Alleged Child-sex Abuser Priest, 79, Dies Weeks before His Trial

By Dan Box
The Austrlaian
January 13, 2017

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An Anglican priest facing dozens of child-sex abuse charges after an interstate police investigation has died weeks before he was to face court, and 42 years after his victims­ first attempted to get the church to acknowledge his crimes.

George Parker, 79, from the Ballarat diocese in Victoria, died on Tuesday, provoking anger from one of his alleged victims who said he had spent “a lifetime just trying to get this priest to answer for what he did”.

Ballarat bishop Gary Weatherill said yesterday that others in the church did not tell him the priest was a suspected child abuser when he took charge of the diocese in 2011.

“There are no records of anything, but presumably there was a conversation between one of my predecessors and one of the previous­ bishops of Newcastle,” in NSW, where Parker worked as a priest until 1996, he said.

“It’s the way the church operated and it’s caused a lot of grief to a lot of people.”