AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
December 19, 2013
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
A Lismore Catholic priest who sexually abused children was ordered by the Vatican to “live a life of prayer and penance” and offer a Mass every Friday for his victims, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told.
But the “overwhelming majority” of clerical sex abuse cases are not reported to Rome because the Vatican wants to know only about incidents which occurred within the past 10 years, the Commission heard. The Bishop of Lismore, Geoffrey Jarrett, did not pass on any complaints for five years, probably because a directive from the Pope to do so was filed in a drawer and forgotten, he told the Commission.
In a day of astonishing revelations about the Australian Catholic church’s lackadaisical attitude to child sex abuse allegations, Bishop Jarrett admitted he did not pass on a 2002 complaint in which a woman alleged she “walked in on Father [Paul Rex] Brown in the act of sexually abusing a child in the sacristy of the cathedral” in 1959. That alleged incident preceded Father Brown’s abuse of Mrs Jennifer Ingham in the late 1970s by two decades.
When Bishop Jarrett eventually reported the separate case of a Lismore priest accused of “numerous” incidents of child sex abuse, with reparations of $50,000 already paid, the Vatican took two years to issue the punishment of offering Mass on Fridays. That priest is retired and lives in the presbytery with other priests in Lismore, Bishop Jarrett said. The Bishop has opted not to let him keep his priestly faculties, but said he would have written to the priest in 2004 to tell him he was not allowed to have contact with children. “I can’t recall whether I have written to remind him of it ever since,’’ Bishop Jarrett said.
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