Some of the worst scandals have engulfed the Catholic Church. There are two aspects of Catholic teaching which may help explain this. The first is the place of canon law in the life and thought of the worldwide Catholic Church. The second is the culture of clericalism.

There has long been a culture within international Catholicism that the proper place for judging clergy is through its canon law. In this sense, the church perceived it to be a law unto itself. Canon 1395 provides that clergy who abuse children under 18 are to be "punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state"; but it was no part of canonical thinking that child sexual abuse is a crime that ought routinely to be reported to the police and dealt with by the criminal courts.

The second factor was clericalism. The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith put it succinctly in 2011: "The bishop has a duty to treat all priests as father and brother." The view was expressed at the highest levels in Rome little more than a decade ago that this involved an obligation not to denounce priests and religious brothers to the police or courts.

It is in this context that the response of the Australian church leadership needs to be understood. Towards Healing, published first in 1996, was a radical and proactive step at the time. Those who gave leadership to this were people of great integrity and commitment. The unerring condemnation of the Catholic Church as a whole is unfair to the many decent people who have tried to make amends, to help victims and to put in place better processes for dealing with these issues. There have been substantial improvements in the last 15 years, but they have been from a dreadful baseline.

While much has changed in the culture of the Catholic Church, some old attitudes remain. Some leaders have spent extravagantly on legal representation for alleged offenders, while being miserly in compensation of victims; for others, the greatest concern was to protect their organisation from scandal rather than for the children in their care. There are still those who would aspire to tough out the various inquiries, mixing some candour with a lot of spin, rather than tell the unvarnished truth. There remain a few rotten apples.