NSW cops in bed with the Catholic Church

There's news from down under darlings, and if you're part of the Catholic Church the news is not good. It's also another wonderful example of the contribution religion has made to our society in recent times.

Overnight the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has put to air a bomb shell of a report. In it is revealed how for about ten years (up until 2003) the Catholic Church believed it had a "memorandum of understanding" with the NSW police; being that information wouldn't be provided to the police by the church unless the church was ordered to in a court order.

"Church authorities shall make available the report of an assessment and any other matter relevant to the accused's account of events only if required to do so by court order." more

The MOU wasn't even signed, and the police reckon it never existed (yeah right). But most importantly you are required by law to tell the police about serious crimes such as sexual abuse, making the MOU an illegal document. Of which the church was working under for those ten or so years. They just "assumed" that was how they were to deal with cases of abuse (yeah right).

GEOFFREY WATSON, BARRISTER: The point is that under our law, you must report it if you become aware of a serious criminal offence and you've got to give all the particulars of that. You've got to tell the police. When I looked at the MOUs, they were really in effect trying to get the police to condone the failure to comply with that law, or even perhaps worse, get the police to participate in it. more

But there's more. Turns out the cops drafted another MOU that was even worse:

STEVE CANNANE: In 2004 another agreement between the police and the Church was drafted, despite previous advice from police that it would breach the Crimes Act. If signed, this agreement would have given even more protection to accused clergy.

DAVID SHOEBRIDGE: And in that MOU, the Church wanted to effectively give the accused priest a veto power about whether or not to provide crucial information to the police. Utterly extraordinary when you think that that's less than a decade ago.

STEVE CANNANE: This agreement was prepared by NSW Police, but a police spokesman says it was never considered a workable document and never endorsed. more

That's just shocking. The police themselves drafted a document that would give veto power to a paedophile priest. Incredibly disturbing, and needless to say both the police and the church were operating outside the law.

So what was the result of the first MOU being used by the church for priest sex cases?

DAVID SHOEBRIDGE: We don't know how many sanitised complaints were made by the police under the terms of this MOU and we don't know the extent to which police were involved in that process for the better part of the decade. But it's likely that hundreds, if not more than that, cases were processed through this MOU and processed in a way that didn't protect victims, didn't assist the police in prosecuting for crimes, but protected the good name of the Church and effectively prevented the police from getting the key evidence to prosecute any accused priest. more

You can view the whole story at the link. 

Oh, and I don't want to hear from Christians that "We're not all like that". Where were those Christians when this was happening?