AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
February 21, 2014
Marty Silk
A culture of protecting the church existed in a diocese where a Catholic teacher raped and molested 13 girls, an inquiry has heard.
Teachers were repeatedly told not to compromise the bishop, but the culture of protection wasn’t sinister, a former principal told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Brisbane on Friday.
Two Catholic Education Office staff and the principal of a Toowoomba school learned of abuse claims against a teacher in 2007, but failed to act.
That teacher, Gerard Byrnes, was eventually jailed in 2010 after pleading guilty to 44 child sex charges involving 13 young girls.
Byrnes was allowed to continue working at the school after the first complaints surfaced, and went on to abuse other pupils.
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