AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 8 July 2015)
In 2015, an American Catholic Brother (Brother Bernard Hartman, 75) has been convicted in Australia for committing a series of sexual crimes against Australian children while he worked at a Melbourne school more than 30 years ago. He is believed to be the first Catholic clergy member extradited from the United States to face court in Australia. In July 2015 he is in court in Melbourne for pre-sentence proceedings.
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 he was charged with sexual assaults on two boys and two girls while he was working at St Paul’s College in Altona, a suburb in Melbourne’s west. (This was then a boys’ school, operated by the Marianist religious order, but now has become one of the campuses of the Catholic Church’s co-educational Emmanuel College.)
The attacks, on victims aged between six and 16, occurred between 1976 and 1982 when Brother Hartman worked at the school. The court was told that the alleged assaults occurred both at the school and at the victims’ homes.
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