AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article posted 10 February 2014)

Former students of a Catholic boys’ school in South Australia (Salesian College, Brooklyn Park, Adelaide) have complained that at least three senor priests at this school between the 1960s and the 1980s were child abusers. The abuse happened under the noses of the Melbourne-based national headquarters of this Catholic religious order, the “Salesians of Don Bosco”.

Here are details of the three priests in the Adelaide incidents:

1. The Salesians’ national headquarters have acknowledged that Father Patrick Laws committed child-sex offences in 1967-68 while he was a senior staff member at Salesian College, Brooklyn Park, Adelaide.

2. Another former student of the same school has lodged an official complaint about having been sexually abused in 1969 by another teacher, Father Adrian Wenting, who eventually rose to be the head of this school.

3. And in 1980-81,…