AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 16 August 2014
Research by Broken Rites has revealed how the Catholic Church harboured this abusive priest, Father Victor Gabriel Rubeo, for three decades while he committed child-sex crimes in the Melbourne archdiocese. Broken Rites first exposed Rubeo in the 1990s, prompting some more of Rubeo’s victims to contact Broken Rites. In August 2014, Australia’s national Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is receiving new evidence about more of Rubeo’s crimes, committed during the cover-up. Rubeo (pronounced “roo-BAY-oh”) was born in 1933 and was ordained as a priest in 1959; he died in 2011.
Rubeo’s victims included two boys (Tony and Will) in one of his earliest parishes (in Melbourne in the 1960s). In 1996 he pleaded guilty in court after these two victims finally spoke to police. On 28 October 2011, Rubeo appeared in court again, charged with 30 additional offences (in the 1960s) against the same two boys. He was ordered to re-appear on 16 December 2011 for a full hearing but he died a few hours before his next scheduled court appearance, aged 78.
The two boys in these court proceedings (Tony and Will) were twin brothers who were born about 1952. Their parents were Dutch working-class migrants. Their father had been badly affected by World War 2 and he had an alcohol problem. Their mother was missing her relatives in the Netherlands.
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