsix dioceses across Pennsylvania.

Pope Francis issued an apostolic letter in 2019 requiring clergy to report abuse, changing an earlier standard that allowed church officials their own discretion on the matter.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

By Catarina Demony

More than 100 priests suspected of child sexual abuse remain active in church roles in Portugal, according to the head of a commission investigating the issue.

The commission, which started its work in January 2022, said in its final report published on Monday that at least 4,815 children were sexually abused by members of the Roman Catholic Church in Portugal – mostly priests – over 70 years.

It added that the findings were the “tip of the iceberg”, describing the 4,815 cases as the “absolute minimum” number of victims.

“There is an approximate (number of accused priests) and it will clearly be more than 100,” child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, who headed the commission, told SIC television.

The commission said it was preparing a list of accused priests still working to send to the Church and to the public prosecutors’ office.

Strecht said those on the list should be removed from their roles or at least should be banned from interacting with children and teenagers during the investigation.

Jose Ornelas, head of the Bishops’ Conference, said the institution was yet to receive the list.

“What Pope (Francis) says (is)… abusers of minors cannot hold positions within the ministry as long as it is proven that the person is an abuser,” Ornelas said, adding the Church would not conduct a “witch hunt” against its members.

Strecht said the Church had the “moral and ethical duty to collaborate with judicial authorities” on the matter.

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said the revelations “shocked society as a whole”, adding that government officials, including the justice minister, would meet with commission members.

President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who came under fire in October for saying 400 cases of alleged sexual abuse by clergy members did not seem to be “particularly high”, said the Church must be held accountable.

Portuguese bishops will meet on March 3 to consider implementing “more efficient and appropriate mechanisms” to prevent future abuses, Ornelas said.

In a statement, U.S.-based support group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) called on Portuguese church officials to “prominently publish the name, photo, place of residence, and work history of abusive clergy”.

“Immediate action is needed, and it includes the dismissal of any bishop, chancellor, vicar general, or other church hierarchs who is complicit in what has happened,” SNAP said. “Without change at the top, nothing will change.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!