An old adage has it that governments only agree to hold an inquiry when they know what it will find. Yet that has not always been true of royal commissions, and it is certainly not true of the royal commission into the sexual abuse of children in institutions, whose members and terms of reference the Gillard Government announced last week.
At this stage all that can be predicted with any confidence is that the task of Justice Peter McClelland and his fellow commissioners will be long and expensive, and that the evidence they will gather is likely to shame profoundly many of the institutions that come under their scrutiny.
That the commission will cost many millions of dollars and may need to continue well beyond the three years initially allotted for it can be seen as obstacles only by those who think that a desire for quick fixes outweighs the obligation to expose fundamental injustice and acknowledge longstanding grievances.
The nearest equivalent to this Australian inquiry is the Ryan commission in Ireland, which submitted its final report nearly ten years after it began hearings. If that is what it takes here, too, so be it.
The commission's terms of reference are properly broad, allowing it to investigate allegations of the sexual abuse of children in all types of institutions, public and private.
Such abuse has never been restricted to agencies of the Catholic Church. It can hardly be denied, however, that the chief impetus for the creation of this royal commission has been the appalling record of concealment of abuse in Catholic institutions, and of the protection of perpetrators by bishops and major superiors. If that record did not exist, the royal commission would not exist.
And Catholics — especially bishops and major superiors — cannot evade this fact by complaining, as they sometimes do, about malicious reporting by hostile secular media. If the abuses had not occurred, the reports could not have been written.
Worst of all, the abuse and concealment have evidently continued long after the church adopted protocols intended to redress the grievances of those who have been abused, and to prevent further abuse.
That is the considered judgment of Professor Patrick Parkinson, of the University of Sydney's law school, who twice reviewed the Towards Healing protocols for the hierarchy. He has since ended that relationship, because he says the protocols have been undermined.
The police submission to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse and media interviews by Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox of the NSW police also asserted that church authorities have frequently stalled investigations of the sexual abuse of children.
These assertions are not rabid allegations by anticlerical, muckraking journalists; they are expressions of frustration and disgust by ordinary cops who have been prevented from doing their job.
Too many bishops and major superiors have failed to act in good faith in the matter of clerical sexual abuse, and in this respect the Catholic Church in Australia has replicated a pattern familiar overseas. Whatever else the royal commission may reveal, we already know there is an entrenched culture of concealment within the church, and public awareness of this culture is shredding the Church's credibility.
That is why the best response the official Church in Australia has yet made to the child abuse crisis, the creation of the lay Truth, Justice and Healing Council, has been greeted with undeserved but predictable cynicism. It is a step that should have been taken ten years ago, and now it has ten years of others' dishonesty and evasion to live down.
The question that the royal commission cannot answer, but which we must answer for ourselves, is why sexual abuse has been so prevalent in Catholic institutions. A facile, often-heard answer is that it is a consequence of clerical celibacy.
This is not true is the sense that is usually intended: the issue is not sexual frustration, for celibacy does not necessarily make a man a molester any more than marriage necessarily makes a man a rapist. But there is a deeper sense in which mandatory celibacy is indeed at the heart of the matter.
The culture of concealment arises because the institutional church's reliance on what may be called the mystique of the priesthood: on the appearance of the priest (and by extension, a vowed religious, too) as someone special, a man set apart.
In most places and at most times, it has been through manipulating that mystique, rather than by citing official pronouncements, that the church has sought to wield practical authority. How can it not threaten a clericalist church, then, when the mystique is revealed to be a sham?
Ray Cassin is a freelance writer and editor who is based in Melbourne. He was founding editor of Australian Catholics in the 1990s.