AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
Deborah Snow and Beau Donelly
Mark Fabbro remembers most vividly the flowering callistemon and blue sky outside the window of the small room tucked behind the priest’s office.
Everything else – the whip, the feel of his bare skin being pressed into the leather couch, the priest mumbling in Latin behind him – comes back in fractured snapshots, images rising unbidden from the deep wells of childhood memory.
“That was a mental escape for me, out the window and into nature,” Mr Fabbro says. “Apparently I was sent there again but I can’t remember what happened [the second time]. It’s like my mind shut down as I crossed the playground.”
Mr Fabbro was just 11 when he was raped by Jesuit priest John Byrne at the prestigious Xavier College in Melbourne.
Not long after, he was sent to board at St Ignatius’ College in Sydney, where another priest (who can’t be named for legal reasons) took a liking to him. This abuser, he alleges, would make him strip, and belt him with a leather strap while the other boarders slept in the dormitory next door.
Mr Fabbro, now 55, says if the church is to continue running schools it needs to be held to a higher standard.
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