Senior Catholic Figure John Usher Admits Conflicting Accounts about Paedophile Priest

The Guardian
September 22, 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/22/senior-catholic-figure-john-usher-admits-conflicting-accounts-about-paedophile-priest

Monsignor John Usher (left) arrives at the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse. Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

A senior Catholic church figure has admitted giving conflicting accounts of what he meant in a diary entry he made about paedophile priest John Farrell and child sexual assault.

The former vicar general of Sydney John Usher told the child sexual abuse royal commission his 1992 note about a plan to defrock Farrell “following CSA [child sexual assault]” meant “following a CSA meeting”, not following assaults committed by Farrell.

Usher and another senior church official have denied that Farrell admitted to them at a September 1992 meeting that he had abused boys in the 1980s.

The commission heard that in 2012 Usher told an inquiry he couldn’t explain the “cryptic” diary note and didn’t know what it meant. But in a statement to police in May he said “CSA” referred to matters Farrell had already been in court for.

Probed about the three different accounts, he told the child sexual abuse royal commission he had “no explanation”.

“I’m only human and I made some different comments,” he said on Thursday.

The royal commission has spent the past nine days inquiring into how church leaders in Parramatta and Armidale handled the Farrell case. The inquiry was told that complaints about him sexually abusing altar boys first surfaced in 1984 at Moree, in northern New South Wales, where Farrell was an assistant priest. However, Farrell was allowed to keep working in public ministry until 1992 and wasn’t defrocked until 2005.

In 2012 an old letter surfaced that indicated Farrell admitted to sexually interfering with five boys at Moree in a 1992 meeting with Monsignor Usher and two other priests, Brian Lucas and Wayne Peters.

The letter, by Peters to his then-bishop, contradicted previous statements by the priests and Cardinal George Pell that Farrell had made no admissions.

On Wednesday Usher said he had been investigated by police over whether he and others had failed to report Farrell to the authorities.

The royal commission’s hearings on the Farrell case has been adjourned until a date to be fixed.