AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
By IAN KIRKWOOD July 10, 2013
BISHOP Michael Malone says he never looked at confidential files about his priests despite the paedophilia controversy that raged during his 16 years in charge of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese of the Catholic Church.
In an extraordinary afternoon of evidence before the Special Commission of Inquiry sitting in Newcastle, the retired bishop agreed that some of his evidence “defied belief”.
But he insisted it was true, and repeatedly said he had never seen a trove of documents obtained by the commission’s investigators, even though they all came from the diocese headquarters and some came from filing cabinets in his own office.
Some of Bishop Malone’s early evidence yesterday about the circumstances of his taking over the diocese from Bishop Leo Clarke in 1995 drew sympathetic laughter from many in the 50-strong gallery.
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