AUSTRALIA
Border Mail
By Melissa Cunningham
Dec. 15, 2015
Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns struggles to sleep at night due his role in concealing the child sex crimes of priests spanning decades, an inquiry has heard.
Retired Ballarat diocese priest John McKinnon, who still visits the terminally ill bishop at hospital, told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Bishop Mulkearns was “profoundly sorry” for what “he had done” or failed to do.
“He says he struggles to sleep at night…he probably still struggles to sleep of a night and so these things now are on his mind but beyond that there wasn’t much more we could say,” Fr McKinnon said.
Fr McKinnon said he had re-established contact with the bishop in the last two years as he became gravely ill with cancer.
He told the inquiry the two don’t often discuss Bishop Mulkearns’s role in covering up decades of child sex abuse but he knew had remorse for failing to act.
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