AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
DAVID MARR
April 20, 2012
THE former priest Brian Spillane has been sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for a series of sexual assaults on young girls – attacks described as “serious, planned and callous” by Judge Michael Finnane of the NSW District Court.
“The offender used his position as a priest to gain access to the homes in which each of his victims lived,” said the judge. “He was very trusted and the parents of each of the victims readily gave him access to their daughters because of that trust and the esteem in which he was held.”
The assaults began in the late 1970s when Spillane was on the staff of St Stanislaus College, a boys’ boarding school in Bathurst. They continued when he became a parish priest in Sydney. He later returned to St Stanislaus as school chaplain.
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