Sydney
13 July 2003
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Church watchdog reviews Towards Healing protocol
By Chris Lindsay
The Catholic Church’s Committee for Profess-ional Standards is moving to make the Towards Healing sex abuse protocol fairer and more transparent, and has the support of the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes.
The new co-chairman of the committee, Archbishop Philip Wilson, Archbishop of Adelaide, said the committee is working to reverse the common perception that Towards Healing is an “in-house procedure” not susceptible to the normal checks and balances that the community has a right to expect.
Archbishop Wilson said Towards Healing is being fine-tuned to achieve better outcomes both for the victims and for the Church.
“The latest reviews are about trying to ensure that people can see that this is a transparent process,” he said.
“The criticism you hear often is that it’s sort of an in-house procedure, and we’re really concerned about that.
“We want to improve it, and we’ve made some suggestions that have been submitted to the bishops and religious leaders, to help to make that transparency of the process more and more clear.
“I think it has been working well, but I think it’s like a lot of things in human life, that you have to keep learning from the experience.”
The Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes has supported amend- ments to Towards Healing that include the possibility of establishing extra layers of recourse for victims.
The leaders of Australia’s more than 100 religious congregations have reaffirmed their commitment to Towards Healing, while voting unanimously in favour of significant pastoral and administrative amendments to parts of the protocol.
Conference president Sr Bernadette Keating said the issue of how to handle cases of sexual abuse remains a “major challenge” for religious leaders everywhere, but stressed that most of the more than 1000 cases handled using Towards Healing since 1996 have been “successfully resolved”.
“As its name implies, the process has become the catalyst for a whole new healing ministry,” Sr Bernadette said.
The amendments address a range of issues, including:
• approval to review membership of the national committee;
• formation of an additional consultative panel for each diocesan bishop and religious leader to advise and assist them through the process;
• adopting a resolution proposing that “… there should be no difference in the process adopted for a bishop/ leader and the process adopted for a priest/religious” and “in the event a complaint is made against a bishop or religious leader the ‘director of professional standards’ for the case shall be the co-chairpersons of the national committee for professional standards acting together”.
The Jesuits are also looking at adopting Towards Healing to replace their existing protocols on dealing with sexual abuse, which have been under review for six months.
The Jesuit Provincial, Fr Mark Raper, said earlier this month on the ABC’s 7.30 Report that the Jesuits have fostered a legalistic approach to claims of sexual abuse that had the result of harassing the victims and worked against reconciliation, but this would now change.
He said the outcome was either that the victims withdrew from the case through exhaustion or “we win the case or we lose it”, adding “but I’m not at all content with that approach”.
Instead the Jesuits are now working towards embracing the Towards Healing protocol, which is designed to deal with complaints of abuse without resorting to legal action.
The Jesuit leader made it clear that the interests of victims will take priority over the order’s need to prevent the erosion of its assets by large financial payouts.
“The assets are not as important as the people that we seek to serve,” he said.
“What is the point of doing what we’re doing if that’s not the case?”
He said that if necessary the Jesuits will ignore legal advice in order to work for reconciliation with sex abuse victims on a pastoral level.
Fr Raper admitted he had previously been wrong to follow legal advice “against [his] better judgment”.
It was on legal advice that he had failed to honour an undertaking to be interviewed for a 7:30 Report feature on a case involving Lucien Leech-Larkin, who claims he was sexually abused by a teacher at a Sydney Jesuit school 35 years ago.
“I was moved by Lucien Leech-Larkin, and also for me [viewing the 7:30 Report feature] was a moment of liberation I must say, because I’d been accepting advice against my better judgment,” Fr Raper told the program.
Archbishop Wilson said he would be “delighted” if the Jesuits adopted the Towards Healing protocols.
“The focus of the Towards Healing process, right from the very beginning, has always been trying to look at the victims’ needs and to deal with those in a way that doesn’t resort to too legalistic approaches,” he said.