AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
Broken Rites has helped the Australian Broadcasting Corporation with research for a Four Corners television program, being broadcast on Monday 11 August 2014. The program is about how the Catholic Church in Australia tries to cover up its child-sex abuse – and how the church avoids paying full compensation to victims. The ABC producers obtained information from Broken Rites research. Here are the links to some of the relevant Broken Rites articles.
The Four Corners program includes case studies of some of the church’s paedophile priests. For example (you can click on any of the following names):
Fr Aidan Duggan: Cardinal George Pell instructed the church’s lawyers to crush a former altar boy (John Ellis) who had been one of Duggan’s victims. The church is still using this legal tactic (known in legal circles as “the Ellis defence”) to avoid paying full compensation to other victims.
Fr Kevin O’Donnell: George Pell praised Father O’Donnell but Broken Rites supported the victims.
Fr Peter Searson: The church inflicted this “chaplain” on disadvantaged victims.
Fr Dominic Phillips:This priest “befriended” young schoolgirls.
Four Corners also gives an example of one notorious Melbourne parish – Doveton. This low socio-economic area is on Melbourne’s south-eastern outskirts, near Dandenong. The Melbourne Archdiocese leadership sent a succession of sexually-abusive priests to this parish. For example (you can click on any of the following names).
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.