AUSTRALIA
Border Mail

By Catherine Armitage July 7, 2013

The bishop showed the policeman into his bedroom. It could hardly have been a more genteel setting, a Catholic retirement facility at Lake Macquarie on the NSW central coast. He was cordial and welcoming. He’d laid out church documents on his bed in preparation.

But then the bishop duped the policeman. Ultimately, a paedophile priest got away, according to evidence at the NSW government’s special commission of inquiry into alleged cover-ups of child sexual abuse by two priests in the Hunter region.

The evidence before the inquiry is that senior church figures knew of recurring sex abuse allegations against paedophile priest FatherDenis McAlinden from 1954 but dealt with them by moving him around Australia and removing him from the priesthood instead of going to the police.

Senior clergy identified in church correspondence and witness statements tendered to the inquiry include…