AUSTRALIA
7 News
By Dan Cox, ABC
Updated July 29, 2013
A New South Wales Hunter Valley Catholic priest has rejected claims at a public inquiry that he held back information from police because child sexual abuse allegations are “damaging and distasteful”.
Father Bob Searle was the parish priest at Nelson Bay, north of Newcastle, in the late 1990s.
In giving evidence to a Newcastle inquiry today, he said he remembered a person known as AH, a victim of paedophile priest James Fletcher, coming to the presbytery one night drunk and angry and yelling out “nobody loves me”.
Police whistleblower Peter Fox has said that, at the time, Father Searle told him AH was also yelling about priests “doing filthy things to little boys”, but it was not included in his statement to police.
Father Searle said that was because he never heard the comments.
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