AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
A boy complained about being sexually abused by a Catholic priest, but the church merely transferred the priest to a new parish, thus giving him access to more children, a Sydney court has been told. Many years later, one of the victims contacted Broken Rites, which advised him to speak to detectives. Police then charged the priest, Father Robert Flaherty, now retired (aged 72), who eventually pleaded guilty regarding his assaults on two boys, committed in Sydney parishes in the 1970s. On 7 September 2015, a jury found Flaherty guilty of assaulting a third boy. Flaherty will be sentenced soon.
Robert Francis Flaherty (born 14 June 1943) was a priest in the Sydney archdiocese.
Broken Rites first heard of Father Robert Flaherty in 2012, in a phone call from one of Flaherty’s victims. Broken Rites arranged for this victim (“Dwayne”, not his real name) to contact a Detectives Office of the New South Wales Police. In the police files, the detectives found a previous complaint from another boy in one of Flaherty’s other parishes. While conducting their investigation of Flaherty in 2013, the detectives found another victim in another parish.
In 2013, police charged Flaherty regarding three boys, aged between 11 and 15, who lived in parishes where Father Flaherty worked, in three suburbs (St Marys, Richmond and Blacktown — all to the west of Sydney).
The offences occurred between 1971 and 1982 in western Sydney or during visits to this priest’s holiday house (inherited from his parents) at Mollymook, 220 miles from Sydney on the New South Wales south coast, near Ulladulla.
* In 2014, Flaherty appeared in Sydney’s Parramatta District Court, where he pleaded guilty regarding two of the boys (one incident per boy). He is awaiting sentence regarding these two victims.
* Originally, Flaherty pleaded not guilty to two charges (“indecent assault of a male”) regarding a third boy, aged about 12. On 7 September 2015, after a trial conducted by Judge R. Cogswello, a jury returned a verdict of “Guilty” on these two charges regarding the third boy (the official number of this court case was 2013/00201461).
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