A cover-up reaching the highest levels of a Catholic order allowed six known child abusers to teach at Canberra's St Edmund's College in its first three decades.
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Offending brothers were known to some of the Christian Brothers' most senior clergy before they arrived in Canberra, including its worldwide head in one case, and Australian provincial leaders in at least three others.
The Christian Brothers was long ago found to have protected and harboured child molesters, moving them between its schools and orphanages, and dealing with abuse internally under its forgiving canon law.
Secretly commissioned internal investigations suggested day schools were used to hide offending brothers, while keeping them away from dormitories in a misguided attempt to break their pattern of predation.
In May, Fairfax Media revealed that two St Edmund's teachers – Christian Brother John "Chris" Roberts and former Marist Brother Francis "Romuald" Cable – came to the school in the late 1970s despite complaints they had molested children.
New claims of abuse also emerged against a St Edmund's headmaster in the 1960s, Noel Landener.
Those reports barely scratched the surface.
A Fairfax investigation of all 131 Catholic brothers listed in St Edmund's staff records up to 2004 has found a further five came to the school in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, despite complaints they had previously abused children.
Knowledge of the complaints went to the top of the Christian Brothers' order.
One brother, Enda Hynes, was known as a sexual predator to the world's highest-ranking Christian Brother, the Dublin-based superior-general, decades before he came to the ACT.
Superior-general J. P. Noonan wrote to his Australian subordinates in 1934, urging they deal with Hynes and another offender urgently.
"There has been too much delay, it appears to me, in dealing with these two cases," he wrote.
"It is not fair to the congregation or to our pupils whose guardians we profess to be to keep a corrupter of youth on the staff.
"The secular state would not do this. Our standards should not be lower."
Despite the admonitions, the superior-general left it to the Australian clergy to determine Hynes' future. They allowed him to stay in the order.
Hynes molested another child in 1955 but again escaped with a warning. He turned up at St Edmund's two years later, where he taught from 1957-59.
Another brother, Patrick Timothy Farrell, came to St Edmund's from a boarding school in Tasmania, where senior staff had learned he was abusing boys in the junior dormitory he was in charge of in the mid-1950s.
One of those boys, Tony Rayner, was anally raped and abused, crimes that inflicted a terrible physical and psychiatric toll.
Mr Rayner, who has spoken publicly about his abuse, says he has come to understand Farrell's offences as symptoms of a mental illness.
But the silence and willful inaction of other Christian Brothers still greatly troubles him.
"The fact that I was raped by a sexual predator is obviously evil, but it's just one person," Mr Rayner said.
"The really evil thing was that it was covered up by other people who felt it was easier to do that than to stop it.
"There's something totally, stupidly wrong about that. It's so pathetically wrong it's almost incomprehensible."
Another brother, Thomas Coman Seery, abused boys twice in the seven years before he arrived at St Edmund's, receiving a censure and a canonical warning from the order's provincial council, a group of Australia's most senior clergy. Still he was not removed.
Instead, Seery was harboured in the order and arrived to teach at St Edmund's in 1961.
Brother Geoffrey Claver Baumgartner committed offences so serious that the order was to consider dispensing him from his vows – in other words, kicking him out – in the mid-1950s.
Yet, for unknown reasons, the punishment was not meted out, and Baumgartner instead came to St Edmund's in 1960.
In 1956, Brother Romuald Hills was caught kissing boys and punishing their bare buttocks at a Christian Brothers facility interstate.
He was censured, or warned, and arrived at St Edmund's College six years later.
Another brother, who cannot be named, was jailed for abuses at a NSW school where he worked after leaving Canberra.
The Christian Brothers say they have no records of the six brothers offending while they were at St Edmund's, and Fairfax has no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Current evidence suggests only three individuals were alleged to have offended at St Edmund's: the headmaster Landener, Brother Roberts, and a lay teacher Patrick O'Flaherty.
O'Flaherty abused St Edmund's students and was charged, convicted and sentenced in 1970.
He was kicked out as soon as staff became aware of complaints.
He was charged with abusing five children, not all of whom were from St Edmund's, but appears to have made a plea deal and avoided jail time.
In a statement, the Christian Brothers acknowledged fully their past failings, noting they had been revealed and reported on widely in several inquiries, including the royal commission.
The order accepted that its failure to respond properly to child abuse was a "matter of deep sorrow and regret for all Christian Brothers", and accepted criticism of its "dark history".
"From 1993 onwards, the Christian Brothers have publicly acknowledged past failures where children were not protected, suffered abuse perpetrated by some of our own and lay staff, and that the consequences of such abuse are devastating, far reaching and ongoing for victims of this abuse and their families," the order's statement read.
"The Christian Brothers have also accepted that some brothers, against whom allegations had been made, were not removed, as they should have been, from any environment involving children after allegations were received."
"The Christian Brothers do, however, point to our continuing work to engage with and endeavour to bring healing to the lives of those who have suffered so greatly."
