Horrifying truth haunts family of abuse victim

By Joanne Mccarthy
Newcastle Herald
January 12, 2015

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/2812118/horrifying-truth-haunts-family-of-abuse-victim/?src=rss

UNKNOWN: This mother learned of her son’s abuse only after he died.

A NEWCASTLE woman learned her son was a victim of paedophile priest Vince Ryan when police spoke to her in 1996 only days after her son’s suicide.

‘‘Vince Ryan wrote in his diary the name of the children he abused and the dates he abused them,’’ said the woman this week.

‘‘My son’s name was there. He was 11 when it happened, and an altar boy. He never told us. I was so horrified. I was just beside myself. I didn’t even think anything like that would ever happen, but it did.’’

Her son was 30 when he died. His father called him ‘‘my golden boy’’, but by the time the teenager had left his Catholic school for university he had been smoking cannabis for an unknown period.

He dropped out of university after he started talking to himself. Within a short time he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and for 10 years he struggled to live with the condition. His family never knew about the sexual abuse, were disturbed by the cannabis use, and will never know if the early cannabis use precipitated the schizophrenia.

His older brother remembers the hide and seek games at boys’ nights organised by Ryan where the priest had access to young boys.

He lists names of Catholic teachers at schools he attended who went on to be charged or convicted of child sex offences.

He was at St Pius X, Adamstown, in 1978 when John Denham was his class master and geography and religion teacher, and priest Tom Brennan was principal. Denham is in jail after pleading guilty to sexually abusing more than 60boys. Brennan was convicted of making a false statement to police about Denham.

 Brennan died in 2012, shortly after being charged with child sex offences and becoming the first Catholic priest in Australia to be charged with failing to disclose the child sex offences of another priest.

The older brother of the man who took his own life in 1996 supports any formal action that recognises those who didn’t survive being sexually abused within religious institutions as children.

‘‘My brother should be a happy accountant with six kids now but he’s gone. It all makes sense now. He went to his grave and didn’t say a word, and that says it all.’’