AUSTRALIA
The Age
April 3, 2015
Aisha Dow
There was no Good Friday service held at the blackened ruins of St James Church in Brighton, but that did not stop dozens of locals making a quiet pilgrimage to the gutted building.
On the first day of the Easter holiday, they stood behind a safety fence and gazed at the place they and generations of their family had been baptised and married.
But few were truly shocked, and some were not truly sad.
Even before the fire on Monday morning, the crimes of paedophile Ronald Pickering – who served as the church’s parish priest for 15 years – had tainted many people’s feelings towards it.
One local couple who came to see the damage spent four decades as active members of St James. But they recently stopped going because of their deep disappointment with how the Catholic Church responded to child sexual abuse.
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