An extensive survey by two former Australian priests says mandatory celibacy has been and remains the major risk factor for child sexual abuse and warns of an impending wave of abuse cases in India and Italy, which have a significant proportion of the Church’s remaining 9500 orphanages.

Professor Des Cahill and Dr Peter Wilkinson, in their 384-page survey entitled ‘Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretive Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports’, also found that a lack of the feminine and the denigration of women within Church structures was one key, underlying risk factor in abuse.

The survey, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, found that the response of bishops to clerical abuse across the world had been “remarkably uniform”.

“The bishops worked strenuously to keep the problem of clerical child sexual abuse in-house in order to protect the Church’s reputation and its financial assets, hoping that the problem would eventually go away,” it said. “The problem was further exacerbated by an almost incomprehensible refusal to see that it was a […]