AUSTRALIA
Maitland Mercury
By ELLE WATSON July 18, 2013
Victims in the public gallery at yesterday’s special commission of inquiry into alleged child sex abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church gasped audibly and were visibly shaken when two senior Hunter Catholic priests claimed to have little memory of the events surrounding paedophilia within the diocese.
Father James Saunders and Father William Burston could not respond to a number of questions put to them at the inquiry yesterday, claiming a lack of memory.
Father Saunders, who performed a number of senior roles in the diocese including being Vicar General to Bishop Michael Malone, said he knew of rumours circulating about priest Denis McAlinden’s conduct with children in the 1980s.
Counsel assisting the inquiry, Warwick Hunt, asked Father Saunders why McAlinden was referred to in a “bleak fashion” in the minutes of a 1986 bishop’s consultors meeting in Maitland. The priest could not remember.
Father Saunders, who is now in his 70s and semi-retired, shared a parish with McAlinden in 1977 and remembered the then Bishop Leo Clarke warning him the priest might be a “difficult man” which he later took to mean he had a “ferocious temper”.
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