Er is said to have plied young Indigenous Australians with gifts and then sexually abused them: After an internal investigation by the Vatican, the former bishop of the Western Australian diocese of Broome, Christopher Saunders, was arrested on charges of rape and other abuse offences.
A police statement said a 74-year-old man was charged with two counts of sexual penetration without consent, 14 counts of unlawful and indecent assault and three counts of indecent contact with a child between the ages of 16 and 18. Although the name was not given, there is no doubt about the identity of the detainee. The chairman of the Australian Bishops' Conference, Timothy Costelloe, spoke of “very serious and deeply disturbing” allegations in a statement.
Vatican investigators hand over report to police
The arrest follows the handover of a 200-page report prepared by the Vatican and handed over to police in September last year. At the time, The Australian newspaper quoted parts of the investigation. The investigators said they had collected reports from 67 indigenous boys and young men who were allegedly victims of the then bishop.
Interviewing eyewitnesses and examining documents and other evidence revealed that Saunders, as a priest and later as a bishop, developed methods to prepare young indigenous men for sexual acts. This included spending thousands of dollars of church funds on cash gifts, cell phones, alcohol and cigarettes for “vulnerable” Indigenous men and boys.
Parishioners who had stood up against the bishop and his behavior for years had lost their jobs or suffered psychological and social damage in other ways, the report continued. The priest has always denied the allegations.
The police had already investigated Saunders in 2018 and 2020, but did not file charges because it could not be clearly determined what age the boys and men were at the time of the alleged abuse. The allegations relate to the period from 2008 to 2014. The former bishop spent his active time primarily in the remote Kimberly region in northwest Australia.
After decades of work in remote mission stations, the then Pope John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Broome in 1995. After the allegations of abuse became known, he initially resigned from his position before submitting his resignation in 2021.
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