AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 16 June 2014)
Catholic school authorities failed to report the child-sex crimes of Brother Gregory Joseph Sutton to the police, even after one of his victims eventually committed suicide, according to evidence given to Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission on 16 June 2014. Brother Sutton admitted the crimes to the boy’s family.
Brother Greg Sutton (born 19 March 1951) was a member of the Marist Brothers Order, which sent him to teach primary school children, from the early 1970s until the late 1980s, in Catholic schools in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.
Brother Greg (as pupils called him) had his first teaching job was in 1973-75 in a North Queensland town where the Marists conducted a primary school and an adjoining secondary school. The Marist Brothers lived in cottages on the campus.
Brother John Holdsworth, who was the Marist superior for both these schools, told the Royal Commission that in the 1970s he was not concerned by Greg Sutton’s behaviour towards children.
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