AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail
By Australian Associated Press and Nicole Low For Daily Mail Australia
The Catholic Church let a ‘raving lunatic loose’ with no concern for people in a poor Melbourne parish where it sent a string of pedophiles from the 1970s to 1990s, an inquiry has heard.
One pedophile parish priest left Doveton, 34km south of Melbourne, because he was having sex with a number of women, while his ‘bizarre’ successor told a girl he indecently assaulted in confession ‘the Lord forgives you’.
Former Holy Family Primary School principal Graeme Sleeman said church authorities did not care about parishioners in Doveton, a disadvantaged, low socio-economic area.
‘I believed and I am convinced now that the Melbourne archdiocese had no concern for the parishioners of Holy Family School Doveton and what priests they sent to them,’ Mr Sleeman told the child abuse royal commission.
‘The only way something could be drastically changed was for those parishioners to be empowered with the skills and the knowledge of how to change some serious matters that were being inflicted upon them,’ Mr Sleeman said.
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