AUSTRALIA
The Australian
[Submissions – Parliament of Victoria]
By Paul Mulvey
From: AAP
November 12, 2012
SOME Catholic priests have used guns, knives and dogs in their sexual assaults on children and women, an inquiry has heard.
Victoria’s parliamentary inquiry into child sexual abuse heard stunning evidence on Monday, including claims of bestiality, hospital chaplains raping patients, student priests being sexually assaulted in the seminary, a priest carrying a gun around a school playground and boys on altar boy camp being assaulted for a week by seminarians in charge of the camp.
Helen Last, the director of advocacy group In Good Faith, says abuse victims have told stories of priests keeping guns and knives in their presbytery, while one told her that some clergy “introduced dogs into assaults of children”.
Ms Last told the inquiry the Catholic Church took 15 years to deal with priest Peter Searson, now deceased, who was accused of carrying a gun with him in the playground in the mid 1990s, while another priest kept a pistol in his glovebox.
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