AUSTRALIA
New York Daily News
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Tuesday, March 17, 2015
CANBERRA, Australia — A Roman Catholic archbishop in Australia was charged Tuesday with covering up for a pedophile priest during the 1970s.
Archbishop of Adelaide Philip Wilson said he was disappointed that New South Wales state police had decided to charge him with concealing a serious child sexual abuse offence. Wilson said he would fight the charge, which carries a potential two-year prison sentence.
The charge alleges the 64-year-old failed to report child sex abuse carried out by priest James Fletcher during the 1970s when they both served in the town of Maitland, north of Sydney.
Fletcher died in prison aged 65 in 2006, a year into an almost eight-year sentence for raping an altar boy between 1989 and 1991.
“The suggestion appears to be that I failed to bring to the attention of police a conversation I am alleged to have had in 1976, when I was a junior priest, that a now deceased priest had abused a child,” Wilson said in a statement.
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