AUSTRALIA
WA Today
November 10, 2012
Barney Zwartz
”FLY-IN” priests imported to Australia from overseas are an emerging danger, the state inquiry into the churches’ handling of sex abuse heard on Friday.
Victims organisation Broken Rites was aware of at least seven cases in which imported priests had sexually abused people, including one where the priest abused five women, four of them members of his own family, researcher Wayne Chamley said.
”If it’s good enough for Australia to shanghai problem priests and send them off to Samoa or Rome [a reference to actions by the Salesian order], why wouldn’t overseas bishops do it to Australia?” he said.
The Australian Catholic Church has not released the number of clerics imported mostly from India, Nigeria and the Philippines to ease the catastrophic decline in parish priests, but a study last year estimated they made up 20 per cent of Australia’s total of 1500.
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