By Matters India Reporter

New Delhi: India and Italy that share the bulk of Church-managed orphanages in the world face an impending wave of child sexual by clergy, warns a survey undertaken by two former Australian priests.

The report of the survey by Des Cahill and Peter Wilkinson was published on September 12, two days before the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India released its guidelines to deal with sexual abuse cases in Church institutions.

The 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.

It blames mandatory celibacy and a culture of secrecy created by Church authorities for the high rates of child abuse in the Catholic Church.

The extensive survey, published by the Centre for Global Research at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University, finds mandatory celibacy as the major risk factor for child sexual abuse.

The report, which studied the findings of 26 royal commissions and other inquiries from Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and the Netherlands since 1985, found that children remained at risk in Catholic parishes and schools and Catholic residential institutions across the world, especially in the developing world.

India accounts for 2,600 of the 9,500 orphanages that the Church manages in developing countries, the survey noted.

The report estimated about 7 percent of clergy had abused children between about 1950 and 2000.

The patriarchal nature of Catholic institutions meant that abuse went unchallenged. The abusers included a small number of nuns. The report also found the risk of offending was much higher in institutions where priests and religious brothers had minimal contact with women.

It also found the response of bishops to clerical abuse across the world had been “remarkably uniform.”

The survey report says 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.”

However, the problem was further exacerbated by “incomprehensible refusal to see that it was a systemic issue, not a collection of individual failures,” the report says.

The findings explore why the Catholic Church and its priests and religious brothers, more than any other religious denomination, have become synonymous with the historical sexual abuse of children.

Cahill, a priest in the Melbourne archdiocese in the 1970s and now Professor Emeritus of Intercultural Studies in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University, has assisted Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

“It has become an unholy mess,” he said. “It has always been an issue for the Church, not just in the 20th century.”

He told Guardian Australia his attention was drawn to the issue after the abuse first became public around 1978. “I knew some of the priest perpetrators and I studied with them and I lived with one of them. And yet I was never aware while I was in the Church. You have to understand, a priest offender is very secretive and doesn’t want to be found out,” he added.

Wilkinson, a Columban missionary priest in Australia and South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, helped found Melbourne-based group Catholics for Renewal six years ago.

The survey also examines the issue of confession. Last August, Australia’s child sex abuse royal commission called for clergy to face criminal charges for refusing to report child sexual abuse to police because the information was received during confession.

This triggered angry responses from bishops.

Cahill, who left priesthood to marry, said his report states that Pope Pius X’s 1910 decision to lower the age of first confession to seven years indirectly contributed to putting more children at risk; and that the Church has on several occasions in its history allowed the seal of confession to be broken.

Cahill believes that if a child told a priest in confession that they had been abused the priest had an obligation to report it and that doing so would not be breaking the sanctity of confession because the child had not sinned, and so reporting to police would not also be revealing any sin of the child.

But if a perpetrator confessed to abusing a child during confession, Cahill said it would be more practical for a priest to tell the perpetrator that they would not receive forgiveness until they allowed the priest to tell police, or confessed to police themselves.

Meanwhile in India, the Catholic bishops’ conference’s guidelines to deal with sexual harassment at workplace aim to create a safe, healthy and loving environment where employees of Church institutions can work without the fear of prejudice, bias and sexual harassment.

Although largely based on the national law — Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013 — the guidelines are “much broader and unique” as they are gender-inclusive. The Church wants to provide protection not only to its women folk but also men and transgender, said Bishop Jacob Barnabas of Gurgaon, chairperson CBCI Council for Women that prepared the document.

Bishop Barnabas said the bishops’ conference advocates zero tolerance toward acts of sexual violence and has requested the heads of Catholic institutions to implement the document with “as the will of the Lord Almighty and as coming from the ethos of the Holy Bible.”

The document provides “‎the process of handling cases of sexual harassment, if and when they occur and ‎also tries to safeguard people from false allegations. It also creates a ‎mechanism for prevention of any such form of harassment.”

Regarding the delay in bringing out the document, Bishop Barnabas said that it was a tedious process. “We consulted top level legal officials, including judges and senior advocates. Some of them were actively involved. High-level officials who were involved gave us the spirit to go ahead in making it gender inclusive. The gender inclusiveness took a lot of time as one had to be very careful in including this aspect.”