Conflicting agendas expose the Catholic Church's hypocrisy (Comment)

PETER Mahon, the extremely influential public relations expert who handles media strategy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne, once stood on the steps of St Patrick's Cathedral and asked me if I really thought the church wanted to further damage victims of clergy sexual abuse after what they had already gone through.

It was an interesting tactic, designed (I think) to reshape the public conversation, but also misleading. Of course I don't think Archbishop Denis Hart or the Vatican want to cause further pain and trauma - but, the pain and trauma having already occurred, they have several conflicting agendas in which the defence, even preservation, of the institutional church is top priority.

I don't think the manufacturers of thalidomide actively wanted to deform babies in the womb either, but the history of recklessness followed by cover-up, damage control and attempts to evade its responsibilities to victims are instructive. Sadly, it's a natural human reaction.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne has been in the news this week, first for its relentless pursuit of dissident priest Greg Reynolds, who resigned over his support for women priests and formed a small breakaway group called Inclusive Catholics. It is moving to have him defrocked, and the case is at the Vatican.

Next, and most devastating, was the posting online of submissions to the parliamentary inquiry into the handling of clerical child abuse (public hearings opened this week), with shocking accounts by victims and especially by police that the church hindered investigations, protected and moved priests, apparently dissuaded victims from reporting crimes to police, reported no offences itself and even alerted suspects.

Today The Age highlights the apparent contradiction between the church's protestations that it will be open about past failures while in fact having a tightly controlled media strategy designed to stonewall and deflect any journalistic probing.

Father Reynolds is a matter for the church, I acknowledge. What shocks here is the ruthlessness and speed with which the hierarchy has acted compared with, say, action against known paedophiles and abusers among the Melbourne clergy. As he noted, only two other priests have been defrocked against their will since a change in church regulations in 2009 - both notorious paedophiles.

In the case of its media policy, the church might reasonably say, ''Well of course we have a strategy of damage limitation. Any large institution, such as BHP or a government department, does the same.'' 

And that is true, except of course that the church is not merely a large institution; it claims a particular moral and spiritual authority.

The police allegations seem almost impossible to defend, especially as they shatter the church's long-term strategy of arguing that there used to be problems when the leadership - like wider society - did not understand the persistent and predatory nature of paedophilia, but the procedural problems are fixed now. According to the police, they are not.

I know that many of the faithful reading The Age this week will sigh and say, ''Here we go again, more Catholic-bashing by the media''.

In covering the issue of clerical sex abuse over the past decade, I have often been accused of being anti-Catholic. 

That is not true. 

By and large, I think the church is a powerful force for good, from its wide welfare work, to the inculcation of moral values among the young and especially a concern for others, to the sense of community it engenders in a fractured society.

But let's be blunt. 

To the extent that the church has come clean about clerical sexual abuse, the cover-ups and moving offenders from parish to parish, this has largely been driven by the media and the courts.

It is no accident that the breakthroughs came in the English-speaking world, especially the United States and Australia, where there is a strong secular media and legal system - so much so that Pope John Paul II first dismissed increasing reports of sexual abuse as media hostility, then took the fallback position that it was merely an Anglophone problem.

The fact is, abuse is found throughout the world and not only in churches, where children are vulnerable. 

America's National Catholic Reporter showed last year how the old system of denial, blaming the victims, cover-up and moving abusers around is alive and well in the former Pope's home country of Poland, which lacks a strong independent media and court system.

Sustained public pressure from The Age has played at least some part in the government belatedly opening this parliamentary inquiry. 

I would much rather have seen a fully independent royal commission, but the release of submissions shows that the inquiry might still achieve a lot of good.