AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE McCARTHY Nov. 8, 2013
NEWCASTLE man Steven Smith has a simple message for victims of child sexual abuse almost a year to the day since the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse was announced.
‘‘It’s time to speak,’’ he said, as the Anglican Church braces itself for the next round of royal commission public hearings starting on November 18, and the ugly truth about a Hunter priest and the church that protected him.
The royal commission will hear evidence about former ‘‘nightclub entertainer’’/Anglican priest Allan Kitchingman, who was convicted of a ‘‘child sex matter’’ in Newcastle in 1968 and immediately transferred to Grafton diocese where he sexually assaulted a child in 1975 at the church-run North Coast Children’s Home.
The evidence will include the role of the late Newcastle Anglican Bishop James Housden, who organised the Grafton transfer because he was ‘‘anxious to help him [Kitchingman] in every way possible whatever the result of the trial’’.
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