A victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of a Melbourne priest, Peter Searson, has told a royal commission that he now sits at home in the dark with the door locked because it is the only place he feels safe.

The victim, identified only as BVD, said the abuse had begun when he was about nine years old in 1978, while he was serving as an altar boy at the Our Lady of Carmel parish in Sunbury. Searson was the parish priest and BVD was ordered to mow his lawn and wash his car.

“He was a very scary man and and very intimidating, with a gaze that would just pierce you like he was looking right through you,” BVD told the royal commission into institutional responses into child sexual abuse in Melbourne on Tuesday.

“I was very submissive as a child and I was very scared of Searson.”

Searson would order BVD to come inside with him every Saturday after he had finished washing his car, he said, and the priest’s behaviour progressed from drying BVD’s genitals to raping him.

“That happened nearly every Saturday for six months,” BVD said, breaking down into tears. “Searson threatened me, telling me I would go to hell if I told anyone. I was terrified. The only person I was more scared of than Searson was my mother. There was no way I could tell her what was happening.”

He began doing a bad job of washing the car and mowing the lawn so he was eventually barred from doing chores for Searson. BVD told the commission he had attempted suicide three times and now suffered from severe post-traumatic stress and depression.

Earlier on Tuesday, the commission heard from a former Catholic priest, Philip O’Donnell, who worked with Searson at the Sunbury parish and who described his behaviour as “bizarre”.

O’Donnell said he had been told by sisters at the parish that Searson was taking children into his room to give them sex education.

The counsel assisting Gail Furness asked O’Donnell what he did with this knowledge. “Nothing,” O’Donnell replied. “There was nothing I could do with that knowledge.

“Searson was impossible to confront, he really was a psychiatrically disturbed man. Any attempt to raise an issue like that would have been met with aggression and denial.”

O’Donnell had written a number of letters to the then archbishop, Frank Little, about Searson’s behaviour, the commission was told, though he had not mentioned the sex education because he did not witness it. But it was Searson’s refusal to obey an administrative order from Little, not his erratic and aggressive behaviour towards staff and children, that saw him moved to another parish in Doveton.

“The archbishop, when given voluminous specific data on matters of scandal that would have damaged the church and the reputation of the church, chose not to act,” O’Donnell said. “And when he found an administrative matter that was non-scandalous, he acted … ruthlessly or decisively.”

O’Donnell told the commission there was not much doubt that “Rome pulled the strings” when it came to how to handle child sexual abuse within Australian Catholic institutions. Little had been especially loyal to Rome, he said.

“He was an archbishop who had that ability to live with the tension of imperfection, and he understood that his priests weren’t perfect, and if in fact they made errors here, there or wherever, so be it,” O’Donnell said. “Frank would try everything not to cause a problem or scandal.”

O’Donnell told the commission he had left the church because of being traumatised by working with people like Searson and another pedophile priest, Wilfred ‘Bill’ Baker, and because he had wanted to get married.

The commission earlier heard that in 1989, staff from the Holy Family parish in Doveton met with the then auxiliary bishop George Pell, who is now a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church, with a list of grievances, including Searson’s harassment of children, staff and parents, his cruelty towards animals, and his showing children a coffin.



Evidence to be heard over the next two weeks, Furness said, would show that Pell passed the information on to the vicar general, Monsignor Deakin. But complaints against Searson continued into the 1990s, the commission heard.

The hearings continue.