AUSTRALIA
9 News
AAP
Teachers tried to get the Catholic Church to act against a suspected Melbourne pedophile priest including taking their concerns to then bishop George Pell, a royal commission will hear.
The child abuse royal commission is investigating how church authorities dealt with abusers who operated in the Holy Family Parish in Doveton and elsewhere in the Archdiocese of Melbourne for decades.
Former Holy Family Primary School principal Graeme Sleeman and teacher Carmel Rafferty raised concerns about Doveton parish priest Father Peter Searson, a Victorian parliamentary inquiry heard in 2013.
Ms Rafferty told the inquiry a group of teachers visited Cardinal Pell, who was then bishop for Melbourne’s southern area, in 1991 to tell him about Searson, who was suspected of sexual molestation and seen visiting the boys’ toilets several times a day.
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