AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
IAN KIRKWOOD
6 Sep 2016
A 90-year-old grandmother has told the Royal Commission about the night her 13-year-old son killed himself in 1974, probably after abuse by Marist Brothers religious at Hamilton.
Audrey Nash spoke about how the Catholic church she had loved and served all her life had turned its back on her and how a senior figure in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese excused the behaviour of its paedophile priests and religious by saying “it had been going on forever”.
Mrs Nash said that a few years ago she spoke with a diocese figure after a Sunday mass about Andrew, and he said: “Look, Aud, it’s been going on forever. The Romans had their little boys, the Greeks had their little boys and the English Aristocrats had their little boys.”
“I said: ‘And that makes it all right does it?’ I have not spoken to him since.”
Mrs Nash began her evidence by saying she had no hesitation in enrolling Andrew at Marist Brothers at Hamilton even though an older son, CQT, had told her about the violence of the school and about the brothers putting their hands in pupils’ pants, because it was where most of the Catholic boys in the area went.
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