Australia’s most senior Catholic leaders have conceded that the church’s handling of the child sexual abuse crisis was “hopelessly inadequate”, had catastrophic consequences, and amounted to “criminal negligence”.

Five of Australia’s metropolitan archbishops appeared before the child abuse royal commission on Thursday, asked to explain how the church had allowed the abuse of at least 4,444 children between between 1980 and 2015.



Perth archbishop, Timothy Costelloe, said a major cause of the abuse complaints and the abysmal response to complaints was the leadership’s belief in the “untouchability of the church”, which filtered down to bishops and priests.



“The church in a sense saw itself as a law unto itself; that it was somehow or other so special and so unique, and in a sense so important, that it stood aside from the normal things that would be a part of any other body,” Costelloe said.



“There was a profound cultural presupposition about the uniqueness of the church ... in a sense the untouchability of the church, in that it didn’t have to answer to anybody else,” he said.

“It only had to answer to itself.”

He described the church’s response to abuse complaints as “hopelessly inadequate” and “scandalously insufficient”.

Sydney archbishop, Anthony Fisher, took it a step further, describing the church’s response as “criminal negligence”, which prompted applause from the public gallery.

Fisher said there had been a tremendous ignorance of the impact of child sexual abuse, a lack of empathy with survivors, and a flawed comprehension of the nature of paedophilia.

He was asked by counsel assisting Gail Furness, SC, why so much effort was put into covering it up, if the church did not properly comprehend the depth of its evil.

“When I say there’s ignorance, I don’t mean that people didn’t know it was evil, a terrible sin, and a crime,” Fisher said. “But I think they didn’t appreciate the long-term damage that this was doing to people. The repetitiveness of it, the almost addictiveness of it in the perpetrator,” he said.

“I think people didn’t understand that and maybe we still don’t understand the nature of paedophilia.”



Fisher said there was now more empathy and compassion toward survivors within the church, and a greatly improved understanding of the nature of abuse and the long-term damage it wrought.

Adelaide archbishop, Philip Wilson, and Melbourne archbishop, Denis Hart, also pointed to a past ignorance of the “awful reality” of the crimes among the church’s leadership.

“There was an unreality in the way which bishops operated, and they sort of floated above it,” Hart said. “The awful reality of these crimes didn’t make contact with them. I don’t understand why, but I do know that the way that we act now is very, very different.”

At one point, commission chair, Justice Peter McClellan, noted that the Catholic church had structures in place for dealing with the abuse of children since the 4th century. He asked how it could be that the church could still be ignorant of the nature of child abuse in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Wilson suggested the leadership had lost its knowledge on the issue and was “unable to reflect on the experience of the church”.

Furness asked Hart why the embezzlement of money by priests, which was also a crime, would have attracted significant punishments, while child sexual abuse did not.

“I think it might have been the thing that wasn’t spoken about, it was so far out of their consciousness,” Hart said.

No one could believe that a priest would commit such crimes, he said: “That illustrates the mindset, it doesn’t excuse it, but it illustrates what the mindset was… and that’s a serious failure of responsibility.”

Each leader was asked whether they had met with survivors outside the church’s formal Towards Healing framework for dealing with abuse claims. Each said they had, some only once, and others a few times.

Brisbane archbishop, Mark Coleridge, said meeting survivors through the Towards Healing process, while structured, was intensely personal and insightful.

Asked whether he would consider more face-to-face meetings with survivors outside of Towards Healing, Coleridge responded: “I would be very open to it if I thought it would help. I am open to suggestions, but sometimes in dealing with abuse you can, with the best of intentions, do things that hinder rather than help,” he said.

Australia’s royal commission or judicial inquiry into institutional responses to child sexual abuse was set up in 2013. It has investigated how institutions such as schools, churches, sports clubs and government agencies responded to allegations and instances of abuse. It findings will inform laws, policies and practices to better protect children.

The most senior Australian in the Vatican, Cardinal George Pell, has appeared before the royal commission on three occasions, once in person and twice via videolink from Rome.

The archbishops will appear again before the royal commission on Friday morning.