AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Marlina Whop and William Rollo
Retired Rockhampton Bishop Brian Heenan has returned today to continue giving evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in the central Queensland city.
The inquiry has been told that for more than three decades, children at St Joseph’s Orphanage at Neerkol, west of Rockhampton, were raped, molested and beaten.
Today’s hearing was due to begin at 10:30am but delayed because of webcast problems.
Bishop Heenan has been explaining the Catholic church’s response to abuse allegations at the orphanage from the 1940s to the 1970s, which was run by the Sisters of Mercy.
He allowed one of the main offenders, Father Reg Durham, to continue working for the Catholic Church for three years despite a woman alleging in 1994 he sexually abused her since she was a child.
It took Bishop Heenan three years to restrict Father Durham’s contact with children, and in 1999 he gave him a character a reference.
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