Royal Commission: Priest Referred to Vatican with 'No Expectation' of When Church Might Hear Back
By Catherine Armitage
A Lismore Catholic priest has been referred for action to the Vatican after telling people he knew of a place in Thailand “where under age people were available to foreign visitors”, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has heard. Since a 2001 directive from Pope John Paul II, bishops have been required to report “substantiated” allegations regarding sex abuse of children by priests to the Vatican if the priest is still alive, Bishop Geoffrey Jarrett of the Catholic Church’s Lismore diocese testified. He said he had referred a case in 2011 or 2012 and was awaiting instructions on what to do from Rome. But he said he had “no expectation” of when he might hear back. Because there have been “so many of these matters referred from all over the world”, Rome “can’t move very quickly for all of these matters”, he said. Bishop Jarrett was giving evidence in the case of Jennifer Ingham, who was abused for four years by a priest of his diocese, Paul Rex Brown, from when she was 16 in 1978. Bishop Jarrett agreed it was a serious problem that child abusers have been moved from one diocese to another within the church. Asked what checks he would do if he were asked to accept a priest from another diocese into his own, he said he would do the “checks required by civil legislation”, that is, Working with Children checks. Asked whether further checks on a priest’s employment record or reputation might be carried out beyond the basic requirement of a Working with Children check, he responded: “I don’t understand what the procedures over and above might be.” He said “a bishop is not going to allow a priest he knows to have offended in this way to go to another diocese”. There were incredulous gasps from the public gallery. In a separate case, a man now aged 55, who was abused by a teacher at his Marist Brothers college in northern Queensland from age 13 in 1970, told the hearing that he didn’t know the man who molested him had apologised for the abuse 15 years ago until he saw documents produced for the commission hearings. The abuser, Brother Raymond Foster, also known as Brother Celestine, killed himself at a Catholic retirement home in Mittagong hours before he was due to face court to be extradited to Queensland on charges of abusing the witness, known as DG, the commission heard. Brother Foster left a note asking for ‘‘his forgiveness if he would be so kind’’. DG, with greying hair and glasses, testified that Brother Foster’s suicide was intended ‘‘both to free him from prosecution and to inflict guilt upon myself’’. He said he wrote to the Marist Brothers in disgust when newspaper reports in his home town after the suicide quoted the Marist Brothers saying Brother Celestine had died of a heart attack, was a ‘‘wonderful man’’ and had not been worried about the impending charges. ‘‘It appears from your response that I must have been harassing a sick old man, not seeking justice on a devious, slothful, and drunkenly indulgent child molestor,’’ DG wrote. The commission was told that the 1999 suicide note was conveyed to Brother Michael Hill, then provincial of the Marist Brothers Sydney area. But when Brother Hill met DG and his wife as a prelude to mediation several months later, he volunteered no information about Brother Foster. ‘‘When I got the documents from the commission was the first time I had any knowledge that he had acknowledged the abuse in any way, shape or form’’, DG testified. Brother Hill, a psychologist now working at Marist College North Shore in North Sydney, gave evidence he did not know the identity of the complainant referred to by Brother Foster, and took no steps to find out. DG got a payout of $36,500 and a written letter of apology that referred to him only in the third person, which he described as ‘‘hollow’’. The hearing continues.
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