AUSTRALIA
The Australian
DAN BOX THE AUSTRALIAN FEBRUARY 22, 2014
A CONFIDENTIAL Vatican inquiry that criticised an alleged victim of child sex abuse was conducted by three senior serving Australian priests, two of whom now say the man may have been motivated by money.
As revealed yesterday by The Australian, the three clerics were appointed by Cardinal George Pell after the alleged victim spent more than a decade lobbying church leaders to consider his case.
Their decree, which Cardinal Pell personally forwarded to the Vatican last month, describes the man as an “exaggerator” with
“a detailed dossier of these remembered events clogging his computer”.
“The credibility and reliability” of a second alleged victim was also questioned in the decree, despite the similarity of the two men’s descriptions of abuse by the same Vincentian priest at St Stanislaus College in Bathurst, NSW, during the 1970s. The alleged victims’ claims ultimately were not upheld.
The decree’s authors are Kevin Matthews, judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Adelaide, Adrian Farrelly, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Brisbane, and Anthony Kerin, episcopal vicar of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.
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