“Guilty Archbishop Philip Wilson should be ‘thrown in prison’, says original Spotlight investigator”, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News
By Riley Stuart, 23 May 2018
Walter “Robbie” Robinson was not in Newcastle on Tuesday to hear the gasps when Magistrate Robert Stone delivered his decision.
But he knew how significant the verdict was.
When Philip Wilson, the Catholic Archbishop of Adelaide, was found guilty of covering up child sexual abuse, reverberations from the landmark ruling made it all the way to Boston.
Although Professor Robinson — a Pulitzer Prize-winner and veteran newspaperman — deflects much of the credit, he began writing this story 16 years ago.
Professor Robinson ran Boston Globe’s “Spotlight Team” in the early 2000s and its investigation into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church.
Their ground-breaking reporting was turned into the 2015 feature film Spotlight, which won an Academy Award for best picture that year.
The 72-year-old remains the paper’s editor-at-large and, after making a career out of putting the church under a microscope, followed yesterday’s decision from the other side of the world.
“Wilson is a peculiar case because it’s one of the very few instances in which the person in charge who covered up the abuse and enabled the abuse to continue has actually been held accountable,” he told the ABC.
Wilson was the world’s most senior Catholic to be charged with covering up child sexual abuse.
Outside court yesterday, one abuse survivor said the guilty verdict represented “one of the most significant days in criminal law in Australian history”.
According to Professor Robinson, the ramifications will be felt abroad too.
“It’s almost unheard of for a bishop or an archbishop or a cardinal to be held personally or criminally responsible and that’s a damn shame,” he said.
“The people who made this possible have essentially ended up getting off scot free.”
Those covering up should be ‘thrown in prison’
Wilson could now face up to two years behind bars, and the prosecution have requested a custodial sentence — something Professor Robinson believes would send a message.
“For the church there has been no downside for the bishops or the cardinals who have allowed this to happen for so long,” he said.
“My opinion would be that it’s a good thing that some of them should be thrown in prison because I think that alone might force the church to confront the abuse of children and do something emphatic to bring that to an end.”
Wilson has been bailed, but will be sentenced on June 19.
When handing down his verdict yesterday, Magistrate Stone said Wilson knew “what he was hearing was a credible allegation and the accused wanted to protect the church and its reputation”.
During his trial, the archbishop said no one had ever come forward to tell him of allegations of child sex abuse during his 40 years as a clergyman.
However, Magistrate Stone cast that claim aside in a ruling that could have ramifications in courts around the country.
Despite his glittering career and investigations of the church, Professor Robinson does not take credit for every domino that falls.
“Maybe it’s just that we lit the fuse,” he said.
“When we began to publish we didn’t know it at the time but it was the dawn of the internet age. Within a day we were getting emails of victims of priests form all around the world including Australia.
“People contacted us and said ‘I was abused too’.
“We played a role in bringing it to the forefront. Did we know it was going to be a result of our reporting? Of course we didn’t.”
More than 1,500 kilometres from Newcastle — which was yesterday described as ground zero for Catholic child sexual abuse in Australia — Wilson’s parishioners at St Francis Xavier Cathedral were more sympathetic.
“I think he’s like a child that falls off a scooter, he’s got to get up again and he’s got to master it, and that’s what I think has to happen, so I want him back as Archbishop Wilson,” one said.
Another attending mass at the Adelaide diocese said Wilson should not be jailed.
“If anyone deserves punishment it will be God’s punishment,” they said.
Wilson ‘wanted to protect church’s reputation’
Wilson’s legal representation attempted to have the case thrown out of court four separate times leading up to the trial.
In April, Wilson’s barrister Stephen Odgers made a “no-case” submission during the trial at Newcastle Magistrates Court.
Last year Wilson lost an attempt to rule the charges invalid in Sydney’s Court of Appeal.
Two separate applications were previously rejected by a magistrate and a Supreme Court judge.
Mr Robinson said the defence used by Wilson’s lawyers had “been the modus operandi of the church for decades”.
“We received thousands of pages of documents from the church of their overwhelming impulse was to keep this a secret, to protect the reputation of the church, even if it meant putting priests who had offended in one place into parishes somewhere else where they continued to abuse children,” he said.
“(This was) to keep it secret, to keep it from coming to trial, to keep the public from knowing the extent to which clergymen abused children.”
When handing down his verdict yesterday, Magistrate Stone said Wilson knew “what he was hearing was a credible allegation and the accused wanted to protect the church and its reputation”.
During his trial, the archbishop said no one had ever come forward to tell him of allegations of child sex abuse during his 40 years as a clergyman.
However, Magistrate Stone cast that claim aside in a ruling that could have ramifications in courts around the country.
Despite his glittering career and investigations of the church, Professor Robinson does not take credit for every domino that falls.
“Maybe it’s just that we lit the fuse,” he said.
“When we began to publish we didn’t know it at the time but it was the dawn of the internet age. Within a day we were getting emails of victims of priests form all around the world including Australia.
“People contacted us and said ‘I was abused too’.
“We played a role in bringing it to the forefront. Did we know it was going to be a result of our reporting? Of course we didn’t.”