SYDNEY (Reuters) - The Catholic church in Australia said on Friday it would oppose laws forcing priests to report child abuse when they learn about it in the confessional, setting the stage for a showdown between the country’s biggest religion and the government.

Pope Francis, leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, is facing sexual abuse crises in several countries and the stance taken by the Australian bishops reflected the abiding, powerful influence conservatives in the church.

Visiting Ireland earlier this week, Pope Francis begged forgiveness for the multitude of abuses suffered by victims in Ireland, and he has promised no more cover-ups.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC), the country’s top Catholic body, said it did not accept a recommendation from an official inquiry which would force priests by law to report abuse to the police when they hear about it in confession.

Two of Australia’s eight states and territories have since introduced laws making it a crime for priests to withhold information about abuse heard in the confessional, while the others have said they are considering their response.

“This proposed law is ill-conceived, and impracticable, it won’t make children safer, and it will most likely undermine religious freedom,” ACBC President Mark Coleridge told reporters in Sydney, referring to the sanctity of the confessional.

The seal of confession was “a non-negotiable element of our religious life and embodies an understanding of the believer and God”, Coleridge added.

Twenty-two percent of Australians are catholic and the move sets up a rare schism between the church and the government, in a country that adheres to a secular constitution.

Andrew Singleton, professor of philosophy at Deakin University in the state of Victoria, said the bishops’ response reflected a disconnect in Australia between religious and secular sensibilities.

“Their stance is the classic tension between canon law, and their sense that there is some sort of higher, transcendent entity, and common law,” Singleton said.

Last year, Australia ended a five-year government inquiry into child sex abuse in churches and other institutions, amid allegations worldwide that churches had protected pedophile priests by moving them from parish to parish.

Archbishop Mark Coleridge, President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference in Australia, speaks as Sister Monica Cavanagh, President of Catholic Religious Australia, listens during a media conference in Sydney, Australia, August 31, 2018. REUTERS/David Gray

The inquiry heard seven percent of Catholic priests in Australia between 1950 and 2010 had been accused of child sex crimes and nearly 1,100 people had filed child sexual assault claims against the Anglican Church over 35 years.

Accusations of cover-ups in the church have reverberated all the way to Pope Francis, who has been accused by a United States archbishop of knowing for years about sexual misconduct by an American cardinal and doing nothing about it.

DISAPPOINTED

The ACBC’s opposition runs against laws which take effect in South Australia, the country’s fifth-biggest state, in October, and in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) from April 2019.

Representatives of the attorneys general of South Australia and ACT were not immediately available for comment.

Larger New South Wales and Victoria states have said they are considering the recommendation, while Western Australia has promised a similar law. Queensland, the third-largest state, has never exempted priests from mandatory reporting of abuse.

The stance taken by the Australian bishops also runs against the position taken by their church’s chief adviser on child abuse complaint handling, Francis Sullivan, who said in 2017 that “priests, like everybody else, will be expected to obey the law or suffer the consequences”.

Sullivan was unavailable for comment on Friday.

Clare Leaney, CEO of In Good Faith Foundation, a victim support group, described the bishops’ decision as “more of the same”.

“I’ve spoken to a number of survivors ... who said they were actually quite disappointed,” Leaney said.

“We are aware of at least one instance where the confession has been misused.”

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The ACBC report came two weeks after a former Australian archbishop became the most senior Catholic cleric in the world to be convicted of concealing abuse, and was ordered to serve a one-year prison sentence at home.

The convicted former archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, himself a former ACBC president, was found to have failed to report child abuse outside the confessional. He filed an appeal against his conviction on Thursday.

Australia’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had been scheduled to deliver a rare public apology to victims of sexual abuse on Oct. 22 but he was ousted by his party earlier this month.</s>CANBERRA, Australia — The Catholic Church in Australia on Friday rejected a recommendation by a government inquiry that priests be required to report evidence of child sex abuse disclosed in the confessional.

The recommendation that priests be prosecuted for failing to report evidence of pedophilia heard in the confessional was a key finding in December of Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Australia’s longest-running royal commission — which is the country’s highest form of inquiry — had been investigating since 2012 how the Catholic Church and other institutions responded to sexual abuse of children in Australia over 90 years.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference President Archbishop Mark Coleridge said breaking the seal of the confessional would not make children safer.

“Australian priests and the lay faithful are deeply committed to both child safety and the seal of confession, which we hold to be inviolable,” Coleridge told reporters.

“This isn’t because we regard ourselves as being above the law, or because we don’t think the safety of children is supremely important — we do. But we don’t accept that safeguarding and the seal are mutually exclusive,” he added.

Australian state governments are increasing pressure on the church to report child abuse and are legislating to prosecute priests who maintain that revelations of pedophilia made in the confessional cannot be disclosed.

Former Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson was sentenced earlier in August to 12 months in home detention after becoming the most senior Catholic cleric ever convicted of covering up children sex abuse.

The seal of the confession was not at issue in his case. Rather, Wilson testified that he did not recall ever hearing allegations against a pedophile priest and therefore could not have acted to protect the boys who were abused.

Catholicism is the largest denomination in majority-Christian Australia.</s>The Roman Catholic Church in Australia has rejected a recommendation that priests be required to report evidence of sexual abuse revealed in confession.

The proposed change was contained in a landmark report on child sex abuse in the country issued late last year by a royal commission that spent five years compiling data, including interviews of thousands of people who said they were victims of abuse.

Also among the 400 recommendations contained in the report was a call for the lifting of the celibacy requirement for diocesan clergy, making it a crime to fail to protect a child from abuse and the permanent removal of any person in a religious ministry who is "subject to a substantiated child abuse complaint."

On Friday, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the Catholic Religious Australia – the top body for religious orders in the country — accepted many of the recommendations in the report, but pointedly pushed back on any breach of the seal of confession, calling the idea "contrary to our faith and inimical to religious liberty."

"We are committed to the safeguarding of children and vulnerable people while maintaining the seal," the conference president, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, and CRA President Sister Monica Cavanagh, said Friday.

Coleridge acknowledged that the church reaction to child sex abuse had sometimes been too slow, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

"Those failures allowed some abusers to offend again and again, with tragic and sometimes fatal consequences," he said.

"The bishops and leaders of religious orders pledge today: Never again," he said. "There will be no cover-up. There will be no transferring of people accused of abuse. There will be no placing the reputation of the church above the safety of children."

The far-reaching royal commission heard from 8,000 people about abuse in more than 4,000 institutions and concluded that greatest number of alleged abuse perpetrators were found in Catholic institutions. The authors of the report, published in December, said that 7 percent of priests who worked in Australia between 1950 and 2009 had been accused of child sex abuse.

In February, then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull issued a national apology over the decades of abuse, saying, "We owe it to the survivors not to waste this moment."

In recent months, Australia has been rocked by allegations of abuse and cover-up by high-ranking Catholic clergy.

In April, Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's de facto finance chief, pleaded not guilty to several charges of sexual abuse dating from the 1970s and 1990s when Pell was a priest in the Melbourne area.

Moreover, in July, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson after he was convicted of failing to report child sex abuse by a priest in the 1970s. Wilson is the senior-most Catholic cleric to be found guilty of concealing abuse.</s>(CNN) — Australia’s Catholic Church has rejected calls for priests to be compelled to report child abuse revealed in confessionals.

The Church said Friday it would accept “98%” of recommendations made by a high-level government inquiry into child sexual abuse, which uncovered shocking accounts of widespread abuse inside Australian religious institutions.

But church leaders said that they would maintain the sanctity of confession, arguing to remove it would infringe on religious liberties.

“The only recommendation we can’t accept is removing the seal of confession,” Sister Monica Cavanagh, president of Catholic Religious Australia said at a press conference.

The Church’s decision to reject the recommendation remains a stumbling block for some.

It comes amid a tumultuous week for the Catholic Church as pressure builds on Pope Francis to ensure abusers within the church are held to account.

Addressing crowds in Dublin, Ireland last weekend, the Pontiff spoke of his shame over the “appalling crimes” committed in recent decades and called for forgiveness from those who had suffered.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard testimony from more than 8,000 people, who gave evidence in private sessions, over a period of five years.

During the inquiry it emerged that 7% of priests in Australia had been accused of abusing children, including over 40% of brothers in some orders.

A total of 2,559 referrals were made to authorities, including the police, as a result of the $383 million (AU$500 million) probe.

The final report delivered in December included 189 new recommendations to address a “serious failure” by Australian institutions to protect children, including 20 for the Catholic Church alone.

While the church said it had accepted almost all of the recommendations, it added that a large number would be only be put into effect pending approval from the Vatican. That includes one recommendation to consider voluntary celibacy for priests.

Peter Gogarty, a child abuse survivor, told ABC Radio he thought there was a bit of “clever play on words” going on in the Church’s response to the recommendation.

“A great many of these recommendation it has said that it accepts in principle but subject to it doing more work or research … It’s not as rosy as the Church has tried to paint it, but as I said I remain cautiously optimistic that we are certainly in a more child safe environment,” Gogarty told local media.

The one recommendation it said it wouldn’t adopt was the suggestion that priests be compelled to report to authorities any admissions of abuse made by priests in the confession box.

Sister Cavanagh said the Church was “deeply committed to both child safety and seal of confession, which we consider inviolable. We don’t accept that safeguarding (children’s safety) and the seal are mutually exclusive.”

Under Roman Catholic law, priests risk being excommunicated if they divulge what’s been said in confession, either by their words or actions.

“The sacramental seal is inviolable; therefore it is absolutely forbidden for a confessor to betray in any way a penitent in words or in any manner and for any reason,” according to the Vatican.

Mandatory reporting differs between Australia’s states and territories but in most places professional carers must tell authorities about suspected cases of child abuse.

Advocates say the “seal of confession” shows the church puts itself ahead of children.

“I think it’s appalling that the Catholic Church is not putting the safety of Australian children as their number one priority … We don’t live under canon law,” Leonie Sheedy, chief executive of Care Leavers Australasia Network told CNN.

Sheedy said the Australian public was “fed up” with the church, and it was “insulting” that Australia’s Catholic leaders said they had to refer back to the Vatican for approval to make the reforms.

“Why can’t they make decisions themselves and put the safety of Australian children first?” she said.

In a statement released June, the Church said it “welcomed” the report and had already begun its work to respond to the recommendations “including measures to standardize approaches to child safety and research to help prevent child sexual abuse in the future.”

The landmark Royal Commission report described the abuse of children in Australia’s religious institutions as a “national tragedy.”

“We now know that countless thousands of children have been sexually abused in many institutions in Australia. In many institutions, multiple abusers have sexually abused children,” the report said.

“We must accept that institutional child sexual abuse has been occurring for generations.”

At the time of its release, McClellan, stated that the issue of child sex abuse was an ongoing issue.

“The sexual abuse of children is not just a problem from the past. Child sexual abuse in institutions continues today,” he said. “In some case studies into schools the alleged abuse was so recent that the children are still attending school.”

Archbishop Mark Coleridge, President of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, said that while the Church would not remove the seal of the confessional, it was willing to admit the failures of the past and change to regain the public’s trust.

“We make the pledge ‘never again.’ There will be no cover up. We will respond quickly to accusations, improve governance structure, be more transparent and we will listen,” he said.

“We know that only actions not words can rebuild trust, and until trust is rebuilt all the apologies in the world will miss the mark.” ​</s>The Catholic church in Australia on Friday rejected laws forcing priests to report child abuse when they learn about it in the confessional, setting the stage for a showdown between the country’s biggest religion and the government.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC), the country’s top Catholic body, said it did not accept a recommendation from an official inquiry into church abuse which would force priests by law to report abuse to the police when they hear about it in confession.

One state and a territory in Australia have since introduced laws making it a crime for priests to fail to report abuse heard in the confessional, while the other five states and remaining territory have said they are considering their response.

“The Council … continues to support retention of the civil law protection for the seal of the confessional,” the ACBC said in a report published on Friday.

“Children will be less rather than more safe if mandatory reporting of confessions were required,” the report added.

Addressing reporters, ACBC President Mark Coleridge said the seal of confession was “a non-negotiable element of our religious life and embodies an understanding of the believer and God.”

WATCH: At least 11 Pennsylvania priests accused of sex abuse spent time in Canada

Last year, Australia completed a five-year government-appointed inquiry into child sex abuse in churches and other institutions, amid allegations worldwide that churches had protected pedophile priests by moving them from parish to parish.

The inquiry heard that seven percent of Catholic priests working in Australia between 1950 and 2010 had been accused of child sex crimes and that nearly 1,100 people had filed child sexual assault claims against the Anglican Church over 35 years.

READ MORE: Pope Francis apologizes for Catholic Church’s past ‘crimes’ in Ireland

The ACBC published its report two weeks after a former Australian archbishop became the most senior Catholic cleric in the world to be convicted of concealing abuse, and was ordered to serve a one-year prison sentence at home.

The convicted former archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, himself a former ACBC president, was found to have failed to report child abuse outside the confessional. He has said he will appeal the conviction.

WATCH: Accused American priests sent to Canada for treatment

Accusations of covering up abuse in the Catholic church have reverberated all the way to Pope Francis, who has been accused by a United States archbishop of knowing for years about sexual misconduct by an American cardinal and doing nothing about it.</s>The Australian investigation examined abuse in religious institutions, schools and other establishments, finding that many of the cases of suspected abuse involved Roman Catholic priests and religious brothers.

SYDNEY — Roman Catholic leaders in Australia on Friday rejected a government push to force priests to report accusations of child sexual abuse heard during confession, saying it would violate a sacred rite, infringe on religious freedom and do little to protect children.

The rebuke came as the local Roman Catholic Church issued a response to a five-year government inquiry uncovering what officials called a “national tragedy” of widespread sexual abuse of children spanning decades.

The investigation examined abuse in religious institutions, schools and other establishments, finding that many of the cases of suspected abuse involved Catholic priests and religious brothers.

Church officials sought to strike a largely conciliatory tone in their response, acknowledging the gravity of the church’s “colossal failures” to protect children and embracing the vast majority of the recommendations coming out of the inquiry. Archbishop Mark Coleridge, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, said Friday that the church’s leadership had made a pledge: “never again.”

Yet the church rejected the proposal to hold priests legally culpable for failing to tell authorities of acts of suspected abuse they hear about during confession. Laws that make a failure to report a criminal offense have already been introduced in some parts of the country.

“We believe the legislation abolishing priest privilege is based in fact on a lack of understanding of what actually happens in confession and tends to live in a purely hypothetical world,” Coleridge said at a news conference Friday.

“The bishops and leaders have the utmost respect for the law,” he added. “But we believe this proposed law is ill-conceived and impractical. It won’t make children safer and it will most likely undermine religious freedom.”

The response comes at a moment of extraordinary turmoil for the global church over its handling of widespread child sexual abuse reaching from the parish level to the highest tiers of the Catholic hierarchy.

The crisis flared last weekend when a former top Vatican diplomat urged Pope Francis to resign, accusing him of joining other leading officials in covering up abuse. It also follows a searing grand-jury report in Pennsylvania that found more than 1,000 identifiable victims of sexual abuse over several decades in local dioceses. That report was the broadest government examination in the United States into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

In 2012, Australia created a royal commission, the highest form of investigation in this country, to examine child sexual abuse across a range of institutions. The findings, released in December, revealed the country had been in the grips of an abuse epidemic that stretched over decades and involved more than 4,000 institutions.

Investigators identified 4,444 abuse victims and at least 1,880 suspected abusers from 1980 to 2015. The report said 62 percent of victims who said they were abused in a religious institution said the abuse took place in a Catholic facility.

Australians have been alarmed by revelations of sexual abuse in recent years, including a scandal in Ballarat, the hometown of Cardinal George Pell, one of the highest-ranking Catholic prelates to face trial for charges of historic sexual offenses. In that town, authorities said, a police officer investigating a pedophile ring at local Catholic schools found that as many as 30 abuse victims had killed themselves.

The commission issued 189 recommendations, including creating a National Office for Child Safety and calling on Australia’s Catholic leaders to press the Vatican to end mandatory celibacy for priests.

In its response Friday, the Australian Bishops Conference and Catholic Religious Australia issued a report in which it accepted nearly all the commission’s recommendations. Local church leaders said they would consult Vatican officials on the matter of celibacy and consider ways to modify religious life.

But the report took issue with the recommendations involving confession, including a proposal that children practice the rite only in an open space within the clear line of sight of another adult, and lifting the seal of confession to report abuse allegations.

Church officials said their objection to reporting abuse cases applied only to the confessional, where there is an expectation that conversations are shielded.</s>CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — The Catholic Church in Australia has rejected a recommendation by a government inquiry that priests be required to report evidence of child sex abuse disclosed in the confessional.

The recommendation that priests be prosecuted for failing to report evidence of pedophilia heard in the confessional was a key finding in December of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Australia's longest-running royal commission - which is the country's highest form of inquiry - had been investigating since 2012 how the Catholic Church and other institutions responded to sexual abuse of children in Australia over 90 years.

The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference President Archbishop Mark Coleridge said on Friday breaking the seal of the confessional would not make children safer.</s>Australia's Catholic leaders have vowed to end the cover-up of child sexual abuse but steadfastly refuse to break the seal of confession, even if it means priests could face criminal charges.

The leaders have vowed the Catholic Church's shameful history of priests and others in its ranks sexually abusing children will never be repeated.

They pledged accountability and a plan of action in response to a call for sweeping reforms issued by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

It will be up to Pope Francis and his advisers to act on many of the royal commission's far-reaching recommendations and its implications for centuries-old canon law.

The royal commission made 26 specific recommendations for Catholic Church reform, including that Australia’s bishops request the Holy See to change canon law and call child sexual abuse "crimes" rather than "sins" or "moral failings", and to introduce voluntary celibacy.</s>The Australian Catholic Bishops Conference has formally rejected a recommendation from the child sexual abuse royal commission that reports of abuse disclosed to priests during confession be reported to police.

Eight months after the landmark child abuse inquiry delivered its final report, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Catholic Religious Australia on Friday released a joint report in response to the dozens of recommendations applicable to Catholic institutions.

While it accepted 98% of recommendations, including writing to the Holy See in Rome urging it to make the selection criteria for employing bishops public, and asking the Holy See to consider making celibacy voluntary, it did not budge on the issue of breaking the seal of confession to compel adults to report abuse to authorities.

“As indicated, the council supported, and continues to support, retention of the civil law protection for the seal of the confessional,” the report said. “In relation to mandatory reporting, the council supported, and supports, the attainment of consistency across the jurisdictions and, subject to protection for the seal, the inclusion of persons in religious ministry in the class of mandatory reporters.”

As per the royal commission’s recommendations, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference had written to the Holy See, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic church in Rome, requesting canon law be amended to create a new series of canons specifically relating to child sexual abuse. It agreed “all delicts relating to child sexual abuse should be articulated as canonical crimes against the child, not as moral failings or as breaches of the ‘special obligation’ of clerics and religious to observe celibacy”.

It accepted “in principle” the recommendation to conduct a national review of the governance and management structures of dioceses and parishes, including in relation to issues of transparency and accountability.

But when the royal commission delivered the findings of its five-year inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse in December, many Catholic priests and archbishops rejected the recommendation that they break the seal of confession if they suspected abuse, with some saying they would rather go to jail.

Australian Catholic Bishops Conference president, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, said too many priests, brothers, sisters and lay people in Australia failed in their duty to protect and honour the dignity of children.

“Many bishops failed to listen, failed to believe, and failed to act,” he said.

“Those failures allowed some abusers to offend again and again, with tragic and sometimes fatal consequences. The bishops and leaders of religious orders pledge today: Never again.”

The royal commission heard that on countless occasions notorious paedophiles were moved by senior figures in the church between parishes, where they continued to abuse children. Sometimes offenders were sent overseas for religious education rather than reported to police.

“There will be no cover-up,” Coleridge said on Friday.

“There will be no transferring of people accused of abuse. There will be no

placing the reputation of the Church above the safety of children.”

The church has already begun to change a number of practices, including in the screening of those training to be priests or religious sisters and brothers.

Leonie Sheedy, who co-founded the Care Leavers Australasia Network to support those abused in out-of-home care, said she was pleased to see so many recommendations had been accepted. But she was disappointed that so many of the recommendations involved the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference having to write to the Holy See for approval.

“Why do they need permission from the Pope, a man from Argentina, for approval to implement the recommendations for the safety of Australian children?” she said.</s>The Catholic Church in Australia said on Friday that it would continue keeping confessions on child sex abuse secret, thereby rejecting one of the 409 recommendations made by a government commission investigating sexual abuse of children in the country.

A report by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and Catholic Religious Australia was published based on recommendations by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Dec. 2017.
Catholic bishops in Australia reject a recommendation from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that would force priests by law to report abuse to the police when they hear about it in confession.