AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
June 17, 2014
David Ellery
Reporter for The Canberra Times.
A senior Catholic priest has defended the church’s failure to mandate the reporting of alleged criminal activity by clergy in the early 1990s.
Father Brian Lucas, the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, also defended the practice of not taking notes during meetings with clergy accused of sexual assault and other crimes.
He said he has no recollection of a meeting between himself, Brother Alexis Turton and serial paedophile Kostka Chute in 1993 as he took no notes.
When asked on Tuesday at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Canberra what advice he might have given at the meeting he cannot remember, Father Lucas interjected “we’re tilting at windmills”.
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