AUSTRALIA
Stuff
One Melbourne parish. Four pedophile priests. One after another.
For three decades, the chief spiritual leaders for Doveton’s Holy Family Parish were its child parishioners’ worst nightmares.
“It’s like having a terrifying regime in there for a long period of time,” the victims’ advocate Helen Last said.
“To have them being very sick, very dysfunctional, pathological and some of them very violent, that keeps the parish quiet, keeps them frightened, highly anxious, confused, paranoid, and so they don’t seek help.”
From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a string of priests abused children in the Australian outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Doveton.
Father Thomas O’Keeffe was a violent offender who tortured some of his altar boys in his time in charge of the Holy Family Parish in the 1970s, Ms Last said.
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