AUSTRALIA
The Australian
Dan Box
From:The Australian
July 10, 2012
A FORMER priest at the centre of a sex abuse scandal will be asked to step aside from a council committee in Armidale, in northern NSW.
Known as Father F for legal reasons, the former Catholic cleric allegedly confessed to abusing at least five altar boys, aged 10 and 11, in the Armidale diocese during the early 1980s.
In a 1992 meeting with three senior Catholic officials, he allegedly admitted he had “fondled the genitals of (two) of these boys and to quote ‘sucked off their dicks’,” according to a contemporary account written by one of the three clergy, Wayne Peters, the present vicar-general of Armidale.
The two other officials — Brian Lucas, now the secretary-general of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, and John Usher, the chancellor of the Archdiocese of Sydney — have since given conflicting accounts of what was said at the meeting.
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