The seminary life and training of Catholic priests in the past was dangerous and distorted, the child sex abuse royal commission has heard.
The Catholic Church in Australia accepts there have been deep failures in its past approach to preparing people for life as a priest, the commission heard on Monday.
But Diocese of Broken Bay vicar general Dr David Ranson argues the changes in the area of formation over the last three decades do not go far enough.
"No one could live in that system and not end up at least having to wrestle with the possibility of distortion," he said of past seminary life.
"Clearly that system was both dangerous and detrimental to human flourishing.
"I think there will be no movement forward until we can not only implicitly acknowledge the liabilities of the past but actually publicly acknowledge that this was wrong and that this was just distorted."
The royal commission has heard the training many priests and religious brothers received historically was inadequate to prepare them for their vocation, and that they should have ongoing formation and supervision.
Dr Ranson said the emphasis of seminary life has been primarily on the intellectual formation of priests and there needs to be much greater emphasis on their ongoing formation.
He said there have been significant advances over the last 30 years in respect to human and pastoral formation.
"I would not want to pretend that they are sufficient," he told the inquiry into the factors behind widespread child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald questioned whether the changes meant the church recognised there were deep failures in past approaches and that seminary life was unhealthy in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.
Archdiocese of Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Randazzo said the church recognised the failures.
"I think there is an acknowledgement that there were aspects of the formation in the past that were not as good as they could have been and that they did contribute to the shortcomings within this area that we're talking about," he told the Sydney hearing on Monday.
Bishop Randazzo, a former seminary rector, said there were holes in formation in the past but there was a deliberate change in teaching, including no longer taking children into minor seminaries.
