AUSTRALIA
The Weekend Australian

July 18, 2020

Michael Xu lost five years of his life after a uni friend lied to cover up their sexual encounters. His conviction, like that of George Pell, points to a trend.

By Richard Guilliatt

Among the many shocking accounts of church sexual abuse that have been heard in recent years, the story one man outlined to police in the Victorian city of ­Geelong in September 2015 was particularly horrific. A former student at the local Catholic college St Joseph’s, the fragile 61-year-old remembered one teacher there as a sexual sadist who had violently raped him on more than a hundred occasions in the 1960s, beginning when he was just 10. The man he identified as his attacker was the school’s now-retired Grade 6 teacher, Brother John Tyrrell of the Christian Brothers.

The shameful history of the Christian Brothers was by then…