BishopAccountability.org
 
 

Doveton Parish Abuse Horrors Disclosed

Sky News
November 19, 2015

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/local/melbourne/2015/11/20/doveton-parish-abuse-horrors-disclosed.html

One Melbourne parish. Four pedophile priests. One after another.

For three decades, the chief spiritual leaders for Doveton's Holy Family Parish were its child parishioners' worst nightmares.

'It's like having a terrifying regime in there for a long period of time,' victims' advocate Helen Last said.

'To have them being very sick, very dysfunctional, pathological and some of them very violent, that keeps the parish quiet, keeps them frightened, highly anxious, confused, paranoid, and so they don't seek help.'

From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a string of priests abused children in the outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Doveton.

Father Thomas O'Keeffe was a violent offender who tortured some of his altar boys in his time in charge of the Holy Family Parish in the 1970s, Ms Last said.

'We know that that kind of sadistic sexual behaviour went on for years and years,' the In Good Faith Foundation CEO said.

Strangely, like another Doveton parish priest in the 1980s and 1990s, O'Keeffe had guns.

'The boys thought the guns were for the protection of the altar money and that most priests had guns,' Ms Last said.

'That's a very strong example of what was going on right in the religious centre of the parish.'

Father Peter Searson liked to walk around the Holy Family Primary School playground carrying a revolver and dressed in army fatigues.

'Why the hell didn't somebody give him a psychiatric assessment and figure out what the hell was going on with this bloke. They just left him there,' Broken Rites spokesman Dr Wayne Chamley said.

There were complaints about Searson sexually harassing children at his previous parish in Sunbury, before his time at Doveton in the 1980s and 1990s.

Broken Rites also believes the independent commissioner for the archdiocese's Melbourne Response has abuse complaints against Searson from his earlier parishes in the 1960s. His only conviction was for physically assaulting an altar boy, for which he received a six-month good behaviour bond in 1997.

Searson had a fetish for confessional, former Holy Family Primary School principal Graeme Sleeman told Victoria's child abuse parliamentary inquiry.

Some of the children would say 'Father's creepy'.

They were frightened of Searson. They did not want to go into the church when he was there. They did not want to go to confession with him.

Parents complained regularly about the priest's treatment of the children, Mr Sleeman said.

'I said: I've told the authorities. It has gone to the top, and they've come back and said they've spoken to Father.'

'Therefore we thought: 'They'll do something. They wouldn't let this happen. They're men of God. They're honourable.''

Sixty parents and parishioners petitioned for the priest to be removed, yet nothing happened.

Mr Sleeman resigned in frustration in 1986, hoping it would force the church authorities to take action. Instead he was cast aside.

A later teacher, Carmel Rafferty, was told when she started at the school that children were not safe around the priest and staff must be vigilant.

Children reported being abused by Searson, begging for safety.

Ms Rafferty told the Victorian inquiry she felt her career was jeopardised after she raised Searson's behaviour with senior Catholic Church representatives.

Mr Sleeman had been asked to go to Doveton when the nuns walked out, though he was never told why. It was 1981, when the parish priest was Father Victor Rubeo, another sex offender.

Mr Sleeman pleaded with the vicar-general to send someone pastorally minded, aware that Father Wilfred Baker had previously been in Doveton 'and the people really needed some care'.

Church authorities knew about allegations against Baker, an assistant parish priest in Doveton in the mid-1970s, in 1978. They moved him.

Baker, O'Keeffe, Rubeo and Searson.

The parish appears to have became something of a dumping ground for problem priests, Dr Chamley said.

'There was a series of problem priests and they all seemed to end up down there. These priests were dropped in there and it was hoped that the problem was going to go away and unfortunately it didn't,' he said.

Another Doveton priest sexually abused women, Ms Last said.

The number of offending priests in Doveton could be six in a row over 35 years according to Ms Rafferty's inquiry evidence: the four pedophiles and two who abused women.

It is hoped that the child abuse royal commission's inquiry into the church's handling of child sexual abuse allegations in Doveton and against other pedophile priests in the Archdiocese of Melbourne will shed further light on what senior authorities knew and how they responded.

'I think there will be questions about knowledge by senior people when decisions were made to let priests move voluntarily from one parish to another or be moved more or less by executive decision,' Dr Chamley said.

Francis Sullivan, chief executive of the Catholic Church's Truth, Justice and Healing Council, agrees many questions still need to be answered.

'I think the decades of abuse that have occurred in the Archdiocese of Melbourne have involved mishandling by the diocese, have involved at times the cover-ups,' Mr Sullivan said.

'It's incumbent upon the church to come forward and explain because the community has been horrified by this, scandalised by it.'

 

 

 

 

 




.

 
 

Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.