AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Kate Evans
Catholic priest Father Frank Docherty was expelled from the Sydney Archdiocese in the 1960s for his activism against the Vietnam War and Apartheid South Africa.
After years in Canada, he returns to Sydney and finds himself confronting evidence of abuse within the church. It’s 1996 and the church is flexing its legal muscle.
As familiar as the scenario sounds, there is no Father Docherty. He is a central character in Tom Keneally’s new novel, Crimes of the Father. Nothing too equivocal about that title.
With the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse ongoing, the novel’s timing makes sense, culturally and historically. But why was it the right time for Keneally himself?
It began in 2002, when he was asked to write an article for The New Yorker. A “failed seminarian” and an ex-Catholic, he says the church as an institution still matters to him for its “combination of tribalism, mystery, [its] mytho-poetic corpus”.
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