AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites reseacher (article updated 20 November 2015)
This Broken Rites article is the most comprehensive account available about how the Catholic Church protected Father Terry Pidoto for 25 years while he committed crimes against boys in his parishes.
Terrence Melville Pidoto was jailed in Melbourne in 2007 for seven years after being found guilty of 11 charges including rape.
Pidoto’s priestly career revolved around boys. His superiors and colleagues in the Melbourne archdiocese knew this but they tolerated him, thereby giving him access to victims.
According to court evidence, Pidoto was noted for giving boys a “massage”, sometimes behind closed (or locked) doors. The “massages” enabled Pidoto to commit sexual assaults, sometimes by anal penetration.
According to court evidence, Pidoto even took a boy to visit one of Australia’s leading priesthood-training colleges (Corpus Christi College, Melbourne) and sexually assaulted him in a room there. Other priests or student priests saw Pidoto with the boy at the seminary but they did not see anything unusual about this.
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