AUSTRALIA
The Australian
[Unholy vows– The Weekend Australian Magazine]
HARRY EDWARDS THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEMBER 11, 2013
A FORMER NSW priest who kept a marriage secret for over a year and blew the whistle on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is among the thousands killed by Typhoon Haiyan in The Philippines.
Kevin Lee, 49, was a parish priest at the Padre Pio Church in Glenmore Park in western Sydney and one-time police chaplain. He is reported to have been killed while swimming as part of a religious ritual.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed a 49-year-old man from NSW had died in the storm but declined to confirm the name.
Mr Lee spoke out on abuse in the Catholic Church, including in his book Unholy Silence.
Last year he provided NSW police with information about at least one Catholic school teacher who he believed had sexually abused boys at a religious school in western Sydney in the 1990s.
After 20 years as a priest, Mr Lee was defrocked in 2012 when he revealed he had married.
He had been living on the island of Samar in The Philippines with his wife Josefina, whom he had secretly married in 2011 in Manila, and their baby daughter Michelle, born in September.
Mr Lee told The Weekend Australian last year that when an alleged victim of sexual abuse had come to him seeking help, he had “taken it to police this time because I’m tired of keeping secrets for the Catholic Church”.
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