James M. Miller’s The Priests: sins of the Newcastle fathers laid bare

AUSTRALIA
The Australian

DAVID BREARLEY
The Australian
August 27, 2016

A Catholic lad coming of age in 1970s Newcastle was educated at his peril. The Marist Brothers operated two boys high schools in the region, neither of them safe. The third option was Saint Pius X College, staffed largely by the priests of what was then the Diocese of Maitland.

Pius was a diabolical place. The teacher-priests lived in quarters attached to the main classroom block, an arrangement that raised no eyebrows in that fabulously innocent decade.

The worst of them by a great margin was Father John Denham, perhaps not Australia’s most notorious pedophile priest but quite possibly the most prolific and without question the most expensive from the church’s perspective. His only competition in this regard is another Novocastrian, Father Vince Ryan.

Denham is jailed until 2028 for the sexual abuse of 57 boys, some of them barely out of preschool, most of them Pius students in their early teens. Police believe he abused twice that number and more, and the record shows he did so with uncommon brutality. From 1975 until 1980, according to judge Helen Syme of the District Court, Denham treated Pius as his personal “pedophilic smorgasbord”.

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