Catholic church is like mafia

Catholic Church officials have been likened to the mafia, outlaw motorcycle gangs and drug cartels by a legal activist.

Lawyer and lobbyist Bryan Keon-Cohen said the church, currently at the centre of a royal commission into the handling of child sex abuse complaints, saw itself as above the law and resisted governmental responses to child sex abuse.

Dr Keon-Cohen, the president of community lobby group COIN (Commission of Inquiry Now), said the church's own mechanisms for investigating abuse, such as Towards Healing and the Melbourne Response, were insufficient and objectionable.

"They seek to replace due process of civil and criminal law, while not being open for public scrutiny and accountability," he told a legal conference in Victoria.

Dr Keon-Cohen said the church's refusal to recognise assault as a crime first and not merely a sin amounted to it putting Catholic doctrine before the law of the land.

"(This) places these officials ... in the same smelly bed as outlaw motorcycle gangs, the mafia, drug cartels and people smugglers," he said in a speech at the Australian Lawyers Alliance Victorian State Conference on Friday.

The church says it is committed to cooperation, openness, full disclosure and justice for victims and survivors and established the Truth, Justice and Healing Council (TJHC) to co-ordinate its response to the royal commission.

TJHC chief executive Francis Sullivan said the royal commission was an opportunity for the church to explain the way it had treated victims and survivors, to acknowledge past wrongs and failures and to find ways to work towards justice and healing.

"Since the mid-1990s the church has put in place new procedures designed to prevent sexual abuse and to ensure past victims and survivors are treated with dignity and respect," he said in a statement.

"The church has made a commitment to comply fully with the royal commission, with its requirements and processes."

In his speech, Dr Keon-Cohen also said wealthy organisations should help pay for the royal commission where it could be proven they were responsible for offences.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse had already cost $22 million by April and was expected to run long past its current deadline of December 2015, Dr Keon-Cohen said.

He estimated it could cost "in the order of $500 million", based on the reported $50 million bill for the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission.

In Tuesday's budget the federal government allocated $434.1 million over four years for the wide-reaching inquiry.

The royal commission should explore whether organisations it was investigating could help cover the cost, Dr Keon-Cohen said.

"I suggest that the (inquiry) be required to examine a further source of funds, i.e. wealthy organisations found, on the evidence, to have substantially contributed, due to their derelict practices, to the sexual abuse scandal," Dr Keon-Cohen said.

Such contributions should reflect their assets and "degree of culpability", he said.

Institutional cover-ups of the primary crime constituted a second level of abuse, Dr Keon-Cohen said.
"Such callous disregard for the victim's plight ... amounts to not merely rank hypocrisy, but a second round of abuse," he said.

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