AUSTRALIA
Winnipeg Free Press
By: Michael Madigan
Posted: 12/20/2013
BRISBANE — That the whimsical, sweet-natured, self-defeating comic creation Charlie Brown could be used by a pedophile to lure his victims is not the worst piece of evidence to come out of Australia’s Royal Commission into Child Sex Abuse.
A predator priest’s creation of his own little “Brown family” has provided one of the more poignant parables for a crime that so ruthlessly sabotages childhoods.
But the six-person royal commission, appointed by Australia’s Gov. Gen. Quentin Bryce in January, will hear much worse before the task is completed in 2015.
A priest calling himself Fred Brown allegedly developed a cult-like following among a group of teenage girls way back in the 1960s.
The testimony of one of those long-ago girls, Joan Isaacs, now 60, drew audible gasps from the public gallery last week as she told the commission how one member of the group had “Fred Brown’s” child.
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