AUSTRALIA
The Age
February 24, 2016
Chris Johnston
The former headmaster of St Kevins College in Toorak, Brother Brian Brandon – a senior Victorian Catholic administrator – admitted today it was “questionable” to give paedophile priest Ted Dowlan a job at an orphanage housing young victims of clerical sexual abuse.
Brother Brandon – a former head of legal affairs and provincial council member of the Christian Brothers for Victoria and Tasmania – said there were “suspicions” but not “knowledge” of Brother Dowlan’s sexual interest in boys at the time of the appointment.
Brother Brandon has also held a role with the church’s professional standards team.
Brother Dowlan started working at the St Vincents Boys Orphanage in South Melbourne in 1989.
He was jailed in 1996 for sexually interfering with boys in Ballarat, both at St Patrick’s College, and his previous school, St Alipius primary.
At the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Ballarat, under questioning by Justice Peter McClellan, Brother Brandon said despite “suspicions” about Dowlan, a serial paedophile since the early 1970s, he was not made a teacher at the orphanage, but a co-ordinator.
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