MELBOURNE Priest Showered with Boy

9 News
November 23, 2015

http://www.9news.com.au/national/2015/11/24/12/35/melbourne-priest-showered-with-boy

Priests don't do those things. Then Melbourne archbishop Frank Little did not believe Father Wilfred Baker had abused a boy when confronted by the parents, telling them they should be supporting their parish priest.

Baker was fixated on the teenager, former priest Philip O'Donnell says. Besotted with him. Obsessed.

He showered with the boy and taught him to drive sitting on the Gladstone Park priest's lap.

"I just thought it was utterly inappropriate for an adult male, particularly a parish priest, to be showering with a young lad," Mr O'Donnell told the child abuse royal commission on Tuesday.

Archbishop Little did not believe the allegation when the boy's parents complained in 1978, Mr O'Donnell said.

"The parents found him evasive. He apparently said to them he didn't believe priests did these things," Mr O'Donnell told the commission.

"He complained that it was a role of the laity to support their priests and not complain against them."

Mr O'Donnell said Baker would constantly talk about the boy as they had dinner and was stunned when told a formal complaint was made.

"He said 'Phil, I was only being a father to the boy'.

"He was very shattered that the allegation had been made about him, denied it, and just said he was a carer to the boy, as a father would be."

Baker was moved to another parish about five months later, once a new church was built in Eltham. He cried when told he had to go.

He later moved to St James Parish in North Richmond, in 1992.

Former St James Primary School principal Patricia Taylor will give evidence that Catholic Education Office personnel warned her never to send children to the presbytery by themselves with Baker.

The inquiry heard Ms Taylor went to her regional bishop Monsignor Peter Connor, who said "research tells us once a pedophile always a pedophile".

Baker was jailed for four years in 1999 for abusing eight boys. He died in 2014 while awaiting trial for further offences.

Archbishop Little died in 2008.