AUSTRALIA
Northern Daily Leader
Rachel Browne
22 Sep 2016
The former chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney denied he was trying to save Cardinal George Pell from embarrassment by sticking to his claim about a paedophile priest in the face of conflicting accounts, a royal commission has heard.
In the final day of an inquiry into convicted paedophile John Joseph Farrell, Monsignor John Usher insisted the priest never admitted to crimes against children at a 1992 meeting.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse heard the meeting was attended by Mgr Usher and Fathers Brian Lucas and Wayne Peters in response to concerns about Farrell raised by the then Bishop of Armidale, Kevin Manning.
When the ABC’s Four Corners program made inquiries about the meeting two decades later, the three priests consulted each other and agreed they did not recall Farrell admitting to sexually abusing children, the inquiry heard.
A letter from Fr Peters, written eight days after the 1992 meeting and tendered in evidence, records Farrell saying: “There had been five boys around the age of ten and eleven that he had sexually interfered with in varying degrees in the years approximately 1982 to 1984 while he was the assistant priest at Moree.”
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