AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 9 February 2015)
A retired senior Catholic priest from western Sydney, Father Richard Cattell, is scheduled to appear in Sydney’s Penrith District Court on 20 February 2015 for sentencing on child-sex charges. The offences were committed against an altar boy in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, Father Richard Cattell was appointed as the Vicar-General of Sydney’s Parramatta diocese, helping to administer this diocese for Bishop Bede Heather.
Father Cattell retired from parish work in the mid-1990s. He later lived privately at Port Macquarie on the New South Wales mid-north coast and, recently, on the Gold Coast in Queensland. On 28 February 2014, New South Wales detectives travelled to Tweed Heads, on the New South Wales side of the Queensland border, and interviewed Richard Cattell at Tweed Heads police station about one former altar boy who has alleged that he was sexually abused while Cattell was based at parishes in western Sydney in the 1980s.
Richard St John Cattell was summoned to Tweed Heads Local Court on 24 March 2014, to enable the matter to be officially filed in New South Wales.
Police alleged that, at the time of the offences, Father Cattell was based at a parish called “Our Lady of the Rosary” in a suburb called St Marys [situated 45 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, near Penrith]. According to a church website, Reverend Richard Cattell was the parish priest in charge of Our Lady of the Rosary parish 1982 from to 1994.
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