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Royal Commission hears Vatican told priest to offer a Mass every Friday for his victims
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Sydney Morning Herald (One of Australia's leading newspapers)
Posted: December 23rd, 2013
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/royal-...
A Lismore [Australia] Catholic priest who sexually abused children was ordered by the Vatican to live a life of prayer and penance and offer a Mass every Friday for his victims, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been told. But the overwhelming majority of clerical sex abuse cases are not reported to Rome because the Vatican wants to know only about incidents which occurred within the past 10 years, the Commission heard. The Bishop of Lismore, Geoffrey Jarrett, did not pass on any complaints for five years, probably because a directive from the Pope to do so was filed in a drawer and forgotten, he told the Commission. In a day of astonishing revelations about the Australian Catholic churchs lackadaisical attitude to child sex abuse allegations, Bishop Jarrett admitted he did not pass on a 2002 complaint in which a woman alleged she walked in on Father [Paul Rex] Brown in the act of sexually abusing a child in the sacristy of the cathedral in 1959. That alleged incident preceded Father Browns abuse of Mrs Jennifer Ingham in the late 1970s by two decades. In 2001 [a] Holy See directive ordered bishops to refer to it every case with a semblance of truth involving sexual abuse of children by clerics who were still living. The revised rule that bishops should refer only allegations concerning incidents from the past 10 years came into effect in 2002 after the Holy See was unable to deal with the vast number of referrals from all over the world.
Note: For more on sexual abuse of children, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
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