The local Catholic church's response to the imminent introduction of mandatory sexual abuse reporting covering all adults in the ACT is just not acceptable.
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The draft laws come on the back of a Royal Commission that lifted the lid on decades of abuse of children by priests and brothers, including in Canberra.
That commission also exposed repeated attempts by senior Catholics to conceal offences and to shift known perpetrators from one part of the country to another.
Paedophile priests were even sent overseas "for treatment" in order to put them beyond the reach of Australian prosecutors.
The intent, according to the Royal Commission report, was to protect the church's "good name". The welfare of the victims ran a very distant second.
It was a sordid and pathetic episode in the history of the Catholic church in Australia that has left many believers, and former believers, shocked, ashamed, disgusted and dismayed.
The Canberra church, through Archbishop Prowse and others, has expressed regret on several occasions and said this would never happen again.
But he has also made it clear he does not expect forcing priests to break the seal of confession would make members of the community safer. An expert review concluded that the Catholic church was unlikely to comply with mandatory reporting laws that forced priests to break the seal of confession.
Under that law a priest who learnt of an alleged assault in the confessional, whether from the alleged perpetrator or the victim, would be required to go to the authorities or run the risk of up to two years in jail.
Despite saying he supports mandatory reporting Archbishop Prowse has refused to endorse what has been proposed. He wants the ACT government to reject the measure.
The Archbishop is sending very mixed messages at a time when it would seem wisest for the church to acknowledge its complicity in one of the worst institutional abuse scandals in Australia's history while doing everything it can to ensure history never repeats.
He seems unable to grasp the Attorney General, Gordon Ramsay's, point that the welfare of the children is paramount: "No expression of any faith can put children at risk," Mr Ramsay, a former Uniting Church minister, said.
If this law only helps one child then it has been worthwhile.
Our laws are the statements of the principles that underpin an equitable, fair and democratic society in which nobody, not even God's anointed, is beyond judgement.
How is it possible in this day and age, and given all that has happened, the Catholic church can cling to the belief an 800 year old convention with no basis in scripture can take precedence over the welfare of our children?
Circumstances are vastly different now to what they were when the Lateran Council sat in 1215. It is time for the church to catch up with the expectations of our modern society.