AUSTRALIA
Moree Champion
A DISABLED girl repeatedly raped by a paedophile priest thought the abuse was “OK with God”.
The girl was one of 12 children groomed and molested by former Catholic priest John Joseph Farrell, 62, in a decade-long period of abuse at Moree and Tamworth during the 1980s.
She was abused from the age of 10 by Farrell, who had been moved from one parish after a “scandal that he had been sexually abusing the altar boys”, the victim, who can’t be identified, said in a statement tendered to Sydney’s District Court last Friday.
The traumatising sexual abuse had continued throughout her teenage years.
“I naively assumed that God must have been OK with it,” she said.
Another of Farrell’s female victims was abused from a similar age and would often try to escape when he would visit her family home.
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