AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph
MICHELLE AINSWORTH HERALD SUN MAY 20, 2013
MELBOURNE’S Catholic archbishop has faced the Parliamentary child sex abuse inquiry for the first time today.
Archbishop Denis Hart said it was “better late than never” when questioned why the Church had taken 18 years to excommunicate a priest convicted of child molestation.
The inquiry heard accusations against Father Desmond Gannon surfaced in the late 1980s.
The priest refused to be laicised, which would have removed his church rights, but in 1993 he was stripped of his privileges to perform as a priest.
In 2009 he was jailed for 25 months for molesting an altar boy three times between 1968 and 1969.
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