A Catholic priest and convicted pedophile must have believed his own lies to give “demonstrably” untrue evidence you could “poke a million holes through”, a judge told a court.

Anthony William Peter Caruana, 79, prayed silently in an isolated suite in prison before his second sentence hearing began in the NSW District Court on Wednesday.

More than two decades after he was acquitted at a 1990 trial for similar offences, he was found guilty of 26 charges against 12 young boys from Chevalier College in NSW’s Southern Highlands.

The charges from the 1980s included four counts of sexual intercourse with two of his students.

The teacher and dormitory master was removed from his teaching role in 1989 and forced to take psychiatric assessment and counselling.

Here he expressed “a lifelong problem of his attraction to young boys”, and he was assessed as being “remorseful for his past behaviours”, his lawyer…