Royal Commission: Abuse Victim ‘got a Belting’ for Reporting Priest
The Guardian
A little girl who ran and told a nun after she had been touched by a priest "got a belting" for casting aspersions on the man, an inquiry has heard. Internal Catholic church records show the man, Father Paul Rex Brown, would later be dumped from his priestly duties following a litany of complaints. They included claims he was a drunk and that he sexually abused two boys in the 1980s. Evidence before the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse shows he has been implicated in the alleged abuse of at least six children. But his only criminal conviction before his death in 2005 related to possession of child porn. Deacon Christopher Wallace, the chancellor of the Lismore diocese, gave evidence on Friday that three people came forward as victims of Brown through the church's internal process, Towards Healing. One was Jennifer Ingham, 51, who approached Towards Healing in 2012 and this week spoke out about her anguish as a result of years of sexual abuse by Brown when she was a teenager. Wallace said the first woman to complain about Brown through Towards Healing came forward in 2002, when the priest was alive. "The allegation was [as a schoolchild in 1959] that she walked in on Father Brown in the act of sexually interfering with a child in the sacristy of the cathedral," Wallace said on Friday. "She alleged that he also abused her, touched her and she then fled to near the bell tower to escape, reported the matter to a nun and got a belting for casting aspersions on the priest." Brown denied the allegations when approached by church officials in 2002. A male victim complained about Brown through Towards Healing in 2007, Wallace said. Documents tendered to the commission show that senior church figures were aware of sex abuse allegations involving Brown as early as 1985. Ingham says she disclosed her abuse to senior clergy in 1990 but the church did nothing. A priest Ingham said was present at that meeting, Father Frank Mulcahy, told the commission it never happened and he did not know her, even though he had gone to boarding school with her father, Kevin Williams, and gave him communion on his deathbed. Wallace, a former police officer, later wrote to Ingham saying he believed her account. "What he did to you was wrong and what wasn't done by the church was wrong," he wrote. The Royal Commission has clocked up its thousandth private hearing as it scrutinises institutional responses to child sex abuse. The public hearing continues in Sydney.
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