Exclusive: Review unearths years of sex abuse by Jesuits priests

By John Ferguson
Australian
February 2, 2020

https://bit.ly/2u3KRXL

Sex-offence allegations against 21 Jesuit priests and lay staff have been unearthed in an independent review into the society’s ­duplicitous handling of serial pedophile and former brother Victor Higgs.

Former Victorian Supreme Court chief justice Marilyn ­Warren said the 21 other offenders were accused of misconduct between 1968 and 1971, with Higgs transferred to Sydney’s St Ignatius at Riverview from Adelaide’s St Ignatius at Athelstone in 1970.

It is the first time the extent of offending across the order in the late 1960s and early 70s had been made public and was cited by Ms Warren as relevant to the society’s decision-making when dealing with Higgs.

Higgs, now in his 80s and in jail, was sent from Adelaide to Sydney despite the order’s hierarchy knowing that he had ­assaulted children at the Athelstone campus.

Ms Warren’s review into Higgs has revealed an extraordinary lack of documentation previously kept by the order in Australia, including three of its marquee schools — Riverview, Xavier College in Melbourne and St Ignatius in Adelaide.

She found that at least three complaints about Higgs’s behaviour were made to St Ignatius’s then Athelstone rector, the late Father Frank Wallace, before Higgs was shifted to Sydney in a state of internal disgrace.

Ms Warren found that the order’s then provincial, the late Father Francis Kelly, knew that Higgs had offended against children at the Adelaide campus.

Despite these complaints, Higgs was moved to Sydney, where his offending intensified while working at Riverview’s boarding school.

The current-day Society of Jesus provincial, Father Brian McCoy, told The Australian that anyone with complaints about wrongdoing should approach the order, stressing it had been a lamentable chapter in its history.

“Certainly we would want people to come forward and feel free to come forward,’’ he told The Australian.

The full report of Ms Warren’s review was sent to survivors of Higgs at the weekend and comes after relentless debate about what the order knew, and when, about his depraved ways.

Higgs was an overweight ­alcoholic who preyed on dozens of children in Adelaide and Sydney, despite authorities being told very early that he was an offender. He has been convicted in both states off multiple offences.

Higgs also worked at Xavier College in Melbourne and St Aloysius in Sydney.

Victims said Higgs was a ­voyeur who also touched them on their genitalia in the guise of monitoring their sexual development. He picked on sexually underdeveloped children.

In conducting the inquiry, Ms Warren has exposed a culture where the order in the late 1960s would deliberately leave out of meeting minutes discussion about pedophiles.

“In my view, the fact of these complaints was a factor in the ­decision to move Higgs from Athelstone to Riverview in 1970,’’ she found. She wrote to the society in December seeking more documents and answers in relation to the 21 other accused.

The first of the allegations ­relating to the 21 did not surface until decades after the offences occurred and not all allegations were substantiated or referred to police, sometimes because the ­accuser did not want to progress through the courts.

Only two of the 21 accused are still with the order, one having been exonerated and the other is on restricted duties.

Regarding Higgs, Father McCoy said: “I need to apologise. … We dropped the ball and people got hurt and they’ve carried the burden. We let people down. And, yes, we failed to keep records and I think that some of the Jesuits and others didn’t think it was as serious as it was.’’

Higgs pleaded guilty in 2016 to two counts of indecent assault at St Ignatius in Adelaide and was sentenced to 2½ years’ jail for ­offences between 1968 and 1970. In 2018, he was found guilty of 16 counts of indecent assault at Riverview against six boys.

The Warren review was set up by the Jesuits to determine what the order knew and when about Higgs. Father Wallace, now dead, was the principal at the school and the review found he had been told at least three times that Higgs was an offender.

Bishop Greg O’Kelly was at Athlestone, as a scholastic, and denied knowing about Higgs’s ­activities, despite the disgraced former brother being widely lampooned by students at the time.

Ms Warren did not find against Bishop O’Kelly, although he did concede he had heard ­rumours about Higgs many years after the bishop was moved to Riverview in 1982. This was after Higgs was moved from Riverview.

“I might have heard it ­(rumours of voyeurism) once or twice, then in a way I thought it was an issue that was dead and gone because he had been moved out of a boarding school,’’ Bishop O’Kelly told the review.

The review heard that a meeting 50 years ago of the order’s consultors would not record evidence of pedophiles within their midst. Instead, these matters were recorded simply as dots.

There were no headmaster’s diaries held by St Ignatius in ­Adelaide from 1968-1971 and all the Jesuit consultors of that era are dead.

The Warren inquiry was ­conducted, in effect, as a full ­judicial review of Higgs’s movement by the order, minus coercive powers.

The current-day Jesuits have been hamstrung by a lack of records and the death or sickness of most involved.

Ms Warren said that understanding the way the order had handled the other allegations might help instruct her investigations into Higgs.

Michael Advocate, who uses a pseudonym, is a high-profile critic of the Catholic Church’s handling of the abuse scandal.

He told The Australian that the church would never rise above its past.

“It’s totally impossible for the Catholic Church to recover any relevance or self-worth,’’ he said.