Police Investigate Australian Priest over Scottish Abuse Allegations

ABC News
July 30, 2013

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-30/police-investigate-australian-priest-over-scottish/4853630?section=nsw

[with audio]

A six month investigation by the BBC has found a multitude of allegations of sexual and physical abuse over 30 years at the prestigious Fort Augustus Abbey School in Scotland. Two Australian men are at the centre of the allegations, including one who's been suspended from the Catholic Church pending an investigation.

ELEANOR HALL: The ABC understands that New South Wales Police officers are investigating claims of overseas child sexual abuse levelled at a retired priest in Sydney.

A BBC documentary, aired today, alleges the priest committed the abuse when he was teaching at the Fort Augustus Abbey School in the Scottish Highlands during the 1970s, and then escaped punishment by transferring to Australia.

The Church in Australia says it's suspended the priest, pending an investigation, as Ashley Hall reports.

ASHLEY HALL: For more than 100 years, devout Catholics in Scotland entrusted their children to the care of the men of God at the prestigious Fort Augustus Abbey School. Located in the Highlands on the banks of Loch Ness, the boarding school seemed to represent an idyllic childhood.

It's been closed now for about 20 years, but for some of its students what happened there is still fresh in their minds, and it was far from idyllic.

DONALD MCLEOD: He pulled my trousers down and... it was quite horrible. I don't, sort of... it was painful.

ASHLEY HALL: Donald McLeod was 13 when he went to the Abbey in 1961.

DONALD MCLEOD: Um...

INTERVIEWER: He raped you?

DONALD MCLEOD: Yeah, I guess so. Yes.

ASHLEY HALL: The man who attacked him was an Australian, Aidan Duggan. Donald McLeod says Duggan groomed him during piano and photography lessons, and then, when he was 14, Duggan sexually assaulted him.

Donald McLeod raised the alarm, but no one believed him.

MARK DALY: The headmaster refused to believe the allegation, told the boy that he was lying and that if he continued to lie about Father Aidan, that he would go to hell. And nothing was done to Father Aidan. He was allowed to continue teaching and continue abusing.

ASHLEY HALL: Mark Daly is the investigations correspondent with BBC Scotland. He spent six months speaking with more than 50 former pupils of Saint Augustus and its preparatory school, compiling a catalogue of three decades of physical and sexual abuse. He says a second Australia, Father Denis Chrysostom Alexander, also featured prominently in the investigation.

In 1977, he allegedly abused a student we'll call "Brendan".

BRENDAN: Before he abused me he closed the curtains so no one would see. Used to cry at night, while we were saying our prayers at night, and then I used to just cry, cry.

ASHLEY HALL: Mark Daly says Brendan also complained about the abuse.

BRENDAN: Before he abused me... he closed the curtains so no one would see. Used to cry at night; while we were saying our prayers at night, and then I used to just cry, cry.

ASHLEY HALL: At the time, neither priest was reported to the police in Scotland. Both were sent home to Australia where Aidan Duggan died in 2004. Father Chrystotom has retired and is living in Sydney. The Catholic Church says when it learned of the allegations from Scottish police in May, it notified New South Wales Police, stripped Father Chrystotom of his priestly faculties, and launched an investigation of its own.

But Dr Bernard Barrett of the support group Broken Rites doesn't believe the Church didn't know about the allegations sooner.

BERNARD BARRETT: It was very common for priests to country-hop - Australian priests going overseas to avoid the Australian police, or Scottish or Irish priests appearing in Australia unaccountably to avoid the trouble over in Ireland or Scotland.

ASHLEY HALL: And you say that the Church authorities here would have to have known that they were in some trouble?

BERNARD BARRETT: Well, the Australian bishop has to have some sort of reference from the English or the Irish or Scottish bishop. And often it was a deal done between the two bishops that they could swap two offenders and give them a fresh start and the new parishioners wouldn't know.

ASHLEY HALL: Mark Daly says the victims of alleged abuse as Fort Augustus simply want to know how and why they could be so easily victimised. He tried to put those questions to Father Chrystostom outside his home in the suburbs of Sydney. But the retired priest had nothing to say.

DENIS CHRYSTOSTOM ALEXANDER: I don't care who you are, mate. Just get off my property or I'll call the cops, okay?

MARK DALY: You know why I want to speak to you? I want to speak to you about allegations that you sexually abused a boy called...

DENIS CHRYSTOSTOM ALEXANDER: I'm (redacted) urgent to go, mate.

ASHLEY HALL: It's left to the UK's senior Benedictine, Dom Richard Yeo, to make an apology.

DOM RICHARD YEO: The first thing I want to say is that I'm very sorry, very sorry about any abuse that may have been committed at Fort Augustus.

ASHLEY HALL: Despite repeated requests, the Catholic Church in Sydney has not returned our calls.

ELEANOR HALL: Ashley Hall with that report.