AUSTRALIA
SBS
AAP
Senior church official Brian Lucas has been asked to explain why he didn’t take notes when interviewing abusive priests.
Brian Lucas, the senior churchman who former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell wants sacked, has been asked at a royal commission to explain his practice of not taking notes while interviewing abusive priests.
Fr Lucas, the general-secretary of the church’s national body the Conference of Bishops, was making his second royal commission appearance in two weeks on Tuesday.
Justice Peter McClellan questioned Fr Lucas’s practice at a Sydney hearing in which the commission is looking at how the Catholic Church, under its own canon law, deals with priests and others against whom allegations have been made.
As a member of the church’s special issues committee in 1993, Fr Lucas interviewed John Gerard Nestor, a priest in the NSW Wollongong diocese, who was defrocked by the Vatican in 2008.
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