Church Harboured Fr Victor Rubeo for 3 Decades after His Offences

Broken Rites
January 1, 2012

http://brokenrites.alphalink.com.au/nletter/page269-victor-rubeo.html

The Catholic Church in Australia harboured a priest, Father Victor Gabriel Rubeo, for three decades after he indecently assaulted two boys in one of his earliest parishes (in Melbourne in the 1960s). In 1996 he pleaded guilty in court after these two victims finally spoke to police. On 28 October 2011, Rubeo appeared in court again, charged with 30 additional offences (in the 1960s) against the same two boys. He was ordered to re-appear on 16 December 2011 for a full hearing but he died (aged 78) before this next court date.

Broken Rites will refer to these two boys as "Tom" and "Wayne" (not their real names). They were born in the early 1950s and were related to each other. In the 1960s they lived at Laverton, a Melbourne outer-suburb.

According to a prosecution file which was compiled for the 2011 court proceedings, Rubeo's offences allegedly began when Tom and Wayne were aged 11 or 12 and became more frequent when the boys were 13 to 15. At the time, neither Tom nor Wayne knew that the other was being abused.

Rubeo gathered a large following of boys, especially altar boys.

He encouraged them to visit his parish house, where he would help them with their schoolwork. Any boy was welcome to stay overnight.

Parents trusted Rubeo. They were confident that their children were safe while in the custody of a Catholic priest.

Rubeo entertained Tom and Wayne and other boys at restaurants and gave them presents. He would take one or more boys on a trip — for example, or to Adelaide, or to a farm in southern New South Wales, or to Tasmania or to Fiji.

Rubeo would allow a boy to drink alcohol.

In separate police interviews, Tom and Wayne told how Rubeo introduced each of these two boys to "sex". He did this in secret, to one boy (either Tom or Wayne) at a time. During those years, neither Tom nor Wayne knew that each other was being abused by Rubeo.

In his abuse of Tom or Wayne, Rubeo would invasively massage the boy's naked genitals and he would instruct the boy to do the same thing to Rubeo's naked genitals.

This meant that the boy's first experience of "sex" was with another male — a "celibate" Catholic priest.

Neither Tom nor Wayne was able to tell their "devout Catholic parents" about Rubeo's behaviour because the boys expected that their parents would not believe negative things about a Catholic priest (especially about the popular Father Rubeo).

After Tom and Wayne reached adulthood, their parents continued to be friends of Rubeo — and so did Tom and Wayne, even after Rubeo moved to other parishes.

In their adult years, both Tom and Wayne experienced personal difficulties. Each eventually realised that the abuse by a Catholic priest (plus the church's secrecy and cover-up) disrupted their adolescent development and damaged their adult life. By the time they realised the full extent of the damage, Tom and Wayne were into their thirties and forties.

And it was it was only in their mature years that Tom and Wayne revealed to each other that each had been abused by Rubeo.

The priest's background

Victor Gabriel Rubeo was born in Australia in January 1933. He studied for the priesthood at the Melbourne Catholic seminary, where at one stage (according to his police interview) his fellow students included Gerald Francis Ridsdale.

(Father Ridsdale, who was a year younger than Rubeo, eventually received lengthy jail sentences for child sexual crimes.)

Rubeo was ordained as a priest of the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese in 1959, aged 26, and his long career covered various parishes.

In the early 1960s, Rubeo was based at St Mary's parish, Altona, in Melbourne's west, and his work there included being a chaplain at local Catholic schools.

From 1962 to 1970 he ministered at Laverton, in Melbourne's south-west (situated on the highway to Geelong). The Laverton parish (called St Martin de Porres) was becoming one of the fastest growing perishes in the Melbourne archdiocese. St Martin's parish eventually absorbed the church of Queen of Peace at Altona Meadows.

From 1962 to 1964 at Laverton, Rubeo lived in a temporary presbytery. From 1965 to 1988 he lived in a private house in a Laverton residential street (and some of Rubeo's abuse of Tom or Wayne occurred in this private house). In 1968 he moved into a newly-built Laverton presbytery, where he remained until 1972 when he transferred to other Melbourne parishes. These included:

Doveton (in Melbourne's outer south-east) in the late 1970s and early 1980s;

Reservoir and Preston East (in Melbourne's north) in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and

Boronia (in Melbourne's east) in the mid-1990s.