Part two of a two part article
Current Situation in New Zealand
Evidence before the Commission suggests that the situation for Catholic Church victims and survivors in New Zealand today may be more precarious than when Church leaders in the United States began to publicly deal with clergy child sex abuse cases after the Boston Globe’s investigative team Spotlight exposed the scandal of abuse and coverup in Boston Archdiocese in 2002. Back then, lawyers acting for Catholic bishops would deal with complaints through a private mediation between the bishop and the victim or victim’s family.[1] Settlements typically occurred by acknowledging the abuse. An apology was given, and a sum of money extended to the victim. A confidentiality agreement was signed, and this was all kept secret.
While this kind of response does not take place today, current practice by Catholic Church authorities in New Zealand may be more nefarious than earlier forms of coverup because of its profound deception and exploitation of already vulnerable people. Alarming is the fact that APTH appears to comprise a form of a confidentiality agreement. On the one hand, Catholic bishops and congregational leaders as signatories to APTH agreed to waive all relevant confidentiality regarding settlements relating to abuse claims with a Catholic bishop, diocese, congregation, or congregational leader.[2] However, on the other hand, Form 1 of APTH, the Complainant’s consent form, under the title of Confidentiality requires the complaints to sign the following statement:
I should keep the complaint and any reports or decisions from the Independent Investigator, the National Office for Professional Standards, the Complaints Assessment Committee, and any Review Officer as confidential as possible. I am able to share information with support people such as my lawyer, my counsellor, my doctor, and family and friends who are supporting me. I will let them know that they should keep this information confidential.[3]
Therefore, while Catholic Church leaders in New Zealand claim not to require confidentiality the signing of this consent form entails confidentiality.
Based on the evidence at hand, considerable dissonance exists today between what APTH states and how NOPS has been operating. At the end of what has been consistently reported by complainants as a distressing in-house redress process, a secretive CAC routinely rejects the complaint on grounds of insufficient evidence.[4] The relevant church authority then concurs with the CAC’s decision and notifies survivors via a letter stating that their complaint cannot be upheld. As a result, there is no acknowledgement of wrongdoing, no apology, and no compensation. Consequently, from the survivors’ viewpoint and surely from the viewpoint of any person of goodwill, there is no justice and, therefore, certainly no healing.
Healing cannot occur when there is not an admission of wrongdoing. As previously mentioned, for healing to occur, the minimal requirement would be to acknowledge the harm caused. However, according to testimony presented at Royal Commission hearings and elsewhere, survivors have been left without a compassionate and fair response to their reported traumas. Their complaints are not being upheld in concrete cases. This is occurring despite the same church officials telling the public they are “listening to survivors” and “providing a compassion response.”[5]
Egan-Bitran concluded that “while structures, policies, procedures, and resources may be in place, significant issues within the New Zealand Catholic institutional culture and practices are creating barriers and in fact can perpetuate violence.[6] She identified the following factors as hindering an adequate response: A predominantly institutional-focused response; inadequate training and supervision of clergy; patriarchal structures and culture; Structural Inequalities Which Exacerbate Coercive Control; unsafe, ad hoc and ill-informed Leadership, including governance and management; a general lack of understanding interpersonal violence, and a need for “more inclusive courageous and consistent leadership and governance to drive the development of a safeguarding culture within its religious entities and congregations.”[7]
How APTH would equate to obtaining justice as required by such standards as the European Union’s Victims’ Rights Directive is not clear.[8] That directive establishes minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime and ensures they are recognised and treated with respect. The denial of a victim’s disclosure would not be respectful. In fact, another form of violence is done by the failure to provide the fair and compassionate response promised in APTH, namely, mental, and psychological violence. Consequently, in March 2023 a police report was lodged against the New Zealand Catholic bishops and a member of the Congregational Leaders Conference alleging that the APTH process contained elements of criminality.[9] According to New Zealand’s legal requirements, all New Zealanders have the right to live free from violence.[10]
At the Royal Commission’s Phase 2 Redress Hearing in March 2021, survivors were offered a formal apology from the New Zealand Catholic Church. The apology was renewed at the Faith-Based Institutional Response Hearing, 13-21 October 2022, the last public hearing of the New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. However, such public apologies have been seen by survivors and advocates as insincere.[11] Rocío Figueroa Alvear, an abuse survivor and Catholic theologian who has undertaken extensive research into sexual harm in the Catholic Church, reported in 2022 that “the Catholic Church needs deep renewal if its abuse apologies are to mean anything.”[12] In her critique of the New Zealand Catholic Church’s response, Figueroa stated that “churches have not felt responsible and have not contributed to the process of renewal and healing – and in many cases, victims have not been heard, nor offered justice or reparation.”[13] In closing statements presented at the October 2022 hearing, survivors claimed that personal apologies had still not been received. “We ask, where are the personal apologies today? In some churches, our members continue to have their complaints denied without any acknowledgement of wrongdoing.”[14] To publicly apologise for abuse while denying cases of abuse behind closed doors has been seen as an unsafe practice. “Such denial of actual wrongdoing not only brings the institution into further disrepute, but it also keeps the people unsafe.”[15]
As a result, the perception of a pattern of further concealment and the minimization of abuse taking place out of public view has surfaced. Matthew Epsom, columnist for The Gisborne Herald, pointed out that the production of APTH and subsequent failure or refusal to follow its principles and procedures resulting in the denial of survivor complaints has been interpreted as a coverup.[16] Epsom underscored the idea that Catholic Church leaders in New Zealand were using their national redress scheme to foil complaints:
But if the desired effect of that philosophy was to trick the public by giving a false impression that church hierarchs were being responsible when they were not, then that goal may have succeeded. However, crafting guidelines to address complaints and then deliberately ignoring those guidelines would hardly be an honourable modus operandi.[17]
Epsom equated such a response with the Catholic Church’s “playbook for concealing the truth” as detailed by investigators in the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report.[18] He indicated this view when asking publicly if the Commission would “unearth the fact that the agencies set up by the Catholic Church in Aotearoa New Zealand to address the handling of abuse complaints, instead further bury complaints?”[19]
On the final day of the Faith-Based Institutional Response Hearing, 21 October 2022, counsel assisting the Commission raised concerns about the lack of an audit for NOPS and its APTH process. The reason provided for why an audit had not been performed was “big money.”[20] However, the availability of considerable funds paid by the Auckland Diocese for a stipend and legal representation for the abusive priest Sateki Raass was questioned when no funds were available to audit NOPS.[21] Therefore, to hear that cost was more important than effective and independently audited redress for survivors was viewed by survivor networks and advocates as disingenuous.[22] The New Zealand Catholic Church has significant land holdings, assets, and substantial cash benefactors.[23]
Also, at the Hearing, the activities of the committee that oversees the work of NOPS, the National Safeguarding and Professional Standards Committee (NSPSC) and the Complaints Assessment Committee, which makes recommendations to the church authority, both appointed by the bishops and congregational leaders to implement APTH were questioned.[24] In response to cross-examination, Church Counsel stated that the identities of NSPSC members were not secret. However, no information is publicly available, and survivors have not been allowed to know who sits on this Committee or who was making recommendations to the church authority that complaints not be upheld. All this despite repeated calls from Pope Francis to be open and transparent in dealing with victims’ and survivors’ complaints.[25] Therefore, internal reviews can never be credible when individuals responsible for APTH’s application do not comply with its principles and procedures.
Added to the current situation was a recent attempt by survivors to reach out directly to Church authorities. In August 2022, a letter was sent from a survivor network and advocates to the New Zealand Catholic Bishops Conference requesting the bishops to “take immediate action to establish an urgent, independent, and transparent review of the administration and handling of APTH complaints by NOPS.” The letter alleged that there had been “no legitimate healing process for survivors in the New Zealand Catholic Church,” and that NOPS and the safeguarding procedures instituted by the New Zealand Catholic Church were “not properly functioning; that the administration of APTH is not focused on the healing needs of survivor members of the Catholic Church; that APTH has been distorted, and a prejudicial APTH administration is inflicting further trauma and suffering on the most vulnerable in need of support, to have any hope of healing their lives.”[26] The reply from John Dew as President of the NZCBC overlooked the action request and instead claimed that the New Zealand Catholic bishops had “undertaken changes to NOPS and APTH and changes will be ongoing.”[27] The letter did not indicate what those changes were.
After a second letter to the NZCBC was passed over, in September 2022, survivors appealed to Pope Francis in a letter informing the Pope that survivors were being “harmed by the very Church office set up to provide healing.”[28] They claimed that Catholic Church authorities were mishandling the redress process and retraumatising them. The letter stated that “on the one hand, publicly, the leaders of the local Church extend an ‘open hand to the hope of healing,’ on the other, behind closed doors, they traumatize victims and survivors a second time by violating their own policies and procedures.”[29] The letter asked that Pope Francis intervene to compel the New Zealand Catholic Bishops and Congregational Leaders “to initiate an urgent, independent and transparent review of NOPS and APTH without further excuse or pretext.”[30]
The courtesy of an acknowledgement or response was not received. Therefore, an Open Letter was sent to Pope Francis on March 27th, 2023, informing how the situation has worsened due to continued denials of victims and survival complaints in a process that remained in the strictest secrecy, and that “in the New Zealand Catholic Church victims and survivors remain without justice. Abusers remain in ministry. Children remain at risk and your Church continues to be brought into disrepute by such an unjust system.”[31] This letter was also not acknowledged. A second Open Letter sent from survivors to Pope Francis on June 3rd, 2023, alleged that APTH was being used to deliberately foil and dismiss legitimate survivor complaints through a circuitous and secretive process. Addressing the Pope, survivors claimed that:
victims who survived such grievous assaults and other offences perpetrated by your bishops, priests and religious brothers and nuns in New Zealand are being re-abused by the internal mechanisms of your Church entities in New Zealand, whose leaders stand as both the principal accused offenders, and the sole judges, jury and executioners in assessing those allegations and deciding the outcomes for survivors.[32]
To date none of the letters from survivors in New Zealand to Pope Francis have received an acknowledgement or response.
According to the criteria by which the community is now expected to judge the resolve of church leaders to have “fairly and compassionately” addressed the crimes of clerical child sexual abuse, evidence indicates a fundamental failure to respect the basic principles of APTH and follow the procedures founded on those principles. They have, therefore, failed according to their own criteria. This failure strengthens the idea that victims and survivors of clerical sexual abuse should not look to churches for justice. A pertinent question for public consideration remains why Church leaders would establish principles and procedures to deal with complaints concerning an issue so serious as the sexual abuse of children and others by priests and religious, then deliberately not follow those principles and procedures.
While the aforementioned demonstrates what survivors have testified, other examples of violating APTH are available in the media and elsewhere. Marine Lourens for Stuff reported on how faith-based institutions have “acted to protect their own reputations.”[33] Michael Hall for RNZ reported on “an ‘incapable’ Church body.”[34] Andrew McRae, also for RNZ, reported on the claim that Catholic Church leaders in New Zealand were denying natural justice to survivors by keeping some of its redress process secret.[35] How a secretive process of denial equates to access to justice as required by the EU Victims’ Rights Directive is also un clear. Praveen Menon, investigative correspondent for Reuters reported on the call made by survivors in New Zealand asking Pope Francis to intervene in the redress process.[36]
Based on aforementioned evidence provided to the Commission, and the Commission’s FRPT report, it appears that an inadequate and ineffective response to complaints of sexual abuse and sexual misconduct against clergy or religious in the Catholic Church in Aotearoa New Zealand has resulted.
Moving Forward
In order for true healing to occur it seems Catholic Church leaders in New Zealand need to change strategy. A policy of itself cannot produce change. Only people can bring about change. Egan-Bitran’s field research participant explained, “We can have the best-looking policy in the world, but … we have to keep reminding people though that it’s not about the piece of paper, that’s not what’s going to look after our kids, it is the people, so while we can have the framework, we are relying on our people to do it…”[37]Therefore, the right people would be needed.
As the Royal Commission prepares its final report due out by March 28, 2024, in the expectation that the Government will implement its recommendations, the hope of true healing will be the attainment of justice and restoration through an authentic redress process managed by an independent statutory body. This expectation was outlined in the Commission’s Interim Report on redress, He kaupapa Motuhake—An independent scheme.[38] The Commission noted that “such a scheme, being governed by legislation, would have defined rules and transparent outcomes,” it would “ensure there is consistency and equity in the outcomes for survivors,” it would be “survivor-focused, trauma-informed, accessible to all survivors, properly resourced, properly independent,” and most importantly, it would “avoid the need for survivors to approach the organisations they distrusted.”[39]
An independent scheme “would also eliminate the inherent conflict of interest these organisations face in investigating themselves.”[40] Victims and survivors who undertook APTH have had their complaints denied by church authorities accused of what they were denying.[41] It seems reasonable to accept that the institution responsible for the abuse cannot be the legitimate agency to grant redress to victims and survivors who suffered abuse on account of the institutions systems and culture. Similarly, It seems self-evident that the accused may not sit as arbitrators of justice in a process in which they are also accused. Thus, the dire need for the independent body so that authentic redress and true healing can be attained.
Notwithstanding this new body, there would still remain a need for church leaders to change their strategy in order for a real sense of justice and healing to occur within their organisation. Only when the systems and culture that caused the abuse in the first place are identified and the needed changes made by those in authority, will the results be different. Until then, the situation cannot change itself. Therefore, the longer church leaders delay in administering an authentic healing process for their abused members and fail to make the changes needed in the system and cultures that continue to enable the abuse, then the more harm will be caused to the Church itself as an institution and to its members. Piotr Studnicki, a Polish Catholic priest, stated in response to the case of the Polish Church’s recent reckoning over clerical sexual abuse, “either we take an honest approach... or it will simply destroy us.”[42] Studnicki added that this would not be because the issue is being talked about publicly, “but simply because evil is being tolerated in our community.”[43] John Dew, Catholic Archbishop of Wellington (2005-2023) gave a similar critique, “the systems and culture of the Church allowed abuse to occur […that] these systems and culture failed [victims] and must change.”[44]
A denial of natural justice can result when an institution is a party in its own cause.The misperception is to think that protecting the institution is primary. However, institutions are harmed when their members are mistreated.[45] William Edwards Deming, American engineer, recognised that “a system cannot understand itself. Understanding comes from outside.”[46] Similarly, Kurt Gödel, Austrian logician demonstrated how a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.[47] Since the Catholic Church as an institution has foregone several opportunities to change the systems and culture that allowed abuse o accuse, but rather than change, time after time their officials chose to deny the abuse and to coverup and shield the very perpetrators of the sex crimes that they then failed to thoroughly investigate. It stands to reason, therefore, that those in current leadership positions responsible for such failures, would not be involved in further redress.
The Light of the World
The title used by Pope Francis for his procedural rules “Vos Estis Lux Mundi” (You are the light of the world), a document to ensure bishops and congregational leaders are held to account for failing to report abuse, continues: “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.”[48] In effect, APTH signatories lit a lamp by publishing an objectively robust redress protocol. However, they have placed it under a bowl by enabling the non-performance of its enactors. Egan-Bitran noted that “while institutional goals and statements on preventing and addressing interpersonal violence exist, institutional systems behaviour does not align.”[49] Also, victims and survivor advocates reported to the Royal Commission that “none of this [redress] will ever be helpful to survivors, when what is written in policy, and what is practised, are two entirely different things.”[50] As reported in SNAP’s closing statement to the Royal Commission,
We are talking about child sexual abuse in religious communities and institutional abuse and its cover-up, past and present. This needs to stop and the people who enabled this need to be held to account and the mechanisms that caused this need to be dismantled and the victims and the survivors that suffered this need to be properly compensated.[51]
Writing policy then ignoring the principles and procedures of that policy in application is not helpful to achieve the intended outcomes. There is a risk that the creation of such policy itself may be seen as a form of cover up as Epsom construed.[52] Such a practice risks perverting the course of justice by contravening the core values established in APTH. An alternative approach would be to restore the effectiveness of the Church’s authentic mission by providing genuine survivor-centric healing. Those who provide true healing are like those who light a lamp and place it on a lampstand to give light to everyone in the household.
However, despite promises made, victims’ rights are being harmed again in the APTH process. The ultimate harm is a denial of justice. The Victims’ Rights Directive of the European Union establishes minimum standards on the rights, supports, and protection of victims of crime to ensure that persons who have fallen victim to crime are recognized and treated with respect. For example, survivors of clerical sexual abuse seeking justice through redress in the Catholic Church of New Zealand must receive proper protection, support, and access to justice. It is evident that victims who undertake the APTH process are not receiving the treatment ensured by such directives as the European Commissions’ Victims’ Rights Directive. Otherwise, they would be able to intervene in their own process which would have been explained to them by an advocate. They would have had the right to a victim’s assistance coordinator who would have clearly explained their rights to redress for damages, receive up-to-date information, obtain justice quickly, be fully informed about what was said about them, able to see all the evidence, be told about their rights to correct information, helped to nominate witnesses, told who is deciding their case, and be protected from intimidation or retaliation and further harm during the investigation process.
Instead, abuse survivors in the APTH process have become victims of that very process by being denied these fundamental rights. According to the evidence, they have not received the minimum respectful treatment and recognition as victims because their complaints have not been upheld. Since their complaints have not upheld, they have not received compensation, therefore, they have been denied the justice due from the relative church authority, whether through financial damages paid by the bishop or congregational leader, or by the offender, or through mediation or another form of restorative justice, therefore there is no healing.
The initial response to a survivor’s disclosure is always crucial. Christopher Anderson, Executive Director of Male Survivor USA, explained how the initial responsecan have a profound impact on his or her chances for recovery.[53] For healing, the minimal requirement as the outcome of APTH would be an acknowledgement of wrongdoing. When there is no admission of wrongdoing, then there can be no justice, and when there is no justice, there can be no healing.[54]
The groundwork to shine the light of truth in action and meet the above needs, treat all victims with compassion would provide the justice due, take responsibly for the past and commit to ensuring that abuse never happens again, or when it does, that those responsible are held to account. This would involve, as Francis Sullivan, former CEO of the Truth, Justice, and Healing Council set up by the Catholic Church in Australia to coordinate a response to the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, reported, “drawing our leaders back to what is meant to be our inspiration, which is a gospel story.”[55]
Conclusion
The New Zealand Catholic Church’s response to complaints of historical clerical child sexual abuse has been the production of a redress document titled A Path To Healing/Te Houhanga Rongo. This document was published to set out the principles forming the basis of the Catholic Church in New Zealand’s response to complaints of sexual abuse. It also described the structures to be put in place and procedure to followed in responding to allegations of sexual abuse.
Survivor evidence before the Commission demonstrated that NOPS and the Church’s response to date has demonstrated the denial of wrongdoing in concrete cases of abuse, the shielding of perpetrators, the protection of institutional reputation and financial assets, the isolation and disbelief of complainants, the demonization of whistle-blowers, and concerted efforts to trivialize complaints and understate the scale of reporting. Much of this also reported in FRPT.[56]
This paper has critically evaluated how effective the implementation of APTH has been in light of its own principles and procedures based on the testimonies of its beneficiaries. It has ascertained that publishing a protocol is quite different from resolving complaints. What has been presented here has evidenced that the Catholic Church in New Zealand, through its bishops and congregational leaders, and their agencies, in particular NOPS, have failed to fulfil, and are not fulfilling, their obligations under their own redress scheme. The New Zealand Catholic bishops and congregational leaders have crafted a redress scheme that gives the impression that they are responding appropriately when in effect they are not. Based on the evidence provided throughout this paper, all of which is independently verifiable, not only have they failed to be transparent regarding their operations by any stretch of the imagination, but they appear to have devised, particularly through the secret operations of their Complaints Assessment Committee and National Safeguarding and Professional Standards Committee, and through the circuitous operations of their National Office for Professional Standards, a new and devious scheme of denial and concealment. The overall maladministration of APTH is enabling the continuation of coverup and the shielding of accused priests in what may be the world’s most covert strategy to cover up clerical and religious sexual abuse.
The non-compliance with APTH principles and procedures by the New Zealand Catholic Bishops and Congregational Leaders, thereby also with their own safeguarding guidelines, has caused further harm to victims and survivors, rendering the New Zealand Catholic Church’s healing mission as ineffective, and leaving all its members at risk of ongoing harm because “when church leaders do not acknowledge actual wrongdoing in cases of abuse, and fail to provide real justice to their survivors, then they keep an unsafe church.”[57] The APTH process, to date, has been largely experienced as more harmful than the absence of redress in other churches. Effectively the signatories of APTH, namely, the New Zealand Catholic Bishops and Congregational Leaders have allowed its enactors, namely, the director of the National Office for Professional Standards, and the members of the National Safeguarding & Professional Standards Committee and Complaints Assessment Committee, to extinguish any light the process could and should have provided.
Christopher Longhurst is a lay Catholic theologian based in Aotearoa New Zealand. He holds a Doctorate in Theology summa cum laude from the Pontifical Angelicum University in Rome, Italy. He currently lectures at Te Kupenga Catholic Theological College of Aotearoa New Zealand. He was a core participant in the New Zealand Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-based Institutions. He is the National Leader of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the world’s largest, oldest and most active support group for women and men wounded by religious and institutional authorities. Chris is also a fellow of the International Dialogue Centre KAICIID (King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue).
[1] The Boston Globe, “Church allowed abuse by priest for years,” 6 January 2002. Part 1 of 2, 2002.
[2] Te Rōpū Tautoko, Catholic Dioceses, Bishops, Congregations, Congregational Leaders Confidentiality Waiver, https://tautoko.catholic.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/CATHOLIC-ENTITY-CONFIDENTIALITY-WAIVER.pdf.
[3] APTH, 2020, 20.
[4] See RC Witness Statement WITN0377001, 2021, 33–35. Based on reports from SNAP Aotearoa New Zealand members, most cases are not upheld. However, statistical analysis remains incomplete at this time and difficult to make due to the nondisclosure of other possible survivor complaints’ results held by NOPS.
[5] New Zealand Catholic Church, “Catholic Church will listen to learn from abuse survivors,”
30 Nov 2020, https://www.catholic.org.nz/news/media-releases/church-will-listen-to-survivors/. See also Andrew McRae, 2023.
[6] Egan-Bitran, “The Gremlin of Silence,” 111.
[7] Egan-Bitran, “The Gremlin of Silence,” 111.
[8] Directive 2012/29/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2012 establishing minimum standards on the rights, support, and protection of victims of crime, and replacing Council Framework Decision 2001/220/JHA, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1421925131614&uri=CELEX:32012L0029.
[9] New Zealand Police File 230323/6853. See also McRae, 2023.
[10] Legislation underpins human rights in New Zealand, for example, The Crimes Act (Revised 2012) provides for strengthened protection and accountability for the care of children and vulnerable adults; The Human Rights Act (1993) legislates against discrimination and sexual harassment, The Family Violence Act (2018) aims to prevent and stop family violence.
[11] See RNZ, “Catholic Church formally apologises to survivors of abuse,” 26 March 2021, https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/439211/catholic-church-formally-apologises-to-survivors-of-abuse
[12] R. Figueroa Alvear, “The Catholic Church needs deep renewal if its abuse apologies are to mean anything,” Stuff, 22 October 2022, https://www.stuff.co.nz/opinion/300717965/the-catholic-church-needs-deep-renewal-if-its-abuse-apologies-are-to-mean-anything
[13] Figueroa Alvear, “The Catholic Church needs deep renewal.”
[14] FBIRH, Closing Statement of SNAP Aotearoa, 21 October 2022.
[15] Longhurst, “Safeguarding People before Institutions.”
[16] Epsom, “Covering up the coverups.”
[17] Epsom, “Covering up the coverups.”
[18] Epsom, “Covering up the coverups” and the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, 2018, 3.
[19] Epsom, “Abuse inquiry: we all know the outcome.” The Gisborne Herald, 10 January 2021.
[20] See evidence of Paul Flanagan, Faith-based Institutions Response Hearing, 17 October 2022, https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/our-inquiries/faith-based-institutions-response-hearing/
[21] FBIRH, Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care Closing Statement of SNAP, 21 October 2022, 26, https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/our-inquiries/faith-based-institutions-response-hearing/
[22] FBIRH, Closing Statement, 25.
[23] FBIRH, Closing Statement, 25.
[24] See, Katherine Anderson, Counsel Assisting, Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, FBIRH, 21 October 2022, https://www.abuseincare.org.nz/our-inquiries/faith-based-institutions-response-hearing/
[25] Nicole Winfield, “Pope warns of lost trust without more abuse accountability, AP, 30 April 2022, https://apnews.com/article/pope-francis-europe-religion-sexual-abuse-by-clergy-73540b1b8df34a79e0bf1fe51c04c005.
[26] SNAP, “Letter to NZCBC,” 10 August 2022. Private files of SNAP Aotearoa New Zealand Trust. Available upon request.
[27] See exhibit WITN0237017 of RC Witness Statement WITN0237001.
[28] SNAP, “Letter to Pope Francis,” 2 September 2022. Private files of the SNAP Aotearoa Trust, and also published at https://retelabuso.org/2023/03/27/lettera-aperta-a-papa-francesco/.
[29] SNAP, “Letter to Pope Francis.” 2022.
[30] SNAP, “Letter to Pope Francis,” 2022.
[31] SNAP, Open Letter to Pope Francis, 27 March 2023, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL2303/S00053/open-letter-to-pope-francis-from-survivors-of-clergy-and-religious-child-sexual-abuse-in-the-catholic-church.htm.
[32] SNAP, Second Open Letter to Pope Francis, 7 June 2023, https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK2306/S00145/2nd-open-letter-to-pope-francis-from-survivors-of-clergy-religious-child-sexual-abuse-in-the-nz-catholic-church.htm.
[33] Lourens, 2021.
[34] Hall, 2018.
[35] McRae, 2023.
[36] Menon, 2022.
[37] Egan-Bitran, “The Gremlin of Silence,” 102–3.
[38] FRPT, 2021, 276.
[39] FRPT, 2021.
[40] FRPT, 2021, 276.
[41] See RC Witness Statement WITN0237001 exhibits WITN0237011 and WITN0237012, and private records of SNAP.
[42] P. Studnicki, “Polish Church faces reckoning over sex abuse,” 2020.
[43] Studnicki, 2020.
[44] RC, Faith-based redress hearing—Phase 2, March 2021.
[45] See Longhurst, “Safeguarding People before Institutions.”
[46] T. Stevens, “Interview with William Edwards Deming,” 1994.
[47] R. M. Smullyan, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[48] Matthew 5:14–16. New International Version, Zondervan Publishing House, 1984.
[49] Egan-Bitran, “The Gremlin of Silence,” 111.
[50] SNAP, Closing Statement 2020, 14.
[51] SNAP, Closing Statement, 2020, 14.
[52] Epsom, “Covering up the coverups.”
[53] See National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse, Op-Ed by Christopher M. Anderson: “Compassionate support can improve healing for survivors of abuse,” 9 February 2015, http://www.naasca.org/2015-Articles/022715-CompassionateSupport4Survivors.htm.
[54] C. Longhurst, “Safeguarding People before Institutions,” Tui Motu (August 2023): 14–15.
[55] Francis Sullivan, “Catholics must take responsibility for the past, says Francis Sullivan—video,” The Guardian, 15 December 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/video/2017/dec/15/catholics-must-take-responsibility-for-the-past-says-francis-sullivan-video
[56] FRPT, 2021, vol. 1, 172–180.
[57] Longhurst, “Safeguarding People before Institutions.”