AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
by JOANNE McCARTHY March 20, 2014
IN a nursing home bed, a former Hunter nun, who was a priest’s sexual partner from the age of 15, spends her days in the silences of advanced dementia while her brother demands the truth from the Catholic Church.
The priest, Father Noel Geraghty of the Catholic order Oblates of Mary Immaculate, died in 2005 without the long-term relationship being acknowledged in public by the Church, although it has confirmed it in writing to the nun’s family.
There is evidence the former nun, 70, who has been in care from the age of 63, was not the priest’s only female sexual partner.
The former nun’s brother, a retired teacher who lives in the Hunter, is speaking about it for the first time as the Church faces a new crisis – exposure of its male clergy’s forbidden, secret and abusive relationships with adult women.
“There are so many women out there in this position,” said the former nun’s brother, David, who asked that the family’s identity not be disclosed.
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