SINS OF THE CHURCH
A NEW DOCUMENTARY DELVES DEEP INTO CORRUPTION AND THE MINDS OF SOME OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST NOTORIOUS SEX OFFENDERS
A shocking new documentary about sex offenders.
At the end of Oscar-winning film Spotlight – the story of how journalists exposed the widespread child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Boston, USA – the beach-side community of Newcastle, NSW, is listed among places around the world where major abuse scandals were covered up by the church. Paedophile Vincent Ryan was one priest who preyed on altar boys in the Maitland-Newcastle region between 1973 and 1991, and was jailed for 14 years after admitting to grooming and sexually assaulting 34 children.
Now, in the riveting three-part ABC documentary Revelation (Tue. March 17 at 8.30pm on ABC and iview), journalist Sarah Ferguson confronts both Ryan and former brother Bernard McGrath – another notorious paedophile – as she investigates how power and corruption in the church enabled these sexual predators to ruin the lives of so many children. The documentary comes as disgraced cardinal George Pell takes his fight against his conviction for sex crimes to the High Court.
Ryan, now 81, speaks candidly to Ferguson about what he calls the “horrific” behaviour from his past. But while he pleaded guilty to his deviant crimes in 1997 and offered police the names of more victims, he still lacks a full understanding of his damaging actions, saying he believes God can forgive him for his sins.
Ferguson says of the contradictory Ryan: “My personal view is that he has done some things and thought about it in a way that moves in the direction of remorse, but I don’t think he’s there. It’s clear from the things he said – that the children wanted to be with him, and things that are so shocking – that make it clear that he hasn’t inhabited the person who did those things.” She adds: “There is unquestionably delusion – there is delusion for self-preservation.”
Ferguson interviewed Ryan on the eve of a new trial in 2019, where he was accused of sexually assaulting two more altar boys in the ’70s and ’80s. The convicted paedophile denied these claims, but was found guilty and jailed for a further three years.
In 1975, Gerard McDonald was a 10-yearold altar boy at St Joseph’s Church when he became a victim of Ryan, whom he later dubbed “the monster of Merewether”.
“He’s a very, very smart man. He knew exactly what he was doing,” McDonald says in Revelation.
McDonald was one of six boys who told their mothers about Ryan’s abuse later that year, with the concerned parents reporting the abuse to the nuns at St Joseph’s school. The police were never called and two years later, Ryan was back working in local schools in the area. Twenty years later, it was McDonald and fellow victim Scott Hallett’s brave statements to police that eventually led to the priest’s downfall.
In 2017, a report from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that leaders of the Anglican diocese of Newcastle had put children at harm for 30 years with their “do nothing” approach to reports of abuse.
Throughout Revelation, interviews with police and religious experts show how easily paedophile priests were able to get away with their crimes for so long, protected by an almost 2000-year-old institution.
Father Bill Burston, a friend of Ryan’s from their Newcastle days, says he’s sceptical about the latest abuse allegations, insisting there can be an “overemphasis on believing victims” who could just be after handouts.
Unforgivably, in 1974, Ryan’s superior, Monsignor Patrick Cotter, was told about Ryan’s abuse of two boys by their parents, but failed to take action. Instead, he sent Ryan to Melbourne for a year – supposedly for ‘treatment’ – before allowing him back into the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese, where he was free to prey on boys for years.
The sense that the church was untouchable was perhaps ingrained into Ryan and fellow priests, like a young George Pell, when they studied in Rome in the ’60s, and were later ordained at St Peter’s Basilica.
In 2012, Pell claimed the church was “ashamed” of the sex abuse but dismissed claims it was a systemic problem, saying, “Back in those days, they were entitled to think of paedophilia as simply a sin that you would repent of.” Seven years later, Pell was sentenced to six years behind bars for his own abuse of two choirboys.
During her year filming Revelation, Ferguson travelled to the Vatican in Rome to find out their position on the global child sex abuse scandals. “There are plenty of people in the church who get it, but there are plenty of people who still don’t, who have lived so long inside the fortress of self-defence that they simply cannot and will not step outside in their lifetime,” she says. “It is by no means resolved.”