AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 1 June 2015)
For years, the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese knew that Father Peter Searson was committing sexual offences against boys, girls and women but he was allowed to continue in parishes, including at the Doveton parish (in Melbourne’s south-east), where he survived for years under the supervision of the regional bishop for the south-eastern suburbs, Auxiliary Bishop George Pell. The Victoria Police investigated Searson for sexual offences in parishes but found it difficult to extract evidence from “loyal” church people. Eventually, after 35 years as a priest, when Searson’s record was about to become public, the church authorities dumped Searson from parish work. Later, hoping to protect the church’s public image, the church also removed his name from the published list of retired priests.
Originally a Marist Brother
Broken Rites research has ascertained that Peter Lloyd Searson was born on 4 April 1923 in Adelaide, South Australia, where he was a pupil at Sacred Heart College, a Marist Brothers school in Somerton Park. He was recruited to become a Marist Brother, and he adopted the “religious” name “Brother Bonaventure”. (There was a “Saint” Bonaventure in medieval Europe but Peter Lloyd Searson was certainly no saint.)
The Broken Rites research confirmed that Peter Searson’s name is included in a list of Marist Brothers who entered the Melbourne province of this religious order. (The Melbourne province provided Marists for South Australia and Western Australia, as well for Victoria.)
In the 1950s, Brother Bonaventure Searson taught at a Marist Brothers college in Mount Gambier, South Australia. A former Mount Gambier student, born in 1942, told Broken Rites in 2002 that he was a boarder at the school in the 1950s. Brother Bonaventure, he said, had a fetish for strapping students on their naked buttocks.
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