AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By JOANNE MCCARTHY
March 25, 2016,
A NSW Supreme Court judge has rejected a Catholic Church application to suppress the names of senior church officials with knowledge of a notorious Hunter paedophile priest, in a woman’s case that the church should have stopped him from raping her from the age of five.
Justice Desmond Fagan criticised Maitland-Newcastle diocese for providing the woman with church documents about paedophile priest Denis McAlinden with the names of church officials blacked out, including a 1976 letter from the late Monsignor Patrick Cotter in which the monsignor acknowledged McAlinden’s “inclination… towards the little ones”.
In the letter Cotter told incoming Bishop Leo Clarke that McAlinden had “an inclination to interfere with young girls”. Cotter told the bishop he put the allegation to McAlinden who “agreed it is a condition that had been with him for many years”.
Cotter’s letter included that McAlinden held a strong wish to depart for Geraldton “because it would afford a good cover-up for his resigning the parish”.
The woman suing the estate of the late Leo Clarke and the trustees of Maitland-Newcastle diocese alleges she was sexually abused by McAlinden between 1974 and 1984, from the age of five.
“This letter, given its date towards the beginning of the period in which the (woman) complains she was sexually abused, is very close to the heart of the (woman’s) case,” Justice Fagan said.
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