AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites

By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 21 May 2015)

After committing sexual crimes against boys, Christian Brother Stephen Francis Farrell left his religious order. He then taught in other Catholic schools as “Mister” Farrell and he married three times. But, by December 2013, three of his earlier pupils had got him convicted for his crimes. In one of the court hearings (in 1997), Farrell was supported in court by Jesuit priest Michael McGirr (this made Farrell’s victims feel that they were being abused again). In May 2015, several of Farrell’s victims gave evidence at a public hearing of Australia’s national child-abuse Royal Commission.

In the early 1970s, St Alipius Catholic boys’ primary school in Ballarat (105 kilometres west of Melbourne) had four classes: for grades 3, 4, 5, and 6. In the early 1970s, four Christian Brothers there were committing sexual crimes against their pupils….