AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
July 26, 2013
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
One of the leaders of the Catholic Church has admitted his way of dealing with claims of child sexual abuse against clergy was outside the church’s protocols of the time, that it gave priests an inducement to avoid police action and it helped the church contain any scandal.
In hindsight, it may have been better not to have done it his way, Father Brian Lucas said at the state government inquiry into alleged church and police cover-ups of paedophile priest activity in the Hunter Valley.
On his second day in the witness stand, the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishop’s conference, a barrister with particular legal expertise in issues of child protection and church confidentiality, came in for a grilling over the way he handled complaints against priests in the first half of the 1990s.
The credibility of his complete lack of recall of a crucial meeting with the disgraced serial child abuser Denis McAlinden in 1993 was repeatedly called into question.
From 1990 it was Father Brian’s role to interview NSW priests accused of child sexual abuse. He has asserted the most effective way of protecting children’s safety was to persuade offending priests to leave the ministry so they would not have intimate access to families.
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