AUSTRALIA
The New Daily
May 22, 2015
JACKSON STILES Advisor
Editor
The Catholic archbishop of Sydney has declared the sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by church employees at schools in Victoria to be the worst in the nation’s history.
The nation’s royal commission into child abuse has been holding public hearings in Ballarat as part of its inquiry into past allegations of abuse in the regional town.
“It’s probably the worst story I think in the history of the Catholic Church in Australia,” Archbishop Anthony Fisher told ABC radio on Friday morning.
The testimonies given this week by former Ballarat students who attended Catholic schools ‘sickened’ the clergyman.
“It sickens me. It brings me to tears to hear how the victims have been so damaged, and how priests have betrayed their trust, and how leaders have failed in their supervising,” Archbishop Fisher said.
“We’ve got to do things better in the future.”
Some of Australia’s most notorious abusers, including Gerald Ridsdale, Robert Best and Edward Dowlan, were part of a paedophile ring operating in and around Ballarat during the 1960 and 70s.
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