ALECOMM

The altar boy sat firmly on the back of the motorbike, his skinny arms gripping the waist of the young priest as they weaved through the suburban streets leading to Victoria’s most prestigious Catholic seminary.

It was a Sunday afternoon around October 1976 and the priest was taking the boy to Corpus Christi, the training college whose alumni includes jailed Cardinal George Pell, the Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge, and the former Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart.

According to a civil lawsuit due to be filed in court this week, Father Russell Vears guided the 14-year-old boy, John Fells*, into the building, down a corridor with rooms on both sides, and to a communal area where four or five other boys were already sitting, waiting on a couch.

Then the St Peter’s altar boy says he was picked out by a newly ordained priest, Paul David Ryan, and taken into a bedroom where he was abused.

“I recall that seminarians would come out through the corridor into the sitting room and select a boy to go back with them,” said the now 57-year-old Fells.

“After a short wait, Ryan came out into the sitting room and selected me.”

Fells alleges that he was the victim of a group of priests who formed part of a network of paedophiles coalescing around Corpus Christi in the mid-1970s. His first abuser was St Peter’s Clayton parish priest Ronald Pickering, who Fells claims molested him after a Sunday mass in the parish presbytery. A known paedophile, Pickering fled to England in 1993 after the Melbourne Archdiocese informed him about a victim’s complaint.

Fells’ second abuser was assistant priest Vears, who now goes by the name of Russell Walker. He was sentenced to jail in 2013 for historic offences against two former altar boys including Fells.

And the third alleged offender was Ryan, Pickering’s friend and protege. Now 70, the defrocked priest was jailed in June for unrelated historic offences against adolescents.

“Pickering got me first, then Vears, and then Ryan,” alleges Fells, who tried to take his own life after the seminary incident and still suffers from post-traumatic stress.

“They got me all right.”

The allegations contained in Fells’ statement of claim, lodged by the law firm Arnold Thomas & Becker, will eventually be tested by the courts. Ryan declined to comment. Vears says he has no memory of the events described and cannot comment. But nearly two years after the end of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the story reflects a deeper, darker problem.

The Royal Commission focused mostly on the offending of individual Catholic priests and the way the church shifted them around to hide their crimes. But a months-long investigation by The Age has revealed how a large number of paedophile priests and religious brothers acted in clusters, or rings of abusers. They knew what each other was up to and actively colluded by sharing victims. They passed on intelligence about children who were potential targets. They kept each others’ secrets.

In many cases, Corpus Christi, the seminary owned and governed by the five dioceses of Victoria and Tasmania, was at the centre. Here, sexually repressed men could “act out” with each other, often without consequence, and then transfer their attentions to the most innocent in their flocks.

In some cases, children were brought to the seminary itself to be groomed and exploited.

Repression, shame and confusion

In Latin, “seminary” refers to a seedbed in which plants can bloom and thrive. In the Catholic church, seminaries are supposed to be the places where men are nourished in their faith, and then grow into mature priests, ready to serve the community.

But too often, the process became perverted. According to a conservative Royal Commission estimate, Corpus Christi had produced at least 75 alleged sex offender priests by 2017. Of that group, 47 were ordained to the Archdiocese of Melbourne, with a total of 269 abuse claims made against them. Since then, there have been more, including George Pell, who was the Rector of the Corpus Christi seminary in the 1980s. Other graduates, such as notorious paedophile Gerald Ridsdale, ended up in the Ballarat archdiocese. He was ultimately convicted of abusing 78 children.

Melbourne’s Catholic training college was not alone nationally. In NSW, St Columba's Junior Seminary in Springwood graduated 94 future sex offender priests, and St Patrick's at Manly had 113. Both operated for decades before Corpus Christi opened in 1923 and neither still exists.

So what was it about seminary life that made it such fertile ground for predators?

Traditionally, seminaries have been isolated places where women and sex are shunned, and where clerical culture demands unquestioning obedience to religious superiors. Corpus Christi - initially established at Werribee’s Chirnside Mansion before relocating to Glen Waverley, Clayton and finally, Carlton - was no exception.

Those who entered the seminary to answer their holy calling were often young and sometimes ill-equipped for the quasi-monastic, highly regimented lifestyle. Michael Parer, a former priest who was at Corpus Christi from 1952 to 1959, said only four of the 22 seminarians in his first year were older than 18. Two were just sixteen. They were recruited from parishes by people called vocational directors.

Like putting a flame under a kettle and jamming a lid on. The steam's still going to come out the spout and you have no control over it.

Clinical psychologist Gerardine Robinson to the Royal Commission.

“The vocational directors - they were chosen as men’s men - would go out to any kid that put his hand up and target them, visit the parents and talk about the whole ethos that priests were chosen by God,” Parer said. “That’s pretty heavy stuff to a kid in his adolescence battling testosterone and trying to grow up.”

In the early days, in Werribee, the college had strict rules: newspapers were forbidden, parents were only allowed to visit once a month, students were banned from entering other rooms without explicit permission from the Rector. Celibacy was simply a given, demanded without any genuine discussion about how to prepare for it beyond trusting in prayer.

Underwriting these expectations were millenniums-old strictures about the weakness of the flesh and the fallen nature of women.

“We were told ours was a holy occupation - how could we hold the blood and body of Christ and even think about profaning our hands by touching a woman?" said one priest, who went through the seminary in the 1970s.

The result was a hothouse of repression, shame and theological confusion, which clinical psychologist Gerardine Robinson likens to “putting a flame under a kettle and jamming a lid on.”

“The steam's still going to come out the spout and you have no control over it,” she told the Royal Commission.

One church transcript of an interview with former Vicar-General Gerald Cudmore revealed that in some circles, touching a child, while certainly a crime, might not be regarded by the church as a sin. Another reveals Father Wilfred Baker telling police during an interview that his offending was inspired by a child-rearing book he’d read in the seminary.

“It was something about children and being loved, that it is never enough to tell children that you love them,” he said. “They need to be cuddled and that sort of thing.”

At times, Corpus Christi itself became a place where certain priests and seminarians could groom adolescents, making them feel special for being “chosen” to visit. One Melbourne man will claim in a court filing this week being taken to Corpus Christi’s Glen Waverley campus around 1972 by Father Terrence Pidoto to be shown “where priests are made”.

The former St Bede’s altar boy says he was paraded by Pidoto in front of three young men sitting on a bed in their underwear, with the priest saying words to the effect: “Look boys, he’s the one I was telling you about. Isn’t he cute?” As two more seminarians joined the group, the 14-year-old boy sensed danger and asked to go home. Instead, Pidoto took him through the seminary to show him the chapel, and then the dining room. In claims accepted by a jury in 2007, the priest then raped him.

“We got back in the car, and he never said a word to me on the way home,” the survivor told The Age. “I stopped going to church after that.”

‘High-camp games’

As Corpus Christi moved to Glen Waverley in 1960, on the site of what is now the Victorian Police Academy, then relocated again to the south-eastern suburb of Clayton in 1973, the broader society was becoming more permissive. Inside the seminary walls, there was less emphasis on rigid rules and more on personal responsibility.

But homosexuality remained a crime in Australia, and some same-sex attracted men still saw the priesthood as a refuge where they could be with other like-minded religious men. In the outside world, they would face inevitable questions about why they weren’t married. Here, celibacy became a “cover” for their sexual identity.

There was an ‘arty group’ among students but until the recent revelation of homosexual behaviour there was no solid anxiety amongst the staff.

Letter from Corpus Christi to a US treatment centre.

This was a centuries-old contradiction in action. The Catholic Church insists that homosexuality is a sin, but thousands of its priests are gay. The explosive book Inside The Closet of the Vaticanby French journalist and author Frederic Martel suggests up to 80 per cent of priests are same-sex attracted.

Former Corpus Christi seminarian Phil O’Donnell recalls in the 1960s the emergence of an “overtly homosexual” group, who enjoyed baiting authorities and playing “high-camp” games, led by its charismatic leader, Ray Whitehouse.

“We’d all have a female name and then "ette” would be added to everything,” O’Donnell told the Royal Commission. “I was Phil, so from this group I was Phyllis, and if you were having a meal it was pass the ‘saltette’ or ‘breadette’.”

Others games weren’t quite as innocent. Older students like Des Gannon, now a known sex offender, courted younger seminarians in a practice known as “colting” - the “colt” was in a master-servant-mentor relationship with his elder that had sexual overtones.

Corpus Christi documents also reveal that Paul David Ryan and a group of six seminarians were taking part in “mutual masturbation, massaging, or exhibitionism” and that “more serious acts occurred not infrequently”.

But one 1977 letter from Corpus Christi to a US institute where Ryan was sent for “treatment” to deal with his behaviour also exposes the difficulty that staff faced grappling with what was happening.

“There was an ‘arty group’ among students but until the recent revelation of homosexual behaviour there was no solid anxiety amongst the staff about this arty group to which Paul [David Ryan] belonged,” the letter said. “Certainly a couple of very naive, innocent boys were among his accomplices and our task here will be to assist in their rehabilitation.”

Research shows that homosexuality should not be conflated with paedophilia. A John Jay College of Criminal Justice argued in 2011 that clergy offenders were “situational generalists"-  abusive men who took advantage of the people in their care, most of whom happened to be boys.

However US psychotherapist Richard Sipe, an expert on the church’s abuse crisis, argues that by refusing to deal with homosexuality in its ranks, Catholic teaching encourages “identity confusion, sexual acting out, and moral duplicity.”

There are many examples of double lives. Cardinal George Pell was one of the church’s most vocal opponents of homosexuality but the former Archbishop is now in jail for sexually abusing two choirboys. Pell's legal team on Tuesday lodged an application for special leave to appeal that conviction.

Father John Peregrine Stockdale, who worked at parishes in regional Victoria for decades, was found dead in a sex cubicle at Melbourne gay sauna Club 80 in 1995. At a seminary in Adelaide decades earlier, Stockdale assaulted a 15-year-old priest-in-training, John Hepworth, who later become one of the victims of serial offender Father Ron Pickering.

Pickering was known for grooming adolescents with “lovely gifts” and “lavish dinners”. One victim told the Royal Commission of when the priest took him to Adelaide to wine and dine with a group of clergy and their chosen targets.

“All of the men had boys with them around the same age as me,” the man said in evidence. “I was made to sit on the kids’ table while the men sat on a different table. Although we didn't discuss it, my impression was that the other boys were in the same position as me.”

Hepworth remembers an “unguarded world”, in which “priests who collaborated, cooperated, exchanged details about young men and teenagers.” It was “glittering and fascinating,” he admits. But it was also wrong.

“They were always drawing in young men,” he says. “Some of us broke out at great cost.”

The seminary psychologist

Corpus Christi turned out scores of child abusers over its history. In the worst year, the infamous Gerald Ridsdale’s graduation class of 1961, five out of 18 priests - more than a quarter - were ultimately convicted or accused of committing offences. The others were Kelvin Sharkey, Philip Green, Barry Whelan and Wilfred Baker.

Until the early 2000s, the church’s gatekeepers were psychiatrist Dr Eric Seal and psychologist Ronald Conway, both now deceased. They assessed the suitability of candidates to become priests and treated priests and religious brothers who were caught committing acts of abuse - part of a system designed by church officials to “deal with the problem of child sexual abuse ‘in-house’”, according to the the Royal Commission.

There is no reliable psychological test to detect paedophilia, but church personnel records show lax vetting processes. Questions about suitability, particularly involving sexual misbehaviour, were often dismissed.

Salesian brother Paul Pavlou underwent two psychological assessments in 2000 and 2001 as he proceeded through priest training at Corpus Christi. Conway found indications of “a much richer fantasy life than Paul is willing to commit to paper” and noted “libido pressures … still lurk below the surface although they are well maintained and well socialised”.

But Conway signed Pavlou off as a “better than average” prospect for the priesthood. He was ordained in 2004. By that time he had already raped a 12-year-old boy multiple times, and he went on to assault a 14-year-old boy soon after being posted to a parish in 2006.

Several years later the psychologist Conway himself, after his death in 2009, was accused of committing sexual offences against his patients, beginning in the 1960s.

“The history of seminary training has not always been consistent, and in some instances major failings of care are on the public record,” a Melbourne Archdiocese spokesman admitted. “This is not the case today.”

“The Catholic community, and our wider Australian society, has a right to expect the Church to choose and prepare its leaders with a capacity to serve parishes faithfully, build a culture of safety for children and vulnerable people, and respect the law.”

Corpus Christi seminarians must now undergo working with children checks and psychological assessments by an independent clinician. These tests examine their relationship history, their use of pornography, any history of abuse, and any psychopathology or personality disorders. Formation is conducted by men and women, and today’s seminarians are taught Victorian legislation regarding mandatory reporting, and grooming and child protection, and must participate in regular seminars on chastity and celibacy.

New laws passed in the Victorian parliament, though not accepted by the Catholic church, aim to report child abuse revealed in the confessional to authorities.

And as seminarians progress through their seven-years of training, they undertake undergraduate and graduate studies at the Catholic Theological College - “a co-learning” institution with “significant numbers of lay staff”.

Arrested development

Shortly after lunch on July 29 this year, in Melbourne’s County Court, Paul David Ryan was sitting in the dock, his gaze fixed firmly on the palms of his hands. He didn’t flinch as he was sentenced to a minimum 17 months in jail for historical sex offences against three teenagers aged 14, 15 and 17.

Ryan’s behaviour - in collusion with other priests and acting alone - was devastating for his victims. He would buy students alcohol and cigarettes, show them pornographic magazines and play card games in his presbytery that would suddenly turn into strip poker. At one school retreat, a teenager took a nap in the middle of the day and awoke to find Ryan masturbating him.

His story emblematic of what was wrong with the seminary’s - and the church’s - response to sexual misconduct. Despite being kicked out of an Adelaide seminary in 1971 for unspecified “unsuitability”, Ryan was accepted into Melbourne’s Corpus Christi with support from Ballarat Bishop Ronald Mulkearns - the same church leader who protected some of the worst sex offenders in the state’s western district.

Ryan’s misbehaviour continued, including during the week he was ordained in Ballarat. But instead of taking action, church authorities sent him to the US for “spiritual guidance”.

In 20 years, Ryan made at least seven trips to America, for “treatment”, to study or to minister. He is alleged to have abused children there too. In between he would return to Australia. He was moved from parish to parish, giving him access to new victims in Warrnambool, Terang, Penshurst and Ararat.

One of his victims, now aged 52, reported Ryan to Mulkearns. The bishop did nothing, and years later, a different victim of Ryan took his own life.

"If I had gone to the police, instead of Bishop Mulkearns, that boy may still be alive,” the victim said. “I will carry that anguish forever."