AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (updated 10 January 2014)
For thirty years a prominent Australian Catholic psychologist, Ronald Conway, had a part-time role in assessing and helping trainee priests in the Melbourne seminary. Conway also worked as a consulting psychologist in psychiatric hospitals and in private practice, and some of his male patients say that Conway touched them sexually when they consulted him for professional help.
These former patients say that, during “therapy”, they were masturbated by Conway, who encouraged the patients to touch him sexually in the same way as he touched them.
These disclosures throw new light upon the church’s problem of clergy sexual abuse, as Conway was regarded highly by Australian Catholic leaders.
The seminary was preparing the trainees for their future life of so-called celibacy. In articles that he wrote for newspapers, Conway pointed out that being “celibate” merely means not being married. Furthermore, he pointed out, “clerical concubinage and clerical homosexuality have been commonplace in church history”.
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