AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites Australia researcher (updated 7 August 2014)
This Broken Rites article is the most comprehensive account available about a Melbourne Catholic priest, Father James Scannell, who raped a boy during a sex-education lesson more than 40 years ago. After the rape, Scannell ordered the boy to “confess” and never to tell anybody about it. The victim (now in his fifties) finally reported this crime to the police after learning that his aunt’s funeral in 2010 was to be conducted by this priest.
In the Melbourne County Court on 1 July 2014 a jury convicted Father James Henry Scannell, 88, on a charge of buggery, committed against the 12-year-old boy in the early 1970s.
On 7 August 2014, Judge David Parsons gave Scannell a two-year jail sentence. He must serve 12 months before he becomes eligible for parole.
During the trial, the court was told that in the early 1970s, Father Scannell was doing some ministering in a Melbourne parish (St Anne’s, East Kew), where the 12-year-old boy lived with his mother and some sisters. The boy’s father was absent from the family. The boy’s aunt knew Father Scannell and she presumed that a Catholic priest would be a good “male role model” for the boy. The boy was paid to do some odd jobs at the priest’s house in East Kew.. Father Scannell was then aged in his mid-forties.
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