AUSTRALIA
SBS
AAP
For more than 40 years, Gerard McDonald has been living with “fear, shame and guilt” as a result of sickening sexual abuse at the hands of a notorious Catholic pedophile priest.
“Vincent Gerard Ryan was the monster of Merewether,” Mr McDonald told media outside the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Newcastle on Wednesday.
“I want the shame and guilt to be put where it belongs, with the abusers and those who did nothing or lied to protect them.”
Mr McDonald was 10 when he was abused twice a week for most of 1975 in Father Vincent Ryan’s car, as the priest dropped him home from altar boy practice at St Joseph’s in Merewether.
He told the commission that Ryan, who on one occasion performed oral sex on him and a group of other boys in the church vestry, told him “they won’t believe you, because I’m a priest”.
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