AUSTRALIA
Sky News
AAP
An inquiry’s heard a woman’s conversion to Catholicism involved having sex with her priest, who threatened that she couldn’t get married otherwise.
The child abuse royal commission heard paedophile priest Father Peter Searson agreed to coach the 18-year-old to her baptism in 1974 so she could marry her Catholic fiance.
It heard Searson, then a chaplain at the Villa Maria Society for the Blind, started touching her during the lessons before it escalated to sex.
The woman and her husband complained to then Melbourne Archbishop Frank Little in 1975 and reported being raped to police in 1997.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.