Posted By Bernard Gaynor on Monday, June 18, 2018 3:25 pm | 6 comments

So the South Australian government now requires priests to break the seal of confessional. The Australian Capital Territory is going to follow suit. And the other states and territories are being peer-group pressured to do so as well.

Let me be very clear: these laws will not stop child sexual abuse. They will only result in the framing of innocent priests.

There will only be two groups of informants when it comes to allegations that priests have not obeyed the law: convicted paedophiles who maliciously and cowardly seek to take others down with them for a reduced penalty and vexatious activists who simply hate the Catholic Church.

Let’s look at the first type: the convicted paedophile.

Brother Bloggs has been caught abusing children. During the investigations he realises that the gig is up and he is going to down. So he enters into a deal with prosecutors.

Bloggs will reveal all, plead guilty and in return the prosecutors will not seek the maximum sentence.

Bloggs decides that it will help him if he claims that he confessed to Father Smith that he was a paedophile. He gives a bogus statement that it was in the confessional at Our Lady’s Cathedral on 10 October during morning Mass.

Bloggs lies that Father Smith gave him three Hail Marys and sent him on his way. And then he sobs to prosecutors that he desperately wanted help and not only did Smith fail to inform the authorities, he failed to provide any to Bloggs either.

So Bloggs’ crimes continued. But this time it was not his fault but Father Smith who is to blame.

Bloggs goes on to tell the authorities that he confessed to Father Smith again on 17 November and 23 December.

The police call Father Smith in for questioning.

And Father Smith does what all good Catholic priests would: he refuses to make any comment about who confessed to him and what the confession entailed.

On the one hand, you have a paedophile with dates and times, albeit entirely fictional. And on the other hand you have a priest refusing to say anything at all.

It will be up to the courts to decide which witness is more reliable. So good luck to Father Smith who provides no evidence at all. He, almost certainly, will be hit with charges and found guilty.

In case one, the only effect of these laws will be to help actual child abusers receive lower sentences in return for their making false complaints against others who will refuse to contest the evidence.

Well done South Australia.

The second group of complainants will be vexatious activists.

Johnny Hates Catholics is a rainbow-waving homosexual. His mate, Liberty Lawfare, prides himself on hating Catholics more and waving his rainbows higher.

They come up with a plan to highlight how hateful Catholics are.

Johnny rocks up to the cathedral and takes a selfie outside the front door and another in the confessional line. Liberty does the same. Then, one after the other, the go in and confess. They confess in great detail.

Johnny gives a name. He gives an address. He gives an email account.

And he gives the names, dates, locations and times of ‘offences’ against his victims. And he goes on to state that he is planning to do it all again and is just letting Father Smith know because Father Smith won’t do anything about it.

Father Smith refuses absolution and tells Johnny to get the hell out of the confessional.

The confession of paedophilia, of course, is entirely fictional. But when it comes to South Australia’s new laws regulating the Catholic confessional that is also entirely irrelevant.

All that matters is that the priest, upon hearing this information, must report it to the authorities. It makes no difference whether the information is true or false. It will be up to the state to determine that in an investigation.

Johnny Hates Catholics leaves the confessional and is replaced by Liberty Lawfare. He goes on to provide exactly the same information.

They then wait a week before heading off to visit the local constabulary.

There they tell the coppers that Father Smith has not reported information relating to suspected child abuse.

How do they know?

Well, they’ve got two eye-witness accounts, along with photos of the exact time and location of the confessional.

The police immediately grasp that the actual confession was bogus. But they also grasp that, according to the law, this is not the point.

The point is that Father Smith was obligated to report the confession to the authorities and he did not. More importantly, when he is questioned (probably by a Gay Liaison Police Officer) he refuses to disclose the information that he was provided.

And that is a crime.

Now it is true that South Australia’s laws allow for vexatious complaints to be dismissed. But a lot hinges on the legal definition of ‘vexatious’. Both examples above are clearly vexatious but the first will never be dismissed as being vexatious.

The second example may seem vexatious to an ordinary person, but the law will look at whether there was any merit to the complaint. And, according to the law, there is merit: the law says information must be reported and it was not.

So the complaint might be vexatious in the sense that the whole thing was a set up. But it was not vexatious legally because there is clear evidence that a crime was committed.

And for those who think to themselves that surely our legal system would not allow such an abuse to occur, think again. I have ended up in the High Court for a homosexual vilification complaint that involved the complainer complaining about his own comment that he left on my Facebook page.

And the High Court did not dismiss the complaint because of that. It was dismissed for jurisdictional reasons, meaning that if I did live in New South Wales the complaint would go ahead.

So well done to South Australia again. In case two the only effect of these laws will be to provide a mechanism for priest haters to have them charged with criminal offences for doing what priests do: hearing confessions.

These laws are madness.

And to prove this point entirely, the same section that essentially requires priests to abuse religious sacraments so that they become a tool of Big Brother also allows for complaints to be made regarding potential physical harm of ‘unborn’ children.

Here is the section of this law:

(4) A person reports a suspicion under this section by doing 1 or more of the following:

(a) making a telephone notification to a telephone number determined by the Minister for the purposes of this subsection;

“Note—”

This telephone line is currently known as the Child Abuse Report Line or CARL .

(b) making an electronic notification on an electronic reporting system determined by the Minister for the purposes of this subsection;

(c) by reporting their suspicion to a person of a class, or occupying a position of a class, specified by the Minister by notice in the Gazette;

(d) reporting their suspicion in any other manner set out in the regulations for the purposes of this paragraph,

and, in each case, providing—

(e) —

(i) in the case of an  unborn  child—the name and address (if known) of the mother of the  unborn  child; or

(ii) in any other case—the name and address (if known) of the child or young person; and

I’m not sure whether the South Australian government is aware of what happens during an abortion, but usually it involves ripping the limbs off an ‘unborn child’, then crushing its skull and vacuuming it into a medical waste bag. Or having the mother ingest a series of drugs that results in the delivery of a baby that is usually dead but not uncommonly is still alive and left to lie crying on a medical tray until it takes its last breath.

Either way, something that meets the definition of harm occurs to the unborn or even born child.

The bad news for those involved in the abortion industry, I guess, is that the South Australian government does not want them to find forgiveness in the confessional.

The good news for the abortion industry is that, unlike priests, there is no mandatory reporting requirement for medical practitioners who become aware that an unborn child is about to suffer harm. They ‘may’ report it. And then it ‘may’ be examined. Or not.

This is where insanity becomes reality.

Thousands of unborn children will continue to face the utmost terminal harm in South Australia under the protection of laws that allegedly exist to protect children, while those same laws will be used to frame Catholic priests as criminals by paedophiles and church-hating activists.

And in the process, the state will attempt to nationalise the Catholic Church with all the dreadful consequences that necessarily follow when states decide morality without reference to the natural law or any higher moral authority than themselves.

Authority becomes nothing more than might is right. Morality becomes nothing more than the whim of those in power. In those circumstances, revolution will become the norm and the guillotine (or the anti-discrimination star chamber merely capable of stripping assets) will be placed front and centre. That is where we are headed. It will be, all too sadly, a place where mankind has been before but Australia has not.

God doesn’t need to punish us. The dreadful impacts of these laws will cause our society enough misery all by themselves…