AUSTRALIA
Daily Telegraph
MIRANDA DEVINE THE DAILY TELEGRAPH JUNE 04, 2014
PETER Fox, the wannabe whistleblower cop who claimed a “Catholic police mafia” in the Hunter Valley was protecting paedophiles, was revealed last week as a self-aggrandising zealot unfairly smearing his colleagues.
But the special commission of inquiry he triggered may yet prove valuable.
Not only did it clear the names of innocent police officers smeared by Fox’s wild accusations, but it highlighted the failure of senior clergy within the Catholic diocese of Maitland-Newcastle to protect children from two paedophile priests from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
Commissioner Margaret Cunneen SC’s final report offers an insight into how such evil could exist, undetected, within the church for so long.
What she found was that victims came forward to complain of being sexually abused, but their accusations were not reported to police.
She notes that Father Brian Lucas, now the general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, and a lawyer, had a “general practice of deliberately not taking notes of his meetings with priests accused of child sexual abuse’’.
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