FOR 18 years a Lower Hunter woman who has lived with the burden of knowing she innocently handed little girls to a pedophile priest has waited for the Catholic Church to share the load.
Last week it did, when the Catholic Professional Standards Office told her it "accepted the veracity of the claim" that Redemptorist Father Francis Donovan sexually assaulted two of the girls one the woman's daughter in the 1970s.
Phone calls to the three women came six months after the first formal complaint was lodged with the office, and less than 24 hours after The Herald raised questions about the priest with the office of former Maitland Newcastle diocese priest Archbishop Philip Wilson, and a school principal who had contact with Donovan in the 1970s.
The tragedy for the woman, Beth*, is that she believes the priest molested another of her daughters but she will never know for sure because her daughter has since died.
"I vividly remember her having awful, awful screaming nightmares for months when she was young, and she screamed and thrashed like she was being held down," Beth said.
The nightmares were so serious that she sought formal help for her daughter.
"The question just hangs in the air. Was she a victim too? It keeps me numb. I struggle to get my mind clear."
Donovan was 62 at the time.
Beth was Catholic, had children of her own and cared for other children after school.
Donovan started visiting Beth while her husband, who worked long hours, was not at home.
He never met the priest.
"I was too innocent, too darn naive, to realise he was sucking me in," she said.
The priest invited her girls, and other girls she cared for, to visit. They were aged between five and nine.
"He didn't invite me, just the girls, to play in the library and the gardens anytime. I was a busy mum. He was a priest.
"I walked them there because I didn't feel the crossing was safe.
"I feel I walked all . . . those girls to the edge of the spider web and sent them off to see if the spider was home."
One of the girls, *Peg, abruptly told her parents she did not want to stay at the woman's home anymore.
Beth's daughter, *Sue, just as abruptly refused to make her confirmation [a church rite when children are about 9].
"I remember the words she said. She was a polite little girl and we were the kind of family where people didn't swear, but one day when I talked about her confirmation she came out with 'I'm not doing that. I don't believe in that shit anymore'. I was shocked at the language, but I never asked why."
She did not make her confirmation.
In 1990, Sue told Beth details of how the priest sexually assaulted her. About the same time, although they were unaware of it, Peg was telling her mother she had been sexually assaulted by the priest.
The priest's actions, as described by the two women, were almost identical.
"I was stunned by the news because I had been brought up in the church when the fear of God and the threat of fire and brimstone were ranged down on the congregation from the pulpit," Beth said.
She went to Bishop's House in Maitland in 1990 to speak with the then Father Philip Wilson, who was overseas. She spoke to a priest instead.
"I wasn't seeking revenge. I was hurting for my daughter and yet, at the same time, I was embarrassed for the church, which sounds ridiculous, but I believed in the church," Beth said.
She was told Father Donovan had moved to Western Australia. She assumed he had died. [He died in 1984.] She did not follow it up and the church made no attempt to contact her.
A number of years later she ran into Peg.
"She was fine at first, but then she became nervous. She said she had been meaning to ask me something that had been bothering her for years," Beth said.
Peg asked Beth if she remembered the priest the girls visited.
"Alarm bells rang for me. I asked if she meant Father Donovan and she put her hand to her mouth and started crying. Then she said 'He did something to me'."
Sue complained to the Catholic Professional Standards Office in November last year, after reading The Herald articles about exposed pedophile priest Denis McAlinden.
Peg and Beth lodged separate complaints early this year.
"I kept my mouth shut when my daughter first told me. I didn't follow it up," Beth said.
"We all become part of the problem when we keep quiet.
"Because we didn't do anything, it was perpetuated. Because we trusted the church to act, it went on.
"You perpetuate the secrets by keeping it all quiet, and then we're all shocked years later when we hear all the stories, and you wonder, how bad was this?"
The Catholic Professional Standards Office declined to comment on the case. *Beth, Sue and Peg are not the women's real names.
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