AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By David Marchese
A New South Wales Hunter region church official sent a priest who admitted to being attracted to young boys to a psychiatrist with the hope that he could be “cured” so that he could return to being a “most effective priest”.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearing in Newcastle is investigating abuse at the hands of Vincent Ryan, a Catholic priest who worked in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese for decades.
Ryan has spent 14 years behind bars for sexually abusing 35 boys over a period of 20 years and is currently awaiting sentencing on other charges.
The commission heard the Maitland-Newcastle diocese was made aware of abuse allegations against Ryan in the mid-1970s and sent him for a psychiatric assessment in Melbourne in 1976.
The 1975 abuse of altar boys only came to the attention of police in 1995.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.