The church's Truth, Justice and Healing Council was announced on Wednesday, and will be headed by former NSW Supreme Court chief judge Barry O'Keefe and former secretary-general of the Australian Medical Association Francis Sullivan.
Two bishops and a nun have already been nominated to the 10-person council but it will be led by lay people, whose brief is to nationally co-ordinate the church's "embrace" of the royal commission.
But Detective Chief Inspector Fox, who helped spark the royal commission with claims that police and the church in NSW's Hunter area had hindered investigations into abuse allegations, says the council has been set up as a "shield".
"Why does another body need to be set up somewhere in between? It's basically putting a shield between the church and the commission," he told a forum in Sydney on Friday.
"The commission should not allow that to happen, and it should see through that and go directly to the source."
Anthony Foster, whose daughters Emma and Katie were repeatedly raped by a priest at a Melbourne school in the 1980s and 90s, said the new council was a "smokescreen".
"It shouldn't have been announced, it shouldn't exist," Mr Foster said.
"It just seems that it is the Catholic Church putting another body in between the royal commission and the archbishops and the archdioceses that is not needed.
"The royal commission should be out there garnering the evidence directly from those organisations.
"What we don't want to see is what we've seen in the past ... a filtering of information which is fed out to the public and to authorities."
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