Arya News - The Catholic Church in Australia has been marred by abuse allegations in recent years.
A former Roman Catholic bishop has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for sexually abusing two young indigenous men in Western Australia.
Seventy-six year old Christopher Saunders was sentenced by the District Court of Western Australia and showed no reaction during Wednesday’s sentencing hearing.
In August, a court found Saunders guilty of one count of sexual penetration without consent and 12 counts of indecent assault.
The offences took place between 2010 and 2019 when he was bishop of Broome, a remote diocese in northwestern Australia.
Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, issued a statement apologising for the pain and suffering Saunders inflicted on victims, saying their trust had been “profoundly betrayed by a leader of the Church”.
Saunders was ordained a priest in 1976 and initially worked at mission stations in outback regions from the 1970s onwards. In the 1990s, he was appointed bishop of Broome by Pope John Paul II.
Following the abuse allegations, Saunders suspended his duties in 2020 and in August 2021 Pope Francis accepted his resignation. The clergyman has consistently denied the allegations.
It was revealed in court that the bishop had groomed his victims.
He is said to have regularly invited young indigenous Aboriginal men and teenagers to a beach house or a Catholic Church residence, providing them with alcohol and cigarettes, and giving them money and mobile phones.
The assaults on the two young men reportedly took place while they were heavily intoxicated.
Royal Commission and history of abuse
In 2013, Australia’s government set up a Royal Commission , a high-level inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse, after a series of scandals involving the Catholic Church.
In 2017, the commission revealed that most of the abuse took place in churches, with seven percent of Catholic priests accused of abusing children in Australia between 1950 and 2010. It said allegations were almost never investigated.
It found that 4,444 alleged incidents of child sexual abuse had been reported to church authorities. In some dioceses, more than 15 percent of priests were perpetrators.
The commission also heard testimony from the Vatican’s former finance chief Cardinal George Pell, who was found guilty in 2018 of sexually abusing choirboys in Melbourne, Australia in the 1990s.
Pell – who had been Pope Francis’s anti-corruption tsar – was released from prison in 2020 after a court quashed his conviction. He died in Rome on January 10, 2023, at the age of 81 due to heart complications following hip surgery.