A former Griffith priest will be the focus of a royal commission into child sexual abuse.
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The commission will hear evidence Graeme Lawrence’s power and influence protected child sex offenders for several decades.
Mr Lawrence left Griffith for Newcastle in 1984. He was the senior Newcastle cleric with a prominent role on the Anglican Church’s sexual abuse working group in 2003 that developed national professional standards.
But the 13th Anglican Dean of Newcastle was also in a “gang of three” protecting a notorious Hunter paedophile priest, and led a Griffith group of offenders to the Hunter who were later defrocked after child sex allegations, the royal commission has heard. Mr Lawrence was defrocked in 2012.
It will hear evidence Mr Lawrence was one of a group of four trainee priests at St John’s Theological College at Morpeth in 1963 who went on to be accused, or convicted, of child sex offences.
The royal commission will hear evidence of Mr Lawrence’s early association with Anglican priests Andrew Duncan, Bruce Hoare and Graham Sturt in Griffith, and the move of the four men to the Hunter.
The evidence will include that Mr Lawrence groomed and sexually abused a 16-year-old boy in 1981, after Anglican priest Andrew Duncan told him that Mr Lawrence was “part of the family”.
“It is anticipated there will be evidence that Lawrence had, and continues to have, considerable influence in the diocese,” counsel assisting Naomi Sharp told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse sitting in Newcastle.
That influence includes an allegation he has continued to preach at Adamstown parish despite the defrocking.
The opening day of the 42nd royal commission case study heard shocking evidence of abuse by survivors, but equally shocking evidence of networks supporting Anglican child sex offenders for decades. Mr Lawrence was at the centre of a number of those networks, while also taking calls in the 1990s on the diocese’s child sexual abuse phone line.