$10,000 is not much ... definitely not enough to motivate them into doing a report.

Useless bit of law.

I agree that $10,000 is not enough. All professionals bound by confidentiality have been subject to laws to report disclosures of child abuse and threats of harm to self and/or others for many years. Why should Catholic priests be excepted? 

How anyone could hear of such a thing and NOT report it is beyond me

A law that is 70 year too late and is not enough to act as a deterrent.  

The Catholic Church has been a haven for paedofiles for too long and had created an environment where it protected the perpetrators and pedophilia flourished. 

The various governments at the time did not keep in places the checks and balances. They let down these poor children too.

If the confessional is confidential, how will authorities become aware that someone has confessed to child abuse? Seems like another useless political promise which cannot be enforced.

Many priests will be caught up in a bind. To report or not? If they do not, how would they be found out anyway? However, I suspect that there may well be a number who would welcome this obligation. Too many adults have been committing this sin and then being ‘absolved’ presumably to do it again, and again. We sometimes forget the agony that priests must go through NOT being able to reveal these people. In the eyes of the law, a sinner is a criminal and should be dealt with accordingly. God can redeem this person in the next life - maybe.

It is now recognised that the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic clergy and monks is neither a new problem nor is it caused by ‘celibacy’; it has an extraordinary long history that goes back 2000 years as shown by Dominican priest Father Thomas Doyle, and two former Benedictines, celibacy historian A.W.R Sipe and theologian and canon law expert Patrick Wall in their meticulously researched book, Sex Priests and Secret Codes (2006) .

…..The culture of ‘blame the victim’ evolved as priests became more powerful. The Code of Canon Law 982 contained a canon stipulating that if victims confessed to being sexually abused by priests, the penitents were not to be absolved of sin until a retraction had been made and ‘damages repaired’. This code did not suggest that the priests who coerced and blackmailed parishioners to provide sex should be punished…..

…..Doyle and colleagues claim that, in 2000 years all that changed about child sexual abuse by clergy and monks was the emphasis on secrecy to protect the church hierarchy. They show that this began in earnest in the Vatican in 1922. In 1962, church legislation gave bishops the right to process cases of sex crimes committed by clergy. All those involved, including victims and witnesses, were committed to total and perpetual silence with automatic excommunication if they revealed the abuse to other authorities…….

http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2010/03/26/child-sex-abuse-and-the-church/