AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun
Late paedophile priest James Patrick Fletcher’s crime continue to hurt Catholic Church
ANDREW DOWDELL THE ADVERTISER MARCH 17, 2015
PAEDOPHILE priest James Patrick Fletcher died in prison in 2006 — but the ghosts of his depraved crimes continue to haunt the Catholic Church.
Fletcher, known to his trusting congregation as Father Jim, was finally outed as a depraved and calculating paedophile when he was jailed for molesting an altar boy in the early 1990s.
The disgraced priest died while serving his sentence, but revelations in the past decade have shown his offending stretched back to at least the 1970s.
Fletcher’s housemate at the Maitland-Newcastle diocese was a young priest by the name of Philip Wilson — now the Archbishop of Adelaide.
Archbishop Wilson’s alleged involvement in turning a blind eye to or covering up Fletcher’s heinous crimes was the subject of a special inquiry and on Tuesday resulted in a criminal charge.
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