AUSTRALIA
ABC Newcastle
By Carol Duncan (ABC Local Radio)
When senior NSW Police Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox told ABC TV’s Lateline programme that the Catholic Church had covered up crimes by paedophile priests, silenced investigations and destroyed evidence to avoid prosecution – the public outrage triggered a Royal Commission into institutional child abuse. One of the stories that led to this is that of Patricia Feenan’s son, Daniel, a 14-year-old altar boy when first raped by a priest in the Newcastle/Maitland diocese.
Patricia Feenan is a warm and generous woman, a loving mother telling an unimaginably terrible story of the sexual abuse of her son, Daniel, by a Catholic priest trusted by the family. The details are graphic, shocking and are revealed in her book about her son and her family’s experience.
Patricia says she thought long and hard about writing the book, Holy Hell, but felt there was a need to tell the story.
“I was encouraged by interested people to tell it and see what I could make of it, of explaining the impact on a family of clergy sexual abuse. In initially wrote it to try to get it out of my head after my son went through a criminal trial in 2004. I could write it, put it on a shelf and it would be there as a record for the family.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.