Catholic priests said they would rather go to jail than report child abuse

The Catholic has stated it is not willing to break the seal of confession even if pedophile priest confesses to abusing children according to reports.

Priests said they would rather go to jail than report pedophile priests who confess to raping children in order to the seal of confession fully intact.

South Australia has joined the ACT in moving forward with forcing Catholic priests by law to break the seal of confession when it comes to reporting pedophiles to the police. 

Now other states are considering whether or not to adopt the recommendation from the royal commission.

However, the Catholic church has fiercely rejected the idea, arguing priest should never break the seal of confession regardless of the crime.

“The state will be requiring us as Catholic priests to commit as what we regard as the most serious crime and I’m not willing to do that,” Father Whelan responded.

The New South Wales Government announced it would respond later this month in regard to whether priests being should be forced by law to report child abuse.

“I expect every jurisdiction in Australia now will follow that recommendation and I expect the church throughout will simply not observe it?” Father Whelan said.

According to ABC: Asked if the Catholic Church was above the law, he said: “Absolutely not, but when the state tries to intervene on our religious freedom, undermine the essence of what it means to be a Catholic, we will resist.”

“The only way they [the states] would be able to see whether the law was being observed or not is to try and entrap priests.”

Father Whelan said he was “willing to go to jail” rather than abide by a law.

An alternative, if a priest hears a paedophile confess sins of child sexual abuse, would be to “stop them immediately”, says Father Whelan.

“I would say, ‘Come with me now, we will go down to the police station in order for you to show that you are remorseful’,” he said.

NSW Labor senator Kristina Keneally, who is a scholar of theology and a Catholic, said church could not put itself above the law, but mandatory reporting was not the most effective way to prevent abuse.

“I would look to ordination itself, I would look to who we ordain,” she said.

“I have no doubt that if more women and more parents were involved in the leadership of their Catholic Church, that the problem of child sexual abuse would not have been as big as it was and would have been dealt with far different when it came to light within the institution.”

Recently, Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of three Chilean bishops all accused of ‘covering up’ for pedophile priest in the 1980s and 1990s, according to BBC reports.

All of the Roman Catholic bishops in Chile have now offered their resignations, but the Pope has only accepted three of the 34 was announced today.

The resignations come from the following Bishops:

Archbishop Cristián Caro Cordero of Puerto MonttBishop

Gonzalo Duarte García de Cortázar of ValparaísoBishop

Barros of Osorno

In January, Pope Francis apologized to the child victims of Chile’s pedophile priests stating he “deeply regrets” the sex abuse against children in the country.

Activists protesting the Pontiff visit to Chile described him as “satanic” before burning at least nine churches.