You'll need a strong stomach to digest Revelation's insights into child sexual abuse in the Catholic church
Brigid Delaney
ABC’s documentary about a convicted paedophile priest is difficult to watch, but perhaps it’s necessary to bear witness
The inside of Ballarat cathedral. The ABC’s new three-part documentary Revelation sees journalist
Sarah Ferguson interview criminal priests and brothers of the Catholic church in Australia.
Photograph: ABC TV
Despite an extensive royal commission, scores of criminal trials and excellent books such as Louise Milligan’s Cardinal and David Marr’s The Prince, there are still some unanswered questions about child sexual abuse in the now-tattered narrative of the Catholic church in Australia.
These include: why did these priests do such horrible things? How did they justify their crimes to themselves and to God? What kind of conversations may they have had with, say, their archbishop or monsignor, once they were rumbled by a parent or teacher or victim?
Accounts from the paedophiles themselves that may go some way towards answering those questions are also missing from this narrative. Perhaps this is because paedophiles do not want to talk due to shame or due to the media’s preference for – in some cases – giving victims airtime and denying a platform to abusers. And then there’s us, the audience. Do we really want to hear from them?
There are arguments for listening to perpetrators explain themselves. You can better understand the crime if you understand the criminal. And the Catholic church has for a long time been so opaque on matters of sexual abuse that any interview, no matter how painful to watch, is illuminating.
The first episode of the three-part documentary Revelation is built around such an interview. ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson sits down with Fr Vincent Ryan (see story just below) (yes, he is still a priest, yet to be defrocked despite his horrendous crimes against children) and tries to answer all these questions.
Ryan is 80 now and has been accused of sexually abusing more than 30 boys aged from six to 17 from 1975 until 1995.
He was jailed for 14 years for his crimes in 1997 and last year he was tried on two new charges. These charges form the backbone of the documentary – for the first time during an Australian criminal trial, the ABC were allowed to film.
Sarah Ferguson behind the scenes of ABC documentary Revelation. Photograph: ABC TV
As well as interviewing Ryan (who pleaded not guilty), Ferguson speaks to two of the victims, the prosecution and defence barristers, as well as a psychiatrist who specialised in treating priests.
The documentary doesn’t make a promising start, opening with an introduction from Ferguson that is as purple as a priest’s Lenten vestments: “There are men living among us, like Lucifer’s fallen angels. It’s their ordinariness that I find disturbing. They really should look like monsters to match their deeds.”
Lucifer’s fallen angels? People that should look like monsters? Really?
You should not mock, Brigid. There is definitely an element of the demonic among paedophiles, especially paedophile priests. Paedophiles are guilty of the destruction of innocence, and the violation of the sacred, even, as one Aussie victim wrote, the murder of the soul. They are enemies of God and all that He represents.
Luckily such flowery language is kept to a minimum and the old technique of “show, don’t tell” quickly takes over. And that’s really all that’s necessary, because there’s a lot on show here that we haven’t seen or heard before on our screens. Be warned – you’ll need a strong stomach to digest it. Like, for example, Ryan’s justification for molestation: “As far as I was concerned, I was in a relationship. I was getting the love and the human touch and belonging.”
And then there’s the central crime itself. The victims – courageous men of strength and grace – tell us what happened to them.
They don’t spare us with the details, and why should they? Part of the problem, as the documentary points out, is that shame abounds. The victims suffer twice: from the act itself and then the silence and stigma after it.
The victims were young altar boys. What alternate moral universe was Ryan living in? It was the universe of the Catholic church, a corrupt institution that moved paedophile priests around to avoid scandal, conveniently giving them a batch of fresh victims in each new parish; an institution that saw the children as “instruments of temptation” rather than the innocent victims they were.
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| Brigid Delaney |
Revelation starts off strange, becomes upsetting and is, finally, shocking. In some ways it mimics the mechanics of a jury trial: we, at home, hear all sides. There is no room for politeness or euphemism. The whole nasty, sorry business is laid out before us, and it’s hard to remain with it, but there is a strong feeling that we must bear witness. The detail of the abuse is horrendous and I wish I hadn’t heard it. But maybe as someone raised Catholic and still has some cultural affinity with the Irish branch of the church, I needed to.
• Revelation airs in three parts on ABC TV, starting 17 March at 8.30pm
Convicted paedophile Vincent Ryan confessed to a priest — then he continued abusing children
By Sarah Ferguson
Vincent Ryan was convicted of sexually abusing more than 30 children. (Revelation/In Films)
Vincent Ryan is a Catholic priest and a paedophile, convicted of sexually abusing more than 30 children. In Australia's first television interview with a convicted clerical sex abuser, Ryan said there was no reason why he should not remain a priest.
"It's a duty. I've committed myself to it," he said. "It'd have to be a very serious reason, unless I'm stopped by authority, for me to make that decision and at this moment I don't see it."
In the ABC's Revelation series, filmed on the eve of Ryan's 2019 criminal trial, the paedophile priest is seen performing mass in his home, wearing holy vestments and blessing the communion wine and bread.
Following his fourth conviction in March 2019 on charges of sexually abusing two boys in the Newcastle region in the 1970s and 1980s, Ryan, 81, is currently serving a prison sentence in NSW of three years and three months.
'I will have a conscience problem'
Survivors of Ryan's abuse have condemned the Church's failure to remove Ryan from the priesthood. Peter Dorn was a victim of Ryan's as a primary school boy in Maitland in the 1970s.
"How does the church want somebody like that? How did they say that's a person acting on behalf of God? They've got no decency, they've got no compassion," Dorn said. "They say they have acknowledged it, but if they still recognise him as a priest, you know that's disgraceful."
When Ryan was first arrested in 1995, the church withdrew his "faculties", meaning he was no longer able to perform religious duties in public, hear confession or call himself "father".
When Ryan was first arrested in 1995, the church withdrew his "faculties", meaning he was no longer able to perform religious duties in public or hear confession. (Revelation/In Films)
However, he remained a priest and can still say the Catholic mass in private.
The current bishop of Maitland-Newcastle, Bill Wright, told the ABC in August last year that he had written to the Vatican about Ryan's status.
"The full range of things that have come to light and considerations of the time, all of these things are as matters of fact in what I've sent to Rome," the Bishop said. "So they've been raised."
Bishop Wright confirmed on Sunday in a letter to parishioners that he had received no response from Pope Francis or the Vatican about Ryan.
Ryan questioned whether he would in any case accept a decision to remove him from the priesthood and no longer say mass.
"I will have a real quandary, because I will want to obey the church, but I will have a conscience problem. I don't know what I'll do," he said.
Penance was 'three Hail Marys and a decade of the Rosary'
Is it only in the Catholic Church where praying and praising are considered punishment?
Gerald McDonald is another of Ryan's victims. He was assaulted while an altar boy with Ryan in Merewether in the 1970s and said he felt by allowing Ryan to remain a priest, the church was "condoning a paedophile".
"It makes me sick … That's exactly what they're doing," he said.
Ryan enjoyed the protection of the church in multiple ways during the decades of his offending against children, including taking advantage of the secrecy of confession. Ryan told the ABC that he confessed to a priest that he was sexually assaulting children,
"I don't know the exact words, but they would have been aware that I … that I had offended against children because … I can remember one priest saying, 'you'll go to jail if you don't stop this'," he said.
Ryan said he knew the priest would not break the seal of confession.
"How could he follow up the seal of confession? What can he do?" said Ryan, who claimed his penance was "three Hail Marys and a decade of the Rosary".
Ryan said he felt better having been given absolution for his sins by the priest. "Momentarily I felt free, yes," he said.
Ryan enjoyed the protection of the church in multiple ways during the decades of his offending against children. (Revelation/In Films)
Bishop Wright said he believes the priest, from the Redemptorist Monastery in NSW, was correct to keep Ryan's confession secret.
"I'm afraid I'd have to say I believe he should have kept his confidence," Wright said.
'It's part of the sex abuse crisis'
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended law reform to lift the protection of confessional privilege for reports of child sexual abuse.
All of Australia's states and territories have committed to following the recommendation.
Australia's Catholic Church leaders insist the sanctity of the seal of confession must be upheld even it means protecting priests who are breaking the law.
Ryan was sent to the Vatican to study at Propaganda College, along with a handpicked group of Australian seminarians that included George Pell. (Revelation/In Films)
Bishop Wright said: "Yes, I think the law is intruding into a place of personal conscience where it should not be."
Ryan was ordained as a priest in Rome by Pope Paul VI in St Peter's Basilica in 1966.
He was sent to the Vatican to study at Propaganda College, along with a handpicked group of Australian seminarians that included George Pell.
Ryan explained the effect of ordination:
"It meant you were set apart and you had this special mark on you. That was the theology of the church at that stage … If you were an ordained minister, of course you were more important than a married person."
Bishop Wright explained how that transformation created a damaging culture in some quarters of the church.
Ryan was ordained as a priest in Rome, by Pope Paul VI in St Peter's Basilica in 1966. (Revelation/In Films)
"Believing that membership of the in-group, the clergy specifically of course, confers a certain status and privilege … It becomes clericalism, I guess, when it's unanswerable and it allows people to stand on their status and get away with things that as human beings they shouldn't," Wright said.
"I think everyone agrees it's part of the sex abuse crisis."
Some Cardinals believe children sent to 'tempt' them
Ryan blames his immediate superiors in the Catholic Church for not monitoring him closely once they learnt in the early 1970s that he had abused children. He claims the church's priority was self-defence.
"The church still was in a fortress, defending itself against all these horrible [people] wanting to drag it down," said Ryan, who went on to abuse many more children in multiple parishes over two decades until he was caught.
When interviewed for Revelation, former president of Ireland Mary McAleese, a devout Catholic and qualified canon lawyer, said there were Cardinals who in her presence had blamed children for the crimes committed against them.
"What they're saying is these children, you know from the age of seven with the use of reason and the age of discretion, are capable of grave sin," she said.
"There is a belief that, yes, that the children have been used by the devil to tempt or seduce or to subvert the vocation of a man who was called by God."
Prepubescent children are a-sexual and can't be a temptation to anyone who is not predisposed to perversion! Abusing children is an act of hatred, or rebellion toward God. Satan doesn't use the children to tempt the priests, he uses the paedophile priests to destroy the children and bring blasphemy upon the Name of the Lord.
When asked if he could be forgiven for his decades of abuse of children, Vincent Ryan has no doubt: "By God," he said. "Most certainly."
Yes, he certainly can be forgiven by God, Jesus paid the price; but the question is will he be forgiven. I would be astonished if he were.
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French priest jailed five years over child sexual abuse
By Gwendoly Njoku
A 74-year-old French priest, Bernard Preynat, has been jailed for five years for sexually abusing dozens of children.
Father Preynat was reported to have committed the crime in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.
The jailed priest admitted to abusing boy scouts while he served as a scout leader in Lyon, France.
The Priest had confessed during his trial that he was not aware of the graveness of his actions.
“It took me time to learn it was wrong given the age of the children,” he said in January.
He was reported to have sexually assaulted at least 80 young boys who were between the ages of seven and fifteen and ten of his victims testified at the four-day trial.
Prosecutors accused the priest of destroying his victims’ lives while seeking an eight-year jail term for the accused.
BBC reports that last July, Preynat was defrocked – stripped of his clerical status – after a church tribunal ruled he had committed “criminal acts of sexual abuse against minors."
Retrial to begin for Philadelphia monsignor, the only (USA) church official to go to prison in priest-abuse scandal
By The Associated Press
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Nearly two decades after the Roman Catholic priest-abuse scandal exploded in the U.S. in 2002, only one church official has ever gone to prison over it: Monsignor William Lynn, the longtime secretary for clergy in the Philadelphia archdiocese.
After an appeals court found his sweeping 2012 trial flawed and his conviction was twice overturned, Lynn, 69, is set to be retried Monday on a single child endangerment count. Prosecutors contend he endangered children by transferring a known predator priest, after a year of inpatient therapy, to their parish without warning in 1993.
The landmark case, now trimmed to its core, will look nothing like the gut-wrenching, four-month trial that unearthed the church's "secret archives," drew more than 20 haunted victims to the witness stand and led the judge to conclude that Lynn allowed "monsters in clerical garb … to destroy the souls of children."
This time, a new judge plans to steer clear of the broader priest-abuse crisis that has cost the church an estimated $3 billion or more, and plunged dioceses around the world into bankruptcy and scandal.
"This is one defendant, one count of endangering the welfare of children, with one group of children," Judge Gwendolyn Bright said at a final pretrial hearing Wednesday. "We're not bringing in the so-called or alleged 'sins of the Catholic Church.'"
It's not even clear the jury will hear from a single victim this time. That's because the only accuser whose allegation falls within the statute of limitations — a policeman's son dubbed "Billy Doe" in court files — is an uncertain witness at best, whose credibility has long been challenged. Prosecutors do not plan to call him, although Bright said she may force their hand.
Instead, Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington plans to argue that Lynn endangered children simply by "placing a bomb" in their parish, whether or not it went off.
Zach Hiner, the executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said it was stunning that only Lynn and former Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn have faced charges over what some investigators call "the playbook" long used by dioceses around the country: hiding complaints in locked files, shuffling problem priests, paying victims confidential settlements and stonewalling police.
Finn received probation for a misdemeanor plea of failing to report a priest engaged in child pornography to authorities.
"It's not about getting vengeance and a long prison sentence. It's affirming that this is a crime and it did put children at risk," Hiner said Thursday. "And it can't happen again."
Lynn, who mostly comes to court by himself these days, served 33 months in state prison, of an initial three- to six-year sentence. Neither of the Philadelphia cardinals he served — including the powerful Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who aggressively fought two grand jury investigations and died just before Lynn's first trial — were charged. Nor were the bishops above him in the local hierarchy.
It was Lynn's job at the archdiocese to recommend priest assignments from 1992 to 2004, and to review decades of complaints when the abuse scandal broke.
At trial, he said he compiled a list of 35 active priests who were likely "predators," including one named Edward Avery, in hopes Bevilacqua would act. Instead, he testified, the cardinal ordered the list destroyed, though a copy survived.
Bevilacqua, overruling Lynn's suggestion of a different parish, placed Avery at St. Jerome's in northeast Philadelphia in 1993. The policeman's son would later say he was molested there in about 1999, by Avery, another priest and his sixth-grade teacher.
"I did not intend any harm to come to (Avery's victim). The fact is, my best was not good enough to stop that harm," Lynn testified in 2012.
Avery, who took a plea offer before trial, later conceded that he had engaged in "horseplay" with young boys, but insisted that he never abused "Billy Doe." And a city detective on the case later signed an affidavit saying the evidence did not support the former altar boy's accusations.
"Why are they not calling that victim? That's the elephant in the room," Lynn's defense lawyer, Thomas Bergstrom, argued last week, saying there's no case without a victim. "I suspect they're not calling him because they don't believe he has any credibility."
Testimony from the young man, who had a long history of drug abuse and petty crime, sent two other men from St. Jerome's to prison in 2013: the Rev. Charles Engelhardt and teacher Bernard Shero. Both denied the sexual assault accusations. Engelhardt died in prison before his appeal played out, and Shero was released in 2017 after his conviction was overturned and he pleaded no contest to lesser charges in exchange for time served.
"Doe," who now lives in Florida, received a civil settlement from the Philadelphia archdiocese, which recently installed a new leader, former Cleveland Bishop Nelson Perez, a moderate cleric known for his focus on pastoral work.
“The Archdiocese looks forward to a final resolution in this matter,” spokesman Ken Gavin said in an email Sunday.
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