AUSTRALIA
news.com.au
March 3, 2019
By Rebecca Franks
Marco Fabbro was sadistically raped by a twisted paedophile priest at Melbourne’s prestigious Xavier College aged just 11 years old. The violent and horrific experience left him humiliated, disgusted, ashamed and really, really angry.
“At school, I turned to the Church because there was a sense of belonging and love that I wasn’t getting in my family. I became a choirboy, I looked up to the divinity and Christianity and the belief system very avidly,” Marco tells news.com.au.
That was until the day his innocence was stripped away from him in a brutal and sadistic attack in 1971 on the grounds of Xavier College’s preparatory school Burke Hall in a small room behind the Jesuit priest Father John Byrne’s office.
Marco has tried to block details of the attack from his memory; of being whipped and sexually assaulted on a leather couch by Father Byrne during school hours while the 59-year-old priest mumbled Latin behind him.
“I became very rebellious, very angry,” Marco says. “At school I was what you would call the class clown or the ‘village idiot’ because I didn’t want to be taken seriously, due to the seriousness of what happened.”
Soon after, Marco was sent to St Ignatius College Riverview, an exclusive Catholic boarding school on Sydney’s lower North Shore which includes former prime minister Tony Abbott and former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce as alumni.
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