AUSTRALIA
Bendigo Advertiser
December 6, 2017
By Siobhan Calafiore
Clergy sexual abuse survivors feel they have been heard in a report deeming Ballarat’s Catholic Church culture of cover-up as a catastrophic institutional failure.
Survivor Paul Levey, who features in the redacted report released on Wednesday, said there was a sense of vindication in having Australia’s most powerful legal body reinforce survivors’ stories.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was scathing in its findings of the Congregation of Christian Brothers and the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat responses to abuse allegations.
Mr Levey lived at the presbytery in Mortlake after his parents separated in 1982, where he was subjected to daily sexual abuse at the hands of notorious paedophile Gerald Ridsdale.
“It has really put everything in black and white, what we all thought and what we all knew,” he said of the report.
“Because it was pretty bad what the (church) hierarchy did with it, covering it up.
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