If you want inside information about how the Catholic Church exercises "damage control" on clergy sexual abuse (to protect the church's image), a good source would be Archbishop Philip Wilson, of Adelaide.He became the chairman of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference in 2001 and he has also participated in the Australian bishop's Professional Standards Committee — the committee that manages the church's response to clergy sexual abuse.
Earlier in his career, he had been an insider in the administration of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese in New South Wales.
Philip Edward Wilson was born in 1950, the eldest of five children, and grew up in Cessnock, New South Wales (within the Maitland-Newcastle diocese). After finishing his schooling, he was accepted by the Maitland diocese as a candidate to enter a seminary in Sydney to study in for the priesthood.
After being ordained a priest of the Maitland Diocese in August 1975, he gradually developed a successful career in that diocese, during which he performed some administrative roles that enabled him to observe how the church manages the issue of clergy sexual abuse.
For example, during Father Wilson's early work in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese, what did he know about the following priests?
1. Father John Denham
By early 1979, Father Philip Wilson had become the Maitland-Newcastle diocesan Director of Religious Education, and the 1979 directory of the National Council of Priests gave Father Wilson's postal address as the Catholic Education Centre, 60 Tyrell Street, Newcastle.
One of the schools that came within Father Wilson's orbit was St Pius X College (a Catholic high school) in Adamstown, Newcastle, which was staffed by priests, including Father John Sidney Denham.
In 1980, following a complaint from a pupil's family about Denham's sexual abuse, the diocese transferred Denham away from the St Pius X school to work as an assistant priest in parishes.
Therefore it would be interesting to find out if Philip Wilson ever heard anything about Father Denham's extra-curricular activities.
Denham has pleaded guilty to multiple sexual offences against boys and has been jailed.
2. Father Jim Fletcher
In 1980 Father Wilson became the secretary to Maitland's Bishop Leo Clarke, as well as Master of Ceremonies for the diocese. By the early 1980s, Father Wilson was residing at the Bishop's House. According to the annual Catholic directories, there were two other residents in that House — Bishop Leo Clarke and Father James Fletcher.
For some years, Fletcher had been the administrator (i.e., priest in charge) at the Maitland cathedral and had also been the master of ceremonies for Bishop Leo Clarke.
In the mid-1980s, Bishop Clarke transferred Fletcher from the Cathedral parish to other, less important parishes. In 2005 Fletcher was jailed for child-sex offences committed against one of his victims in the 1990s.
One of Fletcher's victims (named Peter) says that he used to visit Fletcher at Bishop's House in the 1970s, and Fletcher would take this boy up to Fletcher's bedroom, where Fletcher would sexually abuse him.
Did Father Wilson ever learn that Fletcher had taken a boy to a bedroom in the Bishop's House?
3. Father Denis McAlinden
In 1985, Bishop Clarke asked Father Wilson (as the diocesan secretary) to visit the Merriwa parish to receive complaints that Fr Denis McAlinden had sexually abused girls in the parish school (this information is in a statement issued by Archbishop Wilson in Adelaide ten years later, in 1995).
And in 1995, according to church documents, Bishop Leo Clarke appointed Fr Philip Wilson as the notary to record the proceedings in a church inquiry into further complaints against Father Denis McAlinden.
But this information about McAlinden was not reported to the police. Someone from the Maitland-Newcastle diocese did speak to the police about McAlinden in 2005 but, by then, McAlinden was in bad health and he died a year later.
Wilson's later career
Meanwhile, Father Philip Wilson's career boomed. In 1996 he was appointed as the Bishop of Wollongong (south of Sydney) to clean up a public-relations disaster there, caused by Wollongong church-abuse scandals.
In 2001, he became the Archbishop of Adelaide and later became chairman of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference.
His participation in the Australian bishops' Professional Standards Committee means that he is an expert on the church's handling of sex-abuse complaints.
So it would be interesting to find out how much Archbishop Wilson has known, from 1979 to the present, about church sexual abuse in Australia
The Broken Rites website has an article about each of these criminal priests:
Denham
Fletcher
McAlinden
SIC: BrokenRites AUS