AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article posted 18 January 2015)
Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission has been told how the Catholic Church allowed a priest, Father Martin Newbold, to commit sex-crimes against young girls. The church concealed his crimes from the police and transferred him from one Australian state to another to protect him. Thus the church inflicted this criminal on more victims in new parishes.
Broken Rites has ascertained that Father Martin Newbold (real name Thomas Parker Newbold) was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1928. In his teens he was recruited as a priest for Western Australia’s Perth diocese and he was ordained as a priest on 28 July 1951, aged 23, using the name Father “Martin” Newbold.
Broken Rites has searched through 30 annual editions of the printed Australian Catholic Directory. This research indicates that, originally, from 1951 onwards, Newbold officially belonged to the Perth diocese, where his early parishes included Northam, Wagin and Belmont.
Normally, a diocesan spends his career in one diocese. In the mid-1950s, however, Newbolt was transferred, on loan, from the Perth Diocese to the Bunbury diocese, which covers WA’s south-west.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.