AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites Australia researcher (updated 1 August 2014)
On 1 July 2014 an Australian jury convicted a Melbourne priest (Father James Henry Scannell, 88) on a charge of buggery, committed against a 12-year-old boy more than 40 years ago. After the assault, the priest required the boy to take part in Confession and ordered him not to tell anybody about the assault, the court was told. The victim (now in his fifties) finally reported this crime to the police after learning that his aunt’s funeral in 2010 was to be conducted by this priest. As well as working in this parish, Father Scannell was a “chaplain” for many years for vulnerable people at the Kew Mental Hospital and Children’s Cottages in Melbourne.
In the Melbourne County Court on 1 August 2014, Judge David Parsons began pre-sentence proceedings for Scannell. The judge heard submissons by the prosecutor and the church’s defence lawyer about what sort of sentence should be imposed on Scannell. The court received a written impact statement from the victim, outlining how the church-abuse disrupted his adolesence and his later life. The judge then remanded Scannell in custody. The judge will hand down his sentence in a week’s time.
Court documents stated that in the early 1970s, as well as his chaplaincy at the Kew Cottages, Father Scannell was doing some ministering in a nearby parish (St Anne’s, East Kew), and this is where the 12-year-old boy lived. The boy’s aunt knew Father Scannell and this is how the boy came into contact with the priest. The boy was paid to do some odd jobs at the priest’s house in East Kew, where the sexual abuse occurred. Father Scannell was then aged in his mid-forties.
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