AUSTRALIA
The Australian

AAP

AN ABUSIVE priest set up a cult-like group based on the comic Peanuts and used it to groom convent school girls in Brisbane, an inquiry has heard.

The Brown group was created by Father Francis (Frank) Derriman, who was chaplain of the Sacred Heart Convent at Sandgate in Brisbane in the late 1960s.

Joan Isaacs, now 60, has told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that Derriman used the surname ‘Brown’ in reference to himself, three other children and herself.

“I believe that this conduct by Fr Derriman is what today would be called grooming,” she said.

Ms Issacs, who is a teacher, told how Derriman wrote her letters telling her he was dying from a lung disease and needed her to have sex with him before he died and when she was 16.