James M. Miller’s the Priests: Sins of the Newcastle Fathers Laid Bare

By David Brearley
The Australian
August 27, 2016

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/james-m-millers-the-priests-sins-of-the-newcastle-fathers-laid-bare/news-story/9fa0d4114ce58c7550a1219abed23dd1

A Catholic lad coming of age in 1970s Newcastle was educated at his peril. The Marist Brothers operated two boys high schools in the region, neither of them safe. The third option was Saint Pius X College, staffed largely by the priests of what was then the Diocese of Maitland.

Pius was a diabolical place. The teacher-priests lived in quarters attached to the main classroom block, an arrangement that raised no eyebrows in that fabulously innocent decade.

The worst of them by a great margin was Father John Denham, perhaps not Australia’s most notorious pedophile priest but quite possibly the most prolific and without question the most expensive from the church’s perspective. His only competition in this regard is another Novocastrian, Father Vince Ryan.

Denham is jailed until 2028 for the sexual abuse of 57 boys, some of them barely out of preschool, most of them Pius students in their early teens. Police believe he abused twice that number and more, and the record shows he did so with uncommon brutality. From 1975 until 1980, according to judge Helen Syme of the District Court, Denham treated Pius as his personal “pedophilic smorgasbord”.

The monster was out of control. “For reasons known only to them,” Syme said in her sentencing remarks, “other teachers and priests did not intervene to stop the abuse of which most of the students were aware.”

James M. Miller, author of The Priests, reckons he knows why. He writes that he was sexually abused on four occasions in 1978 by the principal at Pius, the late Father Tom Brennan. He was 15 at the time. He says Brennan and his deputy, the late Father Patrick Helferty, spent the next 30 years intimidating him and threatening the livelihood of his family.

More controversially, he says the reason Brennan tolerated Denham’s epic crime spree, at a time when standard operating procedure was simply to shift the priest to another parish once his offending became known, was blackmail. In short, Denham knew that Brennan and Helferty were “lifetime lovers” and he threatened to out them both if they moved against him. “I would go further and say that whether he actually put the specific threat counts for naught,” Miller writes. “It would have been enough that Brennan and Helferty believed Denham would do so. Denham had the senior leadership of SPX right where he wanted them.”

Neither Brennan nor Helferty is here to defend himself, so a great deal hinges on Miller’s unsourced assertion that he “recently became aware” of their relationship. Many older Catholics will have trouble accepting the truth of what he has to say. Others, more credulous, will question his motives for saying it. Almost 40 years have passed, after all, and the world still turns. A notorious and profoundly insensitive utterance of Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher — “dwelling crankily on old wounds” — continues to resonate in this wretched little corner of Christendom.

Doubters will doubt, and they’re entitled, but it should be remembered that Brennan was found guilty in 2009 of providing a false statement to police who were investigating Denham. Moreover, at the time of his death in 2012, Brennan was facing a more serious concealment charge relating to Denham, as well as multiple child sexual assault charges in his own right.

It should also be remembered that this is Catholic Newcastle, a realm of ghosts and fisher kings. Sick priest for sick priest, crook brother for crook brother, conviction for conviction, suicide for suicide, only Ballarat can match its appalling history. This month alone, two Novocastrian priests and one Marist Brother have appeared in court for sentencing. Another Marist, a school principal in Newcastle in the early 70s, has been charged with indecent assault of a minor. And the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is just about to shift its attention from the Hunter’s Anglican clerics to its Catholics.

A barrister by profession, Miller is not especially interested in defending his allegations, knowing that what happens between a man and a boy behind closed doors can never be established to everyone’s satisfaction.

Rather, he is concerned to describe the terrible and abiding consequences of his years at Pius. This he does in prose so sober that he seems at times to be the dispassionate observer of his own demise. Occasionally the facade slips and he twice expresses the desire, or at least a willingness, to shoot pedophiles who taught in Newcastle’s Catholic schools. Healing is a journey without end, but you sense it’s one Miller has only just begun.

His twin themes are his own paranoia and the existence of a “Catholic mafia”, and he is wise enough to concede that the first might queer his perception of the second. Survivors of child sexual assault are not typically this articulate, yet the story Miller tells is entirely typical. That’s not a failing, nor is it a criticism. It’s just a hard, ugly fact.

David Brearley is a journalist and author.

The Priests

By James M. Miller