AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
David Ellery
Reporter for The Canberra Times.
A former senior teacher at Marist College Canberra said he cannot recall being told in 1986 that Brother Kostka Chute was a child molester but he stopped short of denying the conversation ever took place.
John Doyle gave testimony by phone from London on the same day a witness told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse in Canberra that the Marist Brothers had long had a culture of condoning the unacceptable and that going to confession (about acts of abuse) was regarded as “washing dirty water off their chests”.
Witness AAJ, who says he was abused at Marcellin College in Randwick by Chute in 1960, said on Wednesday that while women were out of bounds, boys were considered acceptable.
Earlier in the day, former Marist College Canberra student Damian De Marco, who says he has a vivid recollection of speaking to Mr Doyle about Chute in 1986, told the commission he was not surprised that the lawyer representing Marist Brothers had used Mr De Marco’s past drug use to question his testimony.
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