Father Brian Lucas protected accused paedophiles, sex abuse royal commission hears

By Ben Pike
Daily Telegraph
June 25, 2014

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/father-brian-lucas-protected-accused-paedophiles-sex-abuse-royal-commission-hears/story-fni0cx12-1226965667518

Father Brian Lucas outside the royal commission

ONE of the Catholic Church’s most senior priests did not take notes after confronting accused pedophiles in the clergy because he did not want to “betray” them.

Father Brian Lucas has already come under fire from former premier Barry O’Farrell who, in parliament, called for him to be sacked because he did not report pedophile priests to the police.

Yesterday he told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that taking notes during meetings with accused priests would have prevented them from speaking “frankly and openly”.

“I don't think that's fair to a person. If you've said to him ‘we're having a frank conversation, this is confidential’, I'm not going to take a note of it,’’ the trained lawyer said.

“I don't think I can then betray him subsequently by then taking a note unless I show him the note and get him to adhere to it.”

Fr Lucas was previously a member of the church’s Special Issues Committee and is now the general secretary of the ­Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

During what was close to a two-hour grilling, counsel assisting Angus Stewart SC asked Fr Lucas whether the most rational explanation for not taking notes of any admissions of crimes would be that it was to “protect the priests and the church”.

Fr Lucas replied: “That would be an outcome,” before going on to say that to take notes would mean the priest would “not be forthcom-­  ing” in admitting their crimes.

The commission also heard it took the Catholic Church nearly 20 years to defrock a Wollongong priest accused of pedophilia.

Complaints had been made about Wollongong priest Father Gerard Nestor since the 1980s.

The commission heard the church investigated Fr Nestor in 2007 and concluded that between 1989 and 1993 he had “engaged in a pattern of sexual misconduct at summer camps he ran” and separately had sexually molested two children, one aged nine.

Fr Lucas met Fr Nestor about 1993 where he denied sexual abuse allegations made by boys. In a letter Fr Nestor sent to the Vatican in 1998, he said Fr Lucas had suggested he “make a full admission of the evils I had done, promising confessional secrecy’’.

Fr Lucas yesterday denied using the words “confessional secrecy”.