Australia’s Catholic bishops are being urged to confront the church’s legacy of clerical abuse with a public act of remorse, following examples set in France and Peru.
Tracing clericalism from Pius X to today’s abuse crisis, Australia’s bishops are called to kneel publicly like their French and Peruvian counterparts, begging forgiveness and promising ‘never again’.
“… the Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.” – Pope Pius X, Vehementer Nos (1906)
Clericalism
Pius X’s 1906 letter was written to the French Catholic episcopate and clergy to address, among other matters, the ongoing damaging effects of rampant secularism in Europe.
The letter mixes the image of the Church as an innocent victim with a simmering resentment at its rejection by France, “the eldest daughter of the Church”. The pope stressed the divine institution of the Church and its hierarchical structure as superior to the social entities created by the state.
The now sainted French priest John Vianney (1786–1859), commonly known as the Curé of Ars, wrote in his Little Catechism that “after God, the priest is everything”. Everyone else, presumably, including the Catholic laity, was expected “to know their place” and quietly remain there.
Monsignor George Talbot (1816–1886), an influential aristocratic convert to Catholicism and clergyman, trumpeted a similar kind of elitism in a conversation with Archbishop of Westminster Henry Edward Manning (1808–1892):
“What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain? These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all, and this affair of Newman is a matter purely ecclesiastical…. Dr Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that he will make use of the laity against your Grace.”
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was, like Talbot, a convert from “High Church” Anglicanism. Newman became the subject of ridicule from clerics like Talbot for his insistence that, for a balanced understanding of the Church’s identity and mission, the laity must be treated as essential partners with the clergy.
What Newman found himself up against was the ecclesiastical version of the British class system: elitists obsessed with their divinely ordered status, who used the priesthood and its coded dialects as tools of separation, distance and mystification to keep people in their place. Today, this is called clericalism. It continues to infantilise the laity, to keep them frozen in a state of “clergy dependence” and, in effect, to diminish their baptismal dignity.
Pope Francis described clericalism as a “scourge”, a “toxic disease”, and “a perversion of the Church … (clericalism) forgets that the visibility and the sacramentality of the Church belong to all the people of God and not just to an illuminated and elected few… it is one of the greatest distortions affecting the Church”. Clericalism is a counter-sign to the Gospel and it throttles the Church’s universal mission.
It is now widely held that clericalism has been a key contributor to the catastrophe of clerical child sexual abuse (CCSA) and the subsequent cover-ups.
Clerical child sexual abuse
Norwegian Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim recently preached the 2026 Lenten retreat to Pope Leo’s Vatican household. In one of his meditations, Bishop Varden criticised bishops’ refusal to acknowledge that the Catholic Church faced a problem of systemic institutional failure on a massive scale. Varden was not talking about ‘a few rotten apples’.
“Nothing has done the Church more tragic harm, and compromised our witness more, than corruption arisen within our own house. The worst crisis of the Church has been brought on, not by secular opposition, but by ecclesiastical corruption.”
Australian Bishop Long Văn Nguyễn was keenly aware of the damage done to the people of God by Church leaders who failed in their pastoral obligations as a result of the CCSA scandal: “Instead of demonstrating that fundamental ethos of care for the victims, the Church has been shown to have cared primarily for its own security and interests. It is a shameful indictment not simply on the perpetrators and their enablers but the Church’s collective systemic betrayal of the Gospel.”
Many of the bishops have constantly complained that state and national politicians largely ignore them. They should have drawn some sobering conclusions from what Archbishop Mark Coleridge said in 2016: “I think we have to accept the fact that Christendom is over – by which I mean mass, civic Christianity. It’s over. Now, how do we deal with that fact? … We are not the power in the land which we once were.”
An even more ominous reality check for the bishops is that, as a result of the fallout from clerical child sexual abuse scandals and the history of episcopal cover-ups, few Catholics would have reason to take them seriously anymore.
It’s time
In his Lenten meditation on child abuse and the trails of disaster that have followed, Bishop Varden insisted: “The wounds inflicted will take time to heal. They call out for justice and for tears.”
For their part, the French bishops have knelt down, publicly acknowledged their “institutional responsibility” in the hundreds of thousands of clerical child abuse cases and demonstrated their profound collective remorse. On the evening of 25 May 2026, the cardinals and bishops of the Catholic Church in Peru also knelt down before a group of vulnerable people who had suffered decades of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of fellow Catholics.
The bishops publicly begged forgiveness from groups of peasant farmers for having failed to protect them from the now-suppressed ecclesial movement Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.
On day four of the First General Assembly of the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia in Sydney (3-9 July 2022), the members participated in a lament ritual, but it was held behind closed doors with no livestream. For most Australian Catholics, there is still unfinished business to which the bishops themselves must attend.
Now it is time for justice and tears from the Catholic bishops of Australia. It’s time for them to show that they are getting back on mission by making their own dramatic public gesture of remorse, lament and conversion. They should follow the example of their French and Peruvian colleagues by kneeling on the steps of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, begging forgiveness from victims and their families and promising: “Never again.”
Republished from Global Catholic
David Timbs is an occasional contributor to Pearls and Irritations.