Christianity
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Mary Mackillop exposed Paedophile priest
I will be watching this documentary with great interest.
This nun well and truly deserves her sainthood and about fucking time!A new documentary about the life of Mary MacKillop claims she was excommunicated from the Catholic Church partly as revenge for helping to expose a South Australian pedophile priest.
The documentary for the ABC's Compass program claims sisters in MacKillop's Josephite order of nuns attracted the ire of a South Australian priest for telling authorities that a Father Keating, of Kapunda, was molesting children at the local church school.
The sisters reported the abuse to the vicar-general and disciplinary action was taken against Keating, humiliating him and angering a Father Charles Horan, who was close to the bishop of Adelaide, Bishop Shiel, Fairfax newspapers say.
Horan is believed to have harboured a grudge against MacKillop and the whistleblowers in her order, and used his influence over the bishop to manipulate him into throwing the nun out of the church in 1871. Bishop Shiel reversed the excommunication on his deathbed.
Father Paul Gardiner, a Jesuit priest and the chief postulator for MacKillop's sainthood, told the documentary makers that Bishop Shiel was "gaga" when he excommunicated the woman soon to become Australia's first saint. "She submitted to a farcical ceremony where the bishop was, I'm not sure you should use this word, gaga, but he had lost it and he was being manipulated by malicious priests," he said.
Keating was sent back to Ireland where he continued as a priest, the documentary says.
This is the first time the link between a pedophilia cover-up and MacKillop's excommunication has been exposed, Fairfax says.
The documentary airs on October 10, a week before MacKillop's canonisation in Rome.
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