AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 24 July 2015)
The Catholic Church harboured a sexually abusive religious Brother, Bernard Hartman, throughout his long career in Australia and the United States. In Australia, the Melbourne Catholic diocese learned that Brother Hartman had committed crimes against Melbourne school-children but it did not report these crimes to the police. Finally, on 24 July 2015, some of his Melbourne victims got Brother Hartman (aged 75) jailed for his crimes.
Brother Hartman, born in the United States, is a member of an international Catholic religious order known as the Marianist brothers and priests. He worked in Australian schools in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In court in Australia in 2015 he was charged with sexual assaults on two boys and two girls committed while he was working at St Paul’s College in Altona, a suburb in Melbourne’s west. (At the time of the assaults, this was a boys’ school, operated by the Marianist religious order, but now it has become one of the campuses of the Catholic Church’s co-educational Emmanuel College.)
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