AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail
AAP
The new kids at school were warned who to avoid, boys were molested at the back of classrooms or even while sitting up front on the teacher’s lap and children were raped on church properties.
In some cases every boy in class knew their turn to be abused would come. At one town’s school, every boy aged 10 to 16 was molested.
What went on for decades in the deeply Catholic Ballarat diocese was blatantly obvious – as one victim put it – and widespread, yet no one stopped it.
Pedophile clergy got away with destroying so many lives for so long, and now its come back to haunt the Catholic Church and its most senior Australian figure Cardinal George Pell.
Cardinal Pell is a long way from Ballarat as he presides over the Vatican’s finances in Rome. But victims in his home town are looking to the former parish priest for answers.
So too is the child sexual abuse royal commission as it investigates the church’s many failings in recognising and dealing with what went on in Ballarat. Current Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher describes it as the worst story in the church’s history in Australia.
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