AUSTRALIA
Patheos
August 22, 2018
By Rick Snedeker
No matter how appalling you think the ever-worsening scandal is regarding Catholic clergy’s relentless global sexual assaults against children, it’s worse.
Far worse.
On Monday, a reader of my blog named Jim Jones (@Jim_Jones_1) commented on my August 18 post, titled “Outrage Over Latest Catholic Sex Scandal Misses Point.” Contending that the scandal is far more widespread and destructive that most people are aware, he provided a trove of links to priestly pedophilia atrocities just in Australia.
The most jarring fact in the lot were the unnervingly common suicides among abuse victims from a single church-affiliated school.
Philip Nagle, a 1974 student at St. Alipius Primary School in Ballarat, Australia, the epicenter of some of the worse clergy abuse in Australian history, was the first witness to give evidence when the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse began hearings in May 2015. The hearings focused on defining the impact of abuse on survivors, their families and the community of Ballarat.
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