AUSTRALIA
NEWS.com.au
SMILING Bishop Keith Slater grins so much he had to apologise for doing it before giving evidence at the harrowing royal commission into child sex abuse yesterday.
“I apologise in advance if I may seem to smile at a time which is not appropriate,” he explained. It was just his “personality”.
But there was nothing to smile about as the commission heard a litany of Bishop Slater’s failures to help more than 40 victims of physical and sexual child abuse at the former North Coast Children’s Home in Lismore, adequately compensate them or report their abusers in the clergy to authorities.
Outside the commission he even smiled as he met the first of the child abuse victims to come forward – a man he refused for so long to apologise to or compensate – and blessed him.
“I just ripped into him,” said a disgusted Richard “Tommy” Campion afterwards. “If he had told the truth we wouldn’t be here today.”
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