Senior Catholic may face abuse cover-up charges

By Dan Box
Australian
June 03, 2014

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/senior-catholic-may-face-abuse-coverup-charges/story-e6frgczx-1226940807657

A SENIOR Catholic Church ­official is potentially facing a ­historic criminal prosecution for allegedly covering up child sex abuse committed by a priest, after a report detailing evidence against the official was referred to the NSW Director of Public ­Prosecutions.

The confidential report, produced by a special commission of inquiry, was referred to the independent prosecutor’s office over the weekend by the NSW government, which received the document on Friday.

The DPP is expected to consider whether the official should be charged with either misprision of a felony, an offence that was repealed from NSW law in 1990, or the charge that succeeded it of concealing a serious indictable ­offence.

Any prosecution could represent the first time a Catholic official has faced trial within Australia for concealing child sexual abuse.

While the official cannot be publicly identified, the inquiry, led by NSW prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC, found enough evidence existed to pursue criminal charges against him.

In an accompanying, public part of her report, Ms Cunneen said: “There is sufficient evidence warranting the prosecution of a senior church official in connection with the concealment of child sexual abuse.”

Two Catholic priests, both from the NSW Hunter Valley, have previously been charged with misprision of a felony, ­although neither ultimately faced trial.

The first, Tom Brennan, died in September 2012 shortly after his arrest, while charges against the second, Lew Fenton, were dismissed by a magistrate in March this year.

The state inquiry was established in November 2012, after a serving police detective used a  live interview on the ABC’s Lateline to criticise the force’s handling of church child sex abuse.

It found the officer, ­Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox, to be an “unsatisfactory witness” who gave “deliberately untruthful” evidence after developing “what amounted to an obsession about both the Catholic Church and alleged conspiracies involving senior police”.

His criticisms were “wholly unfounded”, the inquiry found, and police in the NSW Hunter Valley in fact had ­“consider- able success in investigating and prosecuting alleged child sexual offences committed by officials of the Catholic Church”.

During the Lateline interview, Detective Fox claimed he had been “ordered to stand down” from a police investigation into pedophile abuse within the church.

In fact, the inquiry found, he played no part in this investigation, instead pursuing his own “clandestine” inquiries into clerical child abuse, the results of which he “deliberately ­failed” to provide to his ­superiors.

He did, however, play a key role in the successful 2004 prosecution of one abusive priest, Jim Fletcher, whose crimes the unidentified official is now alleged to have ­concealed.

No attempt to prosecute the official was made at the time.

In his evidence to the ­inquiry, Detective Fox said a “Catholic mafia” existed within NSW Police, and that one ­investigation into church child abuse was “a sham” that was “set up to fail”.

The impact of these claims has been hard felt by officers in the Hunter Valley, who have charged more than a dozen priests in relation to the sexual abuse of children over recent years.