AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald
IAN KIRKWOOD
2 Sep 2016
HAVING delivered what he said was an unreserved apology for the “devastation” caused by paedophile priests in his diocese, the Bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, Bill Wright, then left the Royal Commission while the statement of one of Vince Ryan’s victims was read to the hearing.
Asked about it afterwards, Bishop Wright said he had already read the statement and knew it was to be given by the victim’s solicitor, rather than the man himself, but it was “a fair question” the Newcastle Herald was asking about his decision not to stay to listen.
The third day of the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic case study hearings began with Dr Peter Evans, the head of a Franciscan retreat in Melbourne that Ryan was sent to in 1976 after serious child sex allegations against him.
The commission has heard that Ryan had a single consultation in Melbourne and returned to an adjoining parish to the one he’d been sent from about a year before. Next up was Maureen O’Hearn, from the diocese’s survivor support organisation, Zimmerman House, who said that many counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists did not understand the true impact of child sexual abuse.
Bishop Wright then spent an hour either side of lunch in the witness box, much of it answering questions about his interpretations of what two senior clergy, Monsignor Patrick Cotter and Bishop Leo Clarke, knew and did about Ryan’s prolific abuse.
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