AUSTRALIA
The Australian
Dan Box
From:The Australian
January 17, 2013
A CATHOLIC bishop failed to act on years of allegations of child sex abuse by a priest, or to pass these warnings on to another diocese where the priest was later accused of abusing an altar boy, a report has found.
The report, written by the former Federal Court judge Antony Whitlam QC and published today, makes a series of damning findings about the church’s management of the priest, who is identified only as “F”.
The bishop from a regional diocese in NSW, who has since died, “sat on his hands and did nothing”, after being warned about F’s behaviour, the report found. His failure to investigate these allegations “is utterly inexplicable”.
Mr Whitlam found a number of “glaring omission(s) from the records of the . . . diocese”, including the reason F was abruptly removed from his first parish, Moree in northern NSW, in 1984.
The report found that a year earlier, the vicar-general of the regional diocese, told another parish priest: “We’ve got a problem with ‘F’. He’s been mucking around with kids.”
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