AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 1 June 2015)
One of Australia’s most notorious paedophile priests, Father Kevin O’Donnell, committed sexual crimes against children throughout his 50-year career in Melbourne Catholic parishes while his superiors and colleagues looked the other way. In his final years, he even received public praise from one of his superiors, Bishop (later Cardinal) George Pell (see further down in this article, under the sub-heading “Praise from George Pell”). Eventually some of O’Donnell’s victims (with help from Broken Rites) contacted the police and got O’Donnell convicted and jailed. Cardinal George Pell has some explaining to do about how the church covered up for Father Kevin O’Donnell.
O’Donnell is dead but his numerous victims — and their families — still bear the scars of his crimes.
Father Kevin O’Donnell was a child abuser from 1942 to 1992. He fitted Masses, weddings and funerals in between his sex-abuse activities.
The Catholic Church now admits that O’Donnell was a child-abuser from day one. Broken Rites has seen a typed transcript of an interview that Mr Peter O’Callaghan QC (sex-abuse commissioner for the Melbourne archdiocese) had with an O’Donnell victim on 23 March 2003. In the transcript, Mr O’Callaghan commented that O’Donnell was engaged in sex abuse from the time he was ordained — and (said Mr O’Callaghan) he did it in every parish he was in.
During his career, the Melbourne church authorities were told of O’Donnell’s crimes but chose to keep him in the ministry, thus inflicting him on further victims. Some of O’Donnell’s fellow-priests knew that he was a danger to children but they remained silent. Certain other priests, when consulted by O’Donnell victims, just “didn’t want to know about it”.
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