Rubbing up to the Archdiocese of Sydney

Had an interesting experience recently. As you know I am a survivor of clergy sexual abuse at around 8 years of age. I keep up to date on this through friends and online reading, as well I am a bit of an activist (one of the names given to people like me). I had subscribed to the catholic church XT3 site as their SPIN spoke of communication etc and I had been attempting to obtain a conversation with some authoritative part of the church for some time. Their email had come in regularly and at one point I set them to delete on arrival. Moving folders around in my email one day appears to have killed the filter and they began to appear in my Inbox yet again.

I had just recently spent a few hours with different people in simply talking with them as a means of supporting them through the crap they were experiencing in their dealings with the catholic church. One of those people was Angie who was being ostracized by the Healesville Catholic community because of her outspokenness after her son was molested by their local catholic priest. What had become particularly evident again that day was the fact that those who spoke out publicly got no support and of course their claims were minimized and belittled which happens so often to people when they get to speak out about current events of abuse by the church and its systems. Perhaps I should add a note to the Clergy Abuse Survivors Handbook that the more outspoken you are in regards the sexual abuse issue in the church the more problems you have with Carelink and the so called Independent Commission and the Commissioner as it seems the best deals are still done quietly and they are still wrapped up tightly in 'commercial in-confidence' agreements with people still able to go through the entire process and come out believing they have no right to speak out. It takes them a while to realize they have been bought off and bought off very cheaply.

It seems the agreement they have made also excludes them from being of interest to policing in Victoria. This comes from attempts to obtain a description or a copy of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that exists between the Victorian police and the Catholic church. When Victoria Police were asked I was told that they would be most unlikely to provide a copy of the MoU. Survivors are aware that these MoU's exist right across the world, they appear to be agreements between policing and the church about how they each can and do conduct investigations of sexual abuse when it involves Catholic clergy. These MoU's are a proxy for the catholic church's Canon Laws and they appear to be the favored mechanism for the injection of or the intermingling of church and civil law. It seems to be quite offensive that survivors of sexual abuse by catholic clergy can be the subject of an effectively secret agreement between state policing and the church.