"It's Wrong. It's Unfair': a Mother's 23-year Search for a Church Apology

By Patrick Wood
ABC News
February 23, 2017

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-23/eileen-piper-seeks-apology-for-her-daughter/8296642

[with video]

Eileen Piper has told her daughter's tragic story so many times she can recount the facts with a steely determination.

There was a Catholic youth club, a priest, allegations of horrific sexual abuse followed by Church denial. And then her daughter committed suicide.

The 92-year-old is kept awake at night by these events, yet said she finds strength in chasing the truth about what happened to her child.

PHOTO: Stephanie Piper a week before she died, in 1994. (Supplied: Eileen Piper)

It's only when asked what she would like to hear from the archbishops who will appear at the child abuse royal commission that Eileen finally starts to look worn out.

"I've got a broken heart," she said.

"They must help me get over this, just apologise … It's wrong."

The story begins in the late 1970s when Eileen's daughter Stephanie, then just a teenager, joined a church youth club that included a father by the name of Gerard Mulvale.

Eileen didn't know it at the time, but years later Stephanie would tell her that Mulvale raped and abused her.

"He seduced Stephanie and scared her and threatened her and told her because she was an adopted child she was born out of sin and she had to pay for it," Eileen said.

"I can't imagine what she went through, because she was so shy and timid and very modest."

In 1993, following an earlier suicide attempt, Stephanie brought the complaint to the Melbourne Archdiocese, where the church's Special Issues Committee determined her allegations could not be substantiated.

So she took her story to the police, who believed her and went on to interview and lay charges against Mulvale.

But when Stephanie died in January 1994, aged 32, the case was dropped. Mulvale was later convicted of sex crimes against two teenage boys in her friendship circle, but Eileen was left in limbo.

To this day the Melbourne Archdiocese stands by its original decision that Stephanie wasn't abused, and Eileen has spent the last 23 years maintaining her daughter was telling the truth and seeking an apology from church officials.

This week she travelled to Sydney to attend the final days of public hearings at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

She is hoping to confront Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart.

"Would you please be kind and listen to me? Just give me five minutes with you," she wants to say to him.

"Please apologise. You must find an apology in all that background of what you did. It was wrong. It was just not right. It was unfair."

Eileen said by denying Stephanie's story they have made her out to be a liar.

"At one interview she went to, she came out and she said, 'What's the use? Nobody will believe me.' And she broke down," Eileen said.

"Wherever she went, they were there, a brick wall, and they treated her so badly.

"What happened to Stephanie is something that, as a mother … I'll never recover from."

Eileen has since started an online petition addressed to Archbishop Hart that calls on the Melbourne Archdiocese to apologise and provide compensation. It currently has more than 50,000 supporters.

Eileen said she will continue her fight as long as she's physically able to.

"If something else happened to me, well, I've tried, I've tried, I've given my all," she said.