Death in the diocese

The real Vatican conspiracy is considerably more dreadful than anything concocted by Dan Brown:

Father Walsh was a Crown witness in the case against Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson when he met with the pontiff on February 9, 2016. Archbishop Wilson was accused of failing to report to police the allegations of two former altar boys who claimed they had been abused by a priest in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese in the 1970s. At the time he was the highest-ranking Catholic ever to be charged with concealment offences.

Father Walsh later told confidants that the Pope asked him why he was involved in a court case against an archbishop, what he was planning to say in court, and who was walking with him on the journey. Father Walsh said he did not trust the interpreter and offered scant detail.

It was the pinnacle of what Father Walsh perceived as a sustained campaign by the priesthood to get him to toe the line on child sexual abuse. He was allegedly frozen out of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese after he defied the bishop to report a fellow priest for child sexual abuse in 2004 and was not welcomed back until early 2017.

But on October 24, 2017 – a little over two weeks before the archbishop’s trial was set down – Newcastle-Maitland Bishop Bill Wright told Father Walsh he had no future in the diocese, according to an email Father Walsh sent to a friend. The email didn’t say that this decision was because of his giving evidence.

“[Bishop Wright] will look overseas (Third World) where I can live out my days in the service to Christ and his poor, preferably as a contemplative to a leper colony,” Father Walsh wrote.

Two weeks later, before he could give evidence, Father Walsh took his own life.

It’s not the involvement of Fake Pope Francine that caught my attention here, but rather, the fact that a staunch Catholic’s faith was so demolished by his direct contact with the Roman Catholic hierarchy that he chose to commit what he would have previously believed was a grave sin that would deprive him of the right to a Christian burial.