AUSTRALIA
Illawarra Mercury
By CATHERINE ARMITAGE July 1, 2013
Even though the Catholic Church had “extensive knowledge dating back to the 1950s” of the “serious risk posed to children” by the paedophile priest Denis McAlinden, he continued sexually abusing children for decades before he was removed from the priesthood in 1993, an inquiry has heard.
The Bishop of the church’s Maitland-Newcastle diocese, Bill Wright, made a dramatic, unreserved apology from the witness box to victims and their families at the inquiry into an alleged police and church cover-up of child sex abuse allegations against two priests in the Hunter region on Monday morning.
Bishop Wright’s apology is believed to be the most comprehensive acknowledgement of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church yet made by a serving church leader.
He acknowledged that McAlinden and another priest, James Fletcher, both now dead, were “sexual predators” who “repeatedly committed acts of sexual abuse against children”, using their positions of trust in the church to gain access to the children and to conceal their acts. The inquiry heard that one victim complained in 2001 that she had been abused by McAlinden in 1977 when she was four years old.
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