The Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne will introduce guidelines on Monday on “training and cultural understanding,” after one of its priests said Jill Meagher would not have been raped and murdered had she been more “faith filled”.
The church was forced to apologise on Friday following the comments, made by a priest before a service of about 100 people at a Catholic primary school in Melbourne.
The priest reportedly held up a newspaper with the face of Meagher’s killer, Adrian Bayley, on it and told the congregation that had Meagher been “more faith-filled” she “would have been home in bed” and “not walking down Sydney Road at 3am”.
Meagher was raped and murdered by Bayley in 2012 while she was walking home from a bar in Brunswick. Last week, Bayley was found guilty of three additional counts of rape, bringing his rape convictions to 10.
A church spokesman, Shane Healy, said senior church officials had met over the weekend and that a “series of steps” were being implemented on Monday to prevent similar comments from being made in future.
“I’m not going to go into specifics,” he said. “But more generally, it’s around training, better cultural understanding of what’s happening in the community, and we’re in the middle of rolling those out today.”
He said he was satisfied the measures were appropriate.
Healy would not say if any disciplinary action had been taken against the priest who made the comments, saying only that he had been spoken to “immediately after” making the comments, and that the church had apologised.
Jane Vanderstoel, the convener of the Victorian Centre Against Sexual Assault, welcomed moves by the church to introduce new guidelines.
“Obviously the church struggles, and sometimes older men struggle, to really understand that what they’re saying blames women for what happens to them,” she said.
“So yes, guidelines and training are essential to challenge these attitudes and the church also needs to come out strongly to say it’s not a view held by the church as an organisation.
“The comments only perpetuate a victim-blaming mentality and the myth that women are responsible for other people harming them, and it’s really disappointing.”
Meagher’s husband, Tom Meagher, wrote on Facebook that the priest’s comments were “shameful”.
“How a human being with such dangerous and misogynistic views can be allowed pass those messages onto children is depressing,” he wrote.
The priest’s remarks followed comments made by a detective in the Victorian homicide squad following the murder of 17-year-old Masa Vukotic that women should not walk alone in parks.
