By a Broken Rites researcher

An Australian archbishop has indicated one way in which the Catholic Church has traditionally covered up its sex-abuse — by not preserving a written record about complaints. Thus, the diocese would protect the offender throughout his career until he reaches retiring-age with his "no-complaints" record intact.

However, in May-June 2010, prominent Sydney freelance writer Geraldine Willesee forced Perth archbishop Barry Hickey to acknowledge a complaint which she had submitted 46 years earlier about a priest who allegedly abused her when she was a pupil at a Catholic school in Perth.

In May-June 2010 Geraldine forced Hickey to suspend the now-elderly priest from ministering in the Perth archdiocese.

In May 2010, Geraldine found the priest's name on a church website and realised that he still had contact with children 46 years after her encounter. She immediately contacted Archbishop Hickey about this priest.

In articles in the West Australian daily newspaper on 12 June 2010 (pages 19 and 46), Geraldine Willesee outlines her correspondence with Hickey. The newspaper refers to the priest as Father X.

"No record"

Hickey told Geraldine that the absence of any recorded complaint about Father X could be because "little was recorded in those days".

Indeed, Hickey told Geraldine that when he became the archbishop of Perth in 1991, the Perth archdiocese files contained "no record" [meaning no written record] of a child-abuse complaint against any of Perth's diocesan priests. [This means that any offences before Hickey's arrival in 1991 had been covered up]

Hickey told Geraldine that in the 1960s there was "little understanding" [by the church hierarchy?] of the damage caused to children and others by sexual abuse and "hence little or no care was offered" [by the church hierarchy?] "to those who were abused."

[Hickey neglected to say that, even in the 1960s, child sexual abuse was a crime and that the abusive clergy should have been reported to the police.]

Hickey wrote: "Geraldine, I am very saddened by what happened to you. I hope he [Father X] was severely reprimanded by someone."

In fact, according to the 1963 document unearthed by Hickey, the 1963 archbishop (Irish-born Redmond Prendiville) merely transferred Father X to a new parish.

Thus, he continued to be a priest for the next 46 years, with access to children throughout that period. During those 46 years, the next two generations of Catholic families were kept ignorant about Geraldine's complaint. Father X appeared to be a priest about whom there was "no record" of a complaint - until Geraldine Willesee acted in May 2010.

Bingo! A document turns up

And, judging from Hickey's re-discovered document, there is no record of Father X being "severely reprimanded".

Hickey says that Father X left his parish soon after the 1963 complaint to spend some weeks away on a retreat. (Broken Rites wonders if this "time-out" — at a "retreat" — constituted a "severe reprimand".)

"There is no further comment in the priest's general file on the incident," Archbishop Hickey told Geraldine.

Archbishop Hickey told Geraldine in an email on 3 June 2010 that, after finding this document in late May 2010, he immediately suspended Father X from all public ministry and notified the church's Professional Standards Office in Western Australia.

Geraldine's story

Geraldine attended a Catholic school in the Perth parish where Father X was an assistant priest in 1963.

After she was abused by Father X, Geraldine did not remain silent. Her family and the parish priest (Father Cyril Stinson) soon heard about it. She says she refused to go to Sunday Mass. She says: "I stood defiantly, arms crossed, in front of my father one Sunday morning and said: 'I won't go'."

Geraldine says: "My friend, the late Father Jim O'Brien, repeatedly asked for action to be taken regarding Father X. And the late Father Cyril Stinson wrote a letter in 1963 to his then archbishop, the Irish-born Redmond Prendiville, about this abuse. The letter has just been re-discovered by Archbishop Hickey's office. The story has come full circle."

Geraldine questions the value of the church's Towards Healing process (established in 1996 as a front for the church's insurance company). She says: "Fourteen years after the Catholic Church released its Towards Healing manifesto addressing the endemic abuse of minors, it is hard-pressed to identify the men who came to notice as abusers before 1990. The Church doesn't always know who or where they are."

Geraldine has a warning to parents who might still trust the Catholic Church. Referring to her discovery that Father X was still practising as a priest in 2010: "It provokes hair-raising concerns. Can parents putting their children into the hands of the Catholic Church — in the parish, the private school or the local youth group — trust that their priests have no 'history'? No, they can't," Geraldine says.

It is possible that Geraldine's prominence (as a writer) might have prompted the Perth archdiocese to be more diligent than the Australian church authorities usually are in searching to see if a certain member of the clergy has been the subject of a previous complaint. Far too often, Broken Rites hears of victims who are told by the church's Professional Standards Office: "We have seen no record of any previous complaint about this person."