Priest's victim told he'd go to hell

Sky News
November 24, 2015

http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2015/11/24/priest-s-victim-told-he-d-go-to-hell.html

The sexual abuse was the devil's way of punishing the boy for his sins, pedophile priest Peter Searson told his victim.

Searson abused the altar boy for six months from 1978, on Saturday mornings when the nine-year-old washed the Melbourne priest's car for 50 cents and mowed the lawn.

BVD was already scared of Searson, who even a fellow priest described as a bizarre human being, but his devout Catholic mum told him to do the job.

He couldn't tell anyone.

'Searson threatened me, saying I would go to hell if I told anyone, that the devil was punishing me for my sins and this is how he was doing it, that if I told anyone, I'd be taken away from my family and sent to a child's camp,' BVD told the child abuse royal commission.

'I was terrified.'

The abuse shattered BVD's innocence, his ability to trust, his faith in humanity. It still haunts the 47-year-old.

'I sit at home in the dark with the door locked because that is the only place I feel safe.'

The Catholic Church received four abuse claims against Searson, but he was never convicted of a sex offence.

During his time at Doveton parish there were complaints about Searson carrying a gun at school, animal cruelty and showing a body in a coffin to children.

He had children sit on his knee or kneel between his legs during confession and frequented the boys' toilets, counsel assisting the commission Gail Furness SC said.

Searson indecently abused a girl in the confessional, the commission heard, and held a large knife against a child's chest in 1993.

Ms Furness said there was no serious investigation of any complaint made about Searson during the 1980s and early 1990s.

It included a delegation of Doveton parish teachers who told then auxiliary bishop George Pell about Searson harassing children, staff and parents, the coffin incident, the animal cruelty and the unnecessary use of the children's toilets.

Then bishop Pell - now a cardinal and the Vatican's financial chief - passed on what was said to the then vicar general, Monsignor Hilton Deakin, Ms Furness said.

Former priest Philip O'Donnell said Sunbury parish sisters told him Searson - who he described as a bizarre and psychiatrically disturbed man - was taking children into his room for sex education.