AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
JANET FIFE-YEOMANS THE DAILY TELEGRAPH DECEMBER 20, 2013
THE punishment for a Lismore paedophile priest as ordered by the Vatican was to live a life of prayer and penance and offer mass every Friday for his victims.
This was despite him admitting to his numerous “crimes”, the royal commission into institutionalised responses to child sex abuse has been told.
He remains a priest living in retirement in the Lismore presbytery and has not been stripped of his rank or had his “faculties removed”, as the Catholic Church describes being returned to the lay world.
The revelations came during damning evidence by the Bishop of Lismore, Geoffrey Jarrett, who said that he had not known for five years that the Vatican had required bishops to report all child sex abuse complaints to Rome. However, the commission heard that the first letter to the world’s bishops from the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith about the new edict in 2002 was written in Latin.
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