Catholic Church Depravity: More Damning Evidence Surfaces

By Barry Duke
The Freethinker
June 8, 2012

http://freethinker.co.uk/2012/06/08/catholic-church-depravity-more-damning-evidence-surfaces/

Posted in: Catholic Church, gay, Global Catholic abuse scandal, Oh no! Not again!, Religion and crime, Religious child abuse, The Freethinker, You Couldn't Make It Up

Serial abuser Frank Klep, right, was appointed 'spiritual' adviser to a fellow paedophile priest, Victor Rubeo

A CATHOLIC priest, charged in 2005 with 28 counts of indecent assault and one of buggery, had earlier been appointed “spiritual advisor” to a fellow priest charged with multiple child sex offences.

According to this report, in 1994 the then Vicar-General of the Melbourne archdiocese, Gerald Cudmore, oversaw the appointment of Father Frank Klep as spiritual director to Father Victor Rubeo after child sex abuse allegations about Rubeo were first reported to the archdiocese.

At that time, Klep had been charged by police with child sex offences. He was convicted of indecent assault in December 1994. Despite his conviction, Klep continued to act as Rubeo’s spiritual adviser during 1995.

Since the 1980s, Klep had been the subject of repeated child sex abuse complaints from parents of students attending the Salesian order’s school at Rupertswood in Melbourne’s outer north-west. He was sentenced to perform community service for his 1994 conviction and sent to Samoa by the Salesian order in 1998, when it became clear he was to be charged with more child sex offences.

Klep was deported from Samoa in 2004 and charged with numerous child sex charges on his return to Melbourne. He was jailed for five years and 10 months in 2006.

After a complaint had been made against him, Rubeo offered to resign as a priest in 1994 but this was rejected by the archdiocese, which took no action against him until August 1996, when police began investigating a sexual abuse complaint about him lodged by a woman.

Although he denied the woman’s claim, Rubeo admitted to police a few instances of abuse against Tony Hersbach and his twin brother, Will, dating back to the 1960s.

In October 1996, Rubeo pleaded guilty to one charge of indecent assault against each of the Hersbach twins in the Ringwood Magistrates Court and received a two-year good behaviour bond without conviction.

Rubeo died of natural causes in December last year on the day he was due to face a committal hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates Court after being charged with 30 fresh child sex offences. He was 78.

The twin who had been abused by Rubeo for eight years, from the age of 11, was Tony Hersbach. He only discovered Klep’s appointment in 2010, and was “amazed” that senior church leaders thought it appropriate to have a convicted paedophile advising another child-abusing priest. He said:

It makes you wonder what they talked about, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, it has come to light in the US that paedophile priests had been given “golden handshakes” by Cardinal Timothy Dolan after they had been accused of sexually abusing minors.

Dolan, of New York, authorised payments of as much as $20,000 to the kiddy-fiddlers as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee.

Dolan lied to reporters when he initially dismissed news of the payments as

False, preposterous and unjust.

But a document unearthed during bankruptcy proceedings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and made public by victims’ advocates reveals that the archdiocese did make such payments to multiple accused priests to encourage them to seek dismissal, thereby allowing the church to remove them from the payroll.

Dolan had described at least one payment to Franklyn Becker — who had been accused of abusing 10 minors — as “an act of charity” to help the priest “pay for health insurance”.

Dolan, by the way, is now on a crusade against “immorality” in New York in the form of same sex marriage, which he has described as“unjust,” “immoral,” and “unnatural”. As New York was preparing marriage equality in June, Dolan thundered:

This is a very violation of what we consider natural law that’s embedded in every man and woman and we’re really worried as Americans that it’s going to be detrimental to the common good. We still worry about the detrimental effect upon society, upon culture, and certainly upon our individual churches.