St Stanislaus College, Bathurst Closes the Door on the Media

By Joanne McCarthy
Newcastle Herald
June 8, 2017

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/4716541/an-end-to-euphemisms/

IT was bad timing for St Stanislaus College at Bathurst in February, when one of its most notorious teacher/priests, Brian Spillane, was sentenced for terrible sex crimes against students only days before the college marked its 150th anniversary.

In a statement after the sentencing the college acknowledged it was “deeply sorry” for what Spillane’s victims experienced at the Vincentian school.

“The abuse they experienced was a failure by this staff member to fulfil the college mission of proclaiming the Gospel in the spirit of St Vincent de Paul and to open them to God’s loving presence in their lives,” the statement said.

No, actually, I’ll take issue with that.

Spillane didn’t just stuff up on theology. He was a predator who committed crimes, including what used to be called buggery, against boys. That’s why he’s in jail. If he’d just failed to proclaim the Gospel he could have had a few sessions with the Bible. If he’d just sinned – say, lied about saying his prayers that morning – he could have confessed.

But he committed crimes. In a statement nine years after Spillane was first charged, and after legal challenges and enormous heartache borne by his victims during that time, the college needed to say those words. Enough with the euphemisms.

The college statement commended a newspaper editorial headed “One man’s evil can’t define a whole school”.

“Without in any way diminishing the horrendous experiences of young men who have suffered abuse at this college, the editorial draws attention to the many reasons for which we are able to celebrate our sesquicentenary on Sunday,” the statement said.

There was no mention of the number of Spillane’s victims, or that records show more than 160 former students have alleged they were sexually assaulted by college teachers/priests/brothers, or there’s been convictions. The statement doesn’t say anything about the 16 men – Vincentian priests, brothers and lay teachers – associated with the college who have had serious child sex allegations made against them. Nine of the 16 have been convicted of child sex crimes either in NSW or other Australian states.

Only three were acquitted after trials.

A judge granted a permanent stay against one St Stanislaus Vincentian priest because of his age and health. The Vincentians paid compensation to men who made serious allegations against two other St Stanislaus priests, and in a final case a number of women made serious child sex allegations against a priest who died before the allegations were raised. The offences occurred when the women were young children.

In other words, out of the 16 St Stanislaus men alleged to have committed crimes against children, only three were acquitted outright. Those acquittals were in a criminal justice system that Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse chair Justice Peter McClellan said had such “entrenched barriers” against child sexual abuse victims that change is needed.

On Wednesday I attended the state funeral for Anthony Foster in Melbourne. Two of Mr Foster’s three daughters were sexually assaulted by a notorious Catholic priest. One daughter committed suicide. The second was left with severe disabilities after she was hit by a car while binge drinking.

The last time I saw Anthony was in Sydney in March at the final royal commission public hearing into the Catholic Church. Bishops and archbishops from around Australia, theologians and members of Pope Francis’s papal commission on child protection gave evidence. After all these years of apologies and mea culpas from the Catholic Church, a lot of it was depressing.

As papal commission member Baroness Sheila Hollins told the hearing, “There are some people (in the church) struggling to come to terms with the safety of children and its responsibilities in that area”.

Anyone buying the line that Pope Francis is the man to confront the culture that allowed the church to commit crimes against tens of thousands of children around the world for decades, then covered-up those crimes and protected offenders, and then denied, minimised and re-abused victims when the game was up, need only look at transcripts from that public hearing to face reality. Pope Francis might be an improvement on his predecessors, but his actions and public statements on child sexual abuse are not good.

My last conversation with Anthony Foster, a beautiful man who died, aged 64, after 20 years of holding the Catholic Church to account with his extraordinary wife Chrissie by his side, was about how the church is still producing too many apologies, and its representatives are still making too many flowery speeches, while their actions fall well short of the mark.

For the past two weeks I’ve been working to have non publication orders placed by courts over some of the St Stanislaus offenders’ names lifted, so that a full account of what happened at that school can be done. The orders were put in place so that trials of some offenders would not prejudice the trials of others.

The Vincentians haven’t tried to have those orders lifted. In public statements the Vincentians haven’t acknowledged the totality of what happened at that one Catholic high school, which even the offenders’ solicitor in 2009 called “one of the biggest sexual assault cases in Australian history”.

St Stanislaus has invited survivors and “members of the community” to a “public apology and liturgy of sorrow and hope” – a Catholic Church ritual – at the school where survivors were sexually assaulted. The scene of the crimes.

Its website says, “Please note that this occasion will be media free”. No doubt the Vincentians will say this is to “protect” survivors, but those I’ve spoken with want publicity and an end to secrecy. They want the media to shine a light.

The college announced the apology in its February statement. It even named the date, June 16, which struck me as worth checking.

The Vincentians chose to make a behind closed doors apology to child sex victims on the day the order’s founder, St Vincent de Paul, was made a saint.