BishopAccountability.org

Church Harboured Fr Victor Rubeo for 3 Decades after His Offences

Broken Rites
January 1, 2012

http://brokenrites.alphalink.com.au/nletter/page269-victor-rubeo.html

The Catholic Church in Australia harboured a priest, Father Victor Gabriel Rubeo, for three decades after he indecently assaulted two boys in one of his earliest parishes (in Melbourne in the 1960s). In 1996 he pleaded guilty in court after these two victims finally spoke to police. On 28 October 2011, Rubeo appeared in court again, charged with 30 additional offences (in the 1960s) against the same two boys. He was ordered to re-appear on 16 December 2011 for a full hearing but he died (aged 78) before this next court date.

Broken Rites will refer to these two boys as "Tom" and "Wayne" (not their real names). They were born in the early 1950s and were related to each other. In the 1960s they lived at Laverton, a Melbourne outer-suburb.

According to a prosecution file which was compiled for the 2011 court proceedings, Rubeo's offences allegedly began when Tom and Wayne were aged 11 or 12 and became more frequent when the boys were 13 to 15. At the time, neither Tom nor Wayne knew that the other was being abused.

Rubeo gathered a large following of boys, especially altar boys.

He encouraged them to visit his parish house, where he would help them with their schoolwork. Any boy was welcome to stay overnight.

Parents trusted Rubeo. They were confident that their children were safe while in the custody of a Catholic priest.

Rubeo entertained Tom and Wayne and other boys at restaurants and gave them presents. He would take one or more boys on a trip — for example, or to Adelaide, or to a farm in southern New South Wales, or to Tasmania or to Fiji.

Rubeo would allow a boy to drink alcohol.

In separate police interviews, Tom and Wayne told how Rubeo introduced each of these two boys to "sex". He did this in secret, to one boy (either Tom or Wayne) at a time. During those years, neither Tom nor Wayne knew that each other was being abused by Rubeo.

In his abuse of Tom or Wayne, Rubeo would invasively massage the boy's naked genitals and he would instruct the boy to do the same thing to Rubeo's naked genitals.

This meant that the boy's first experience of "sex" was with another male — a "celibate" Catholic priest.

Neither Tom nor Wayne was able to tell their "devout Catholic parents" about Rubeo's behaviour because the boys expected that their parents would not believe negative things about a Catholic priest (especially about the popular Father Rubeo).

After Tom and Wayne reached adulthood, their parents continued to be friends of Rubeo — and so did Tom and Wayne, even after Rubeo moved to other parishes.

In their adult years, both Tom and Wayne experienced personal difficulties. Each eventually realised that the abuse by a Catholic priest (plus the church's secrecy and cover-up) disrupted their adolescent development and damaged their adult life. By the time they realised the full extent of the damage, Tom and Wayne were into their thirties and forties.

And it was it was only in their mature years that Tom and Wayne revealed to each other that each had been abused by Rubeo.

The priest's background

Victor Gabriel Rubeo was born in Australia in January 1933. He studied for the priesthood at the Melbourne Catholic seminary, where at one stage (according to his police interview) his fellow students included Gerald Francis Ridsdale.

(Father Ridsdale, who was a year younger than Rubeo, eventually received lengthy jail sentences for child sexual crimes.)

Rubeo was ordained as a priest of the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese in 1959, aged 26, and his long career covered various parishes.

In the early 1960s, Rubeo was based at St Mary's parish, Altona, in Melbourne's west, and his work there included being a chaplain at local Catholic schools.

From 1962 to 1970 he ministered at Laverton, in Melbourne's south-west (situated on the highway to Geelong). The Laverton parish (called St Martin de Porres) was becoming one of the fastest growing perishes in the Melbourne archdiocese. St Martin's parish eventually absorbed the church of Queen of Peace at Altona Meadows.

From 1962 to 1964 at Laverton, Rubeo lived in a temporary presbytery. From 1965 to 1988 he lived in a private house in a Laverton residential street (and some of Rubeo's abuse of Tom or Wayne occurred in this private house). In 1968 he moved into a newly-built Laverton presbytery, where he remained until 1972 when he transferred to other Melbourne parishes. These included:

    Doveton (in Melbourne's outer south-east) in the late 1970s and early 1980s;

    Reservoir and Preston East (in Melbourne's north) in the late 1980s and early 1990s; and

    Boronia (in Melbourne's east) in the mid-1990s.

He also served briefly as a relieving priest at St Finbar's parish, Brighton East (in Melbourne's south), and possibly did similar stints elsewhere.

First charged in 1996

Father Vic Rubeo first came to police attention in 1996 — that is, 37 years after he was ordained. In 1996, detectives were investigating a complaint by a woman who said that Rubeo committed a serious sexual assault against her in the Doveton parish in the early 1980s. This woman complained first to the Melbourne archdiocese administration but they took no action. She then contacted Broken Rites and the police. Rubeo was interviewed by detectives from the Victoria Police child exploitation squad (later re-named as the sexual crimes squad).

In his 1996 interview, Rubeo contested the woman's complaint (her serious complaint, if proven, could have earned him a jail sentence). However, he admitted to detectives that he had committed "a few" less serious offences 30 years previously while at the Laverton parish. The detectives located Tom and Wayne, who each described Rubeo's 1960s behaviour, although not in full detail. In mid-1996 the prosecutors decided to proceed against Rubeo in relation to some of the Laverton incidents rather than the more serious Doveton case. The 1996 charges were confined to only a couple of selected incidents — one indecent assault (that is, indecent touching) on Tom and one on Wayne.

Guilty plea in 1996

In Ringwood Magistrates Court on 8 October 1996, Rubeo pleaded guilty regarding both Tom and Wayne. As the court was told of only two offences (and as this small number could be interpreted as merely "isolated" incidents), the 1996 magistrate imposed a lenient sentence on Rubeo — just a two-year good-behaviour bond. A few days later, Broken Rites checked with the court office and obtained verification of the sentence.

The church remained silent

Meanwhile, on 22 August 1996, after the police told him that the charges would go to court, Fr Vic Rubeo resigned from his Boronia parish. This was six weeks before the scheduled court date. Parishioners were not told that he was facing criminal charges. Even after his October 1996 guilty plea, the Melbourne church authorities did not tell Rubeo's parishioners.

In March 1997, the Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun asked Broken Rites for information about clergy-abuse court cases in the Melbourne archdiocese. Broken Rites cited the example of Rubeo's guilty plea. The journalist verified this information at the court office and then mentioned the Rubeo case in an article published on 23 March 1997. Thus, Rubeo's various parishes (including his then current parish, Boronia) heard for the first time about his court appearance and the guilty plea.

On the very next day, 24 March 1997, two parish primary schools (St Joseph's at Boronia and St Bernadette's at The Bssin) informed parents in a newsletter. (Rubeo had been acting as a chaplain at these, and other, schools.)

In the local suburban newspaper in the Boronia area, the Knox News on 8 April 1997, the Catholic Education Office defended the schools' delay in advising parents, claiming that the school principals were unaware until the newspaper item appeared. CEO spokeswoman Maria Kirkwood declined to explain why the church did not advise the principals earlier.

The revelation in the two newspapers made it impossible for Rubeo to be re-instated in a new parish, even after his two-year good-behaviour bond, which was due to expire in October 1998.

Retirement

On his retirement in August 1996, Rubeo was aged 63. He was entitled to receive the normal retirement benefits which the archdiocesan superannuation fund provides for retired priests. In addition, he would be able to apply for the Australian Government's age-pension when he reached 65 in January 1998.

Rubeo moved into a house at Portarlington, a seaside town, 107 kilometres south-west of Melbourne, where spent his retirement years.

More charges in 2011

In 2011, Tom and Wayne were still feeling hurt by how their lives had been damaged by the church's harbouring of Rubeo during the years of their abuse. They regretted that only a couple of Rubeo's offences had been mentioned in the 1996 court hearing. And they were dissatisfied by how the church authorities had been silent about Rubeo.

In 2011 Tom and Wayne each made a further written statement for specialist police in the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse (SOCA) unit at the Knox Police Complex in Melbourne's east. They described their 1960s experiences in full. Officers from the Knox SOCA unit went to Rubeo's Portarlington house to interview him.

Rubeo consulted lawyers. He protested that the 2011 charges were unnecessary because he had already admitted a couple of offences against Tom and Wayne in the 1996 proceedings. He realised that the larger number of charges in 2011 would indicate that Tom and Wayne were each abused on more than one occasion.

Furthermore, Rubeo was alarmed that, whereas the charges in 1996 were for plain "indecent assault", many of the charges in 2011 (but based on the laws that operated in the 1960s) were in a more serious category — "indecent assault of a male", which could result in a longer jail sentence than plain generic "indecent assault".

On 28 October 2011, Rubeo appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates Court for a "filing" hearing. This was a procedural event, so that the court could fix a date for a detailed hearing.

Rubeo indicated that he intended to plead "not guilty". The court then scheduled a contested hearing (called a "committal" hearing) for 16 December 2011. In cases such as this, it is common for a defence legal team to have an out-of-court meeting with the prosecutors, seeking to have the number of charges reduced, perhaps with the "indecent assault of a male" downgraded to plain "indecent sssault".

However, shortly before the December 16 hearing, Rubeo's lawyers told the prosecutors that Rubeo would be unable to attend the hearing because of health problems. Therefore the prosecutors intended to ask the December 16 hearing for a re-scheduled date in 2012.

On the morning of 16 December 2011, the court was told that Rubeo had died. He was nearly 79 years old.

Prosecutors obtained a copy of his death certificate. The death was evidently from natural causes.

The court proceedings were cancelled

No death notice for Rubeo appeared in Victorian newspapers, but according to a funeral notice on the Herald Sun website, Rubeo's funeral took place in Melbourne on 20 December 2011.

Now Tom and Wayne will not achieve "their day in court". Their only way of obtaining justice now would be to take civil action against the Melbourne Catholic archdiocese through a solicitor, demanding proper compensation for their damaged lives (that is, not merely the relatively tiny amount that is offered through the church's in-house process).

Footnote

Fr Victor Rubeo was not the only "problem priest" in his various parishes.

After his period at Laverton, he was succeeded there (in the 1970s and 1980s) by Fr Gerard Fitzgerald, who was investigated by police in the 1960s for alleged child-sex offences at the Coburg parish in Melbourne's north.

When Rubeo went to the Reservoir parish (in Melbourne's north), he had been preceded there by a serial child-abuser, Fr Michael Glennon, who ended up in jail.

Other child-sex offenders from the Melbourne archdiocese who spent time at the Doveton parish (before Rubeo went there) included:

Fr Wilfred Baker;

Fr Peter Searson; and

Fr Thomas O'Keeffe.




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