Not an easy problem, therefore no easy solution.

In a blog post my friend Paul Baird makes the point that no-one and no institution is above the law. He writes "If any Priest or person holding a similar position is found to withhold any knowledge that would permit the perversion of the course of justice then they should face the full force of the law. The confessional has no penitent/confessor protection, and none should be assumed or actually given."

In principle, you have to agree with this, that the law is the law and no-one and no thing is exempt. And of course I'd want information on a crime to be passed to the authorities, child abuse maybe more than any. But there is also a problem. Unenforceable law is normally bad law. A law that says that something said by one person in secret to another must be reported is unenforceable. No-one knows, and the person told simply shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Unless confessions are monitored by secret surveillance (in itself unacceptable) how is such a thing to be enforced? Law like that brings the concept of law itself into disrepute and disrespect.

I'd like to think that there is another solution - and admittedly this has not worked with the Catholic Church in the past and probably could not work perfectly in the future. It involves the education of the clergy until and so that they are on side with action against child abuse and other serious crime. As a former clergyman who has heard confessions (in the Church of England) a priest has a sanction. He can withhold absolution, or make it dependent on the penitent taking a certain course of action. In such a case he could require the penitent to turn himself in, and make absolution conditional upon that. Now, assuming the penitent took confession and absolution seriously, you have a strong lever. The problem is that most abusers do not see anything at all wrong with what they have done. They know it is against the law, but that, in their eyes, does not make it wrong. So I cannot see that such a person would have any need to go to confession in the first place.

Many years ago I knew a clergyman, now dead, who plainly had a strong interest in children. No-one suspected how far that interest went - it just was not on our radar all that time ago. So everyone who knew him was shocked and horrified when he was arrested. On the occasion in question he had been bathing a young boy and touched him "inappropriately". The child told his parents, and the law took its course and my friend got 2 years, suspended. Whether the leniency of the sentence reflects the nature of the assault or attitudes at the time or both I cannot tell. He resigned his job, and as soon as the period of suspension was over the church found him another one.

My friend was shaken up, not because of what he had done, but because of the outcry. His view was that he was in love with the child, that he was giving him pleasure, and there was nothing wrong with that, indeed, love is of God. Of course it was technically against the law, but until relatively recently so were homosexual acts between consenting adult males, and so was driving at above the speed limit, which the majority of motorists just did all the time with no ill consequences.

Why would a person who thought like that take his crime to confession, which depends on acknowledging actions as wrong and sinful? Paedophile acts are rightly criminal offences. But that does not make them wrong in the eyes of perpetrators. Until they see the desires they have, and cannot avoid having, as being misdirected and acting on those urges as wrong, harmful and worse, the problem will persist.