I am utterly outraged by reports today that two Australian archbishops have dismissed out of hand the recommendation of the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse to remove the seal of confession in relation to sexual abuse.

Dennis Hart, Archbishop of Melbourne, and Anthony Fisher, Archbishop of Sydney have both dismissed calls to change the rules.
(https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/15/royal-commission-final-report-australia-child-abuse”)

I tried when I was a kid to ‘confess my sin’ of being rude to a priest. (See my blog from 2012)

When asked what I meant, I said ‘with my brother’, he never followed it up to discover what that entailed.

I was sexually abused multiple times. Each and every time I confessed this because I thought it was me doing wrong.

An astute priest, you know, someone with some training, may have picked up on the abuse.

But what good would it have done with the make-believe ‘seal of confession’ that the church so loves?

If my confessor had have picked the abuse up, he could well have prevented further abuse happening to me by way of intervention. He could have prevented the abuse of other siblings.

Fisher said:

“Any proposal to stop the practice of confession in Australia would be a real hurt to all Catholics and Orthodox Christians.”

Children are the ones suffering the real hurt.  The Catholic church is hurting real children. The child who thinks they are the sinners, may well confess the sin and be met with the ‘pontifical secret’ barrier.

Hart and Fisher show by their words and actions that they have no interest in the well-being of children, they merely care about the right of the Catholic church to be beyond the reach of the law of the land.

They lack ethics and are morally bankrupt.