MELBOURNE (AUSTRALIA)
The Age
Setp. 17, 2019
By Farrah Tomazin, Chris Vedelago and Debbie Cuthbertson
Some of the Catholic church’s worst paedophile priests shared victims, passed on details of vulnerable children considered easy targets and worked together to conceal their crimes as part of informal networks of sexual abuse hidden in Australian seminaries, schools and parishes.
An investigation by The Age has identified for the first time that many priests involved in historical sexual abuse of children did not simply act as individuals but formed clusters, or paedophile rings, throughout Victoria, from the western district to the Gippsland region and in suburban Melbourne.
At the centre of a number of these networks was Melbourne’s seminary – Corpus Christi – which has produced about 1000 priests over almost 100 years, including jailed Cardinal George Pell and convicted child rapist Gerald Ridsdale. According to a conservative snapshot from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse, at least 75 convicted and alleged sex offenders emerged from Corpus Christi. The true figure is not known.
One Melbourne man alleges he was repeatedly abused between the ages of 12 and 14 by a network of three paedophiles coalescing around Corpus Christi Clayton in the mid-1970s: St Peter’s parish priest Ronald Pickering, assistant priest Russell Vears and then newly ordained Paul David Ryan.
In a statement of claim which lawyers plan to file in court this week, the victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, alleges Vears took him to the seminary in October 1976 and left him to wait in a communal living room with four or five other boys. A second priest, Ryan, then allegedly picked the boy from the group, took him back to a bedroom and sexually assaulted him.
“I recall that seminarians would come out through the corridor into the sitting room and select a boy to go back with them,” said the former St Peter’s altar boy. “He selected me by pointing at me and ushering me to follow him.”
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