Letters

Child abuse

Arnold Jago

Contents - Apr 2013 - Buy a copy now AD2000: the changing of the guard - Michael Gilchrist POPE FRANCIS: 'REBUILD MY CHURCH' - Michael Gilchrist News: The Church Around the World Obituary: Vale Dr Lyn Billings AM, DCSG, MBBS (Melb), DCH (Lond) - Joan Clements Vocations: Australia's vocations springtime continues into 2013 - Br Barry Coldrey 'Jesus Abandoned' in Nigeria: Chiemera's new freedom - Madonna Brosnan Pilgrimage: A Holy Land pilgrimage with Scott and Kimberly Hahn - Wanda Skowronska Returning beauty and sacredness to churches - Art Lohsen Child sexual abuse: looking beyond the institutions - Anne Lastman Venerable Fulton J. Sheen's insights on the priesthood - Martin Tobin Letters: Anglican Ordinariate - Phillip Turnbull Letters: The Second Coming - Andrew Sholl Letters: Holy priest - M.A. Ross Letters: Child abuse - Arnold Jago Correction Solemn Abbatial Requiem Mass for deceased servicemen on Anzac Day Books: REDEEMING GRIEF: Abortion and Its Pain (2nd and Revised ed.), by Anne R. Lastman - Fr Paul Crotty (reviewer) Books: PERPETUA'S PASSIONS, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Marco Formisano - Peter Westmore (reviewer) Books: FESTA PASCHALIA: A History of Holy Week Liturgy in the Roman Rite, Goddard - Michael Daniel (reviewer) Books: THE SEVEN BIG MYTHS ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, by Christopher Kaczor - Father John Flynn LC Books: Order books from www.freedompublishing.com.au Reflection: Easter: the centrality of faith in the risen Christ - Fr Dennis Byrnes

The website of the "Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse" says it will "investigate where systems have failed to protect children, and make recommendations on how to improve laws, policies and practices to prevent and better respond to child sexual abuse in institutions."

But most child abuse doesn't happen in institutions. There's a well-funded industry devoted to pretending that it does – and mostly in the Catholic Church – and wanting the Church punished, bankrupted and hastened into non-existence.

With child abuse flourishing in every seemingly normal Australian street, better perhaps to say, not "isn't the Church terrible?", but "isn't our whole society terrible – so teeming with child abuse that it has penetrated even the Church?"

To further entrench the notion that child abuse is a problem peculiar to institutions can only guarantee that most abuse will never be eliminated.

Isn't this Royal Commission into institutions itself an institution worsening the problem?

ARNOLD JAGO (DR)
Mildura, Vic

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 26 No 3 (April 2013), p. 14