AUSTRALIA
Ilawarra Mercury
By PAUL OSBORNE
Feb. 8, 2013
A prominent lawyer says the case of a Catholic priest cleared of a child abuse charge but later defrocked by the Vatican should be referred to the upcoming royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse.
Prominent Sydney lawyer Chris Murphy said the case of Father John Gerard Nestor, who attended Sydney’s St Patrick’s Seminary with now Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in the 1980s, was an ideal subject for the royal commission which is yet to start taking its first evidence.
“It’s absolutely what the Royal Commission was meant for,” Mr Murphy said yesterday.
Mr Nestor was a priest in the Wollongong diocese in 1991 when he was charged with the indecent assault of a 15-year-old altar boy.
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