How Christopher Saunders, former Aus bishop, committed a string of sex crimes

A retired Australian bishop who served the church in a remote part of Australia’s northwest for nearly five decades has been charged with rape.

Christopher Saunders, 74, whow was taken into custody on Wednesday, has been charged with 19 offences including child abuse, indecent assault and indecently dealing with a child.

The allegations date back to 2008.

They cover Broome in Australia’s northwest as well as the far-flung towns of Kununurra and Kalumburu.

Saunders has previously denied any wrongdoing.

But what do we know about Saunders?

Let’s take a closer look:

Saunders was ordained as a priest in 1976.

He became a bishop in 1995.

According to BBC, Saunders was appointed Bishop of Broome the next year.

Saunders served the church for most of his time as clergy in the Kimberley region.

The diocese, which has a population of only 50,000 people, is around 770,000 square kilometres – the size of Turkiye.

According to France24, the diocese is home to several Aboriginal communities.

Saunders was famed for socialising, working for causes and taking young men on camping and fishing trips.

A towering figure in the community, he has a beer named after him.

Broome resident Natalie Dean told ABC News, “We attended church maybe three or four days a week and the bishop was one of our main figures that we trusted."

Dean told the outlet she would be following the case closely.

Saunders resigned in 2021 as bishop of Broome after police announced they had dropped a sex crime investigation.

He had stood down a year earlier after media reported the allegations, but remained emeritus bishop of Broome.

But with persistent rumours swirling around the clergyman, the Vatican launched its own probe in 2022 using sweeping powers first established by Pope Francis.

The “Vos estis lux mundi” powers, meaning “You are the light of the world” in Latin, were drawn up in 2019 to help the church investigate sexual abuse accusations at the highest levels.

The confidential church findings were later shared with police, who subsequently re-opened their investigation.

According to ABC, he was seen in the diocese in October 2022 in spite of a Vatican decree that he depart.

That investigation became public knowledge last year when an Australian television news network reported the contents of a 200-page Vatican report on Saunders.

The Western Australia Police Force said at the time they had requested a copy of that report, which restarted the criminal investigation.

Saunders is among Australia’s most senior former or current clerics to be accused in a clergy abuse scandal that has rocked the church.

Footage from TV network Seven showed Saunders being led away by police after his arrest on Wednesday. Police said the man was refused bail.

Australia’s problem with pedophile priests

Australia in recent years has had a problem with pedophile priests.

CNN quoted a 2017 government inquiry as finding a “serious failure” by Australian institutions to protect the most vulnerable.

Of those that reported being abused in a religious institution, 61.4 per cent said it occurred in a Catholic organisation.

The outlet quoted the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as stating that seven per cent of Australian Catholic priests had been accused of abusing children.

In some orders, more than 40 per cent of priests were involved, the report added.

Cardinal George Pell was the third highest-ranking cleric in the Vatican when he was convicted in an Australian court in 2018 of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral in 1996, when Pell was an archbishop.

Pell spent 13 months in prison before the convictions were overturned on appeal. He maintained his innocence until his death in Rome last year.

Also in 2018, a judge quashed former Adelaide Archbishop Philip Wilson’s conviction for covering up child sexual abuse by a pedophile priest in the 1970s in New South Wales state.

Wilson had served almost four months of a one-year sentence in home detention at his sister’s house before his appeal was upheld.

He had been Australia’s highest ranking bishop from 2006 to 2010 when he was president of the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference. Wilson died in 2021.

Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, said the church would continue to cooperate with the police.

“Allegations against the former Bishop of Broome, Christopher Saunders, are very serious and deeply distressing, especially for those making those allegations,” Costelloe said in a statement.

With inputs from agencies