AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
July 25, 2013
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
There is “not much more you can do” to prevent children being abused by paedophile priests once you’ve removed the ministers from office, a Catholic Church priest has told a NSW government inquiry.
But Father Brian Lucas agreed his system of managing accused priests was a failure of risk management and did not comply with the church’s protocols at the time.
In the five or six years from 1990 when his role was to deal with sexual abuse allegations against the church in NSW, some of those accused did admit their guilt to him, he said. But he did not pass the admissions on to police because he “never felt able to do that”.
Father Lucas, who is also a lawyer with expertise in child protection, was being grilled at the inquiry into the alleged church cover-up of paedophile priest activity in the Hunter Valley.
His insistence that defrocking paedophile priests was the best approach in the early 1990s is under challenge from counsel assisting the inquiry Julia Lonergan, SC. Also under challenge is the credibility of his assertion of a total absence of memory about his dealings with paedophile priest Father McAlinden.
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