JOHN Dunn still remembers with distress the look that paedophile priest Vincent Ryan gave him when he was sprung assaulting Mr Dunn's younger brother after Mass.
Mr Dunn was about 16 and head altar server when he entered the altar servers' room in the Sacred Heart Church [now Cathedral] in Hamilton and saw Ryan orally raping his younger brother, altar server Kieran.
"He was seven," Mr Dunn said.
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"You freeze and then you try to work out whether your presence has been acknowledged and it had, because my brother's eyes seeing me enter the room had alerted Ryan.
"He eyeballed me and gave one of those famous looks of his, 'What are you going to do about it?'. As far as I could tell there was f--- all I could do about it, so I disrobed and left the room. And I've had to live with that for a long, long time. But I had no other coping skill.
"And there are boys I know who are gone because they had that experience and were never [direct] victims and a day came where something had happened, where another survivor who was no longer a survivor [died] and some of those observers would follow close behind in death. I know three stories like that from Sacred Heart.
"You just walk away because nobody is listening, nobody cares, it's condoned."
Mr Dunn, 60, who survived abuse by former Marist Brother Romuald, real name Francis Cable - and whose best friend Andrew Nash died by suicide aged 13 in 1974 - said he and Kieran told their parents about the assaults.
"He pleaded with [our mother] 'Please Mum, I don't want to be an altar boy anymore, Father Ryan he comes out when we're getting changed and he says things and he does things'," he said.
"[She said] 'Don't be stupid'. He watched 'Don't be stupid' happen to me and now to him and he was in the same boat - who do you tell?
"All the adults in our life kept shutting us down and telling us 'It's fine, don't know what you're b***hing about', or 'You're making it up, he might have said or done something and you think he was being naughty but he wasn't being naughty'.
"When it stops happening you go 'relief' and you shut that steel door."
Kieran died 17 years ago aged 35 after a heroin overdose, leaving behind a partner and two children.
He hadn't made a police report or been involved in court proceedings.
Mr Dunn said his family was one of many shaken by the news of Ryan's April 13 death, as well as how the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle has responded to it.
He said survivors who had spoken to police and those who hadn't; family and friends of victims who had died; plus those who had witnessed abuse - "there were more than many instances where too many of us saw other boys being victimised" - were reeling.
"If [they] were fair dinkum they would come forward with a list of all the people that they know are victims, not to be published in the newspaper, but to have a chance to find those who are left and just knock on their door and say 'How the f*** are you doing?'" he said.
"Because there are so many out there who we don't know about and that the people who can help don't know about.
"There are men out there who need help and there are a few, I'm gravely worried that the suicides tied to Vincent Ryan are not over yet.
"There's suicide watch going on at a number of different addresses because some were at the cusp of making statements, finally, and they've missed their day in court."
Mr Dunn reported Cable's abuse to police, read a victim impact statement in court and was present in 2015 when Cable was sentenced to 16 years jail for crimes against 19 former students.
He said Cable appeared to be a "bent and shrivelled and broken human being, which was almost cathartic".
Mr Dunn also provided a statement to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2016.
He said others hadn't yet had the same chance to confront Ryan, who he said had looked "fighting fit" in the 2020 ABC series Revelation.
"He's never cowered, he's never recanted and he's never really apologised," he said.
"I'm gutted for his victims, who far outnumber the ones that are known. He looked like a scumbag that was going to make it to 104 and he's dead and that's unfair to the victims and the survivors that they've not known... it's just wrong."
Mr Dunn said the Catholic Church had not proved it had changed.
"Those men who survived Vincent Ryan needed to know he was dead when it happened," he said.
"They needed their chance for grief and anger, not more fuel, because that's ultimately what it provided.
"The Catholic Church is a business like the Commonwealth Bank, the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking resulted in the banks making enormous changes and many of those changes were made even before the commission had finished its inquiries.
"If the church had demonstrated one aspect of 'We've heard it, we've seen it, we've worked it out and we're making a change'... as a global business why haven't they?
"What change have they made organisationally, what the hell has this church done?
"Their willingness to hide the death of one of their most aggressive perpetrators, I just find beyond abhorrent.
"For what reason should we believe them, what proof have they given us to believe that it's not still occurring and there aren't more children being harmed?
"They have given us no reasons and that's why there's a lot of sorrow amongst the survivors today in every forum, in every phone call I've had and believe me I've had many since the news came up.
"The anger dies and what flows is sadness, because the sadness is they're still hurting people."
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