AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
EDITORIAL
The sexual Abuse booklet distributed through Catholic schools by the Archdiocese of Sydney. Photo: David Porter
A man was jailed for a minimum of 33 years on Friday for the callous murder of an innocent couple in their home. He suffocated the husband and wife at the behest of the couple’s adopted son for the fee of $17,000, which would enable him to buy a motorcycle.
This was evil in the extreme, beyond comprehension. But in an attempt to make at least some sense of such heinous, dispassionate taking of life, Supreme Court judge Peter Hidden revealed that the murderer, from a supportive family with an ”unremarkable upbringing”, had at the age of 11 been sexually attacked by a Catholic priest. It was the second time the child had been sexually abused by a person in a position of trust and his ”loving, easy nature” (his mother’s description) was irretrievably lost.
Nobody will know whether the killer would have become capable of such evil had he not been abused, but it’s no great stretch to assume to be the victim of such horror at so early an age was hardly conducive to a balanced personality.
That wicked priest, like the Catholic Church, has a lot to answer for. The victims’ lives were taken, the perpetrators’ lives were ruined and families were shattered.
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