AUSTRALIA
news.com.au
Mark Russell
ADELAIDE Archbishop Philip Wilson has declared under oath that two former altar boys never told him they had been sexually abused by a fellow priest.
Archbishop Wilson, 67, who has been diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, gave evidence in his defence in Newcastle Local Court after magistrate Robert Stone rejected the clergyman’s bid to have the case thrown out.
Archbishop Wilson told the court on Wednesday he had known one of the former altar boys Peter Creigh and his family when he was an assistant priest in the NSW Hunter Region in the mid-1970s.
But Archbishop Wilson said he had no memory of Mr Creigh telling him in 1976 how he had been sexually abused by priest James Fletcher five years earlier, when he was 10.
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