Truth Smith Marr Oxley
“Children with everything to live for. A community betrayed. A whistleblower priest who paid the ultimate price.”
The Altar Boys is the debut book by multi-award winning investigative journalist Suzanne Smith, on the abuses and cover ups of the Australian Catholic Church.
It looks into the lives of Glen Walsh and Steven Alward, two childhood friends from Newcastle, New South Wales, and the ramifications of truth telling against the Australian Catholic Church.
Ahead of the book’s launch, Suzanne Smith, David Marr, and Verity Firth discussed truth telling, censorship, and civil rights in Australia.
The book is an explosive exposé of widespread and organised clerical abuse of children and how the cover up in Newcastle extended from parish priests to every echelon of the organisation, detailing a deliberate church strategy of using psychological warfare against witnesses in key trials involving paedophile priests
One of the most shocking revelations in the book is the complicity of the state and that close connection between the church and the police force at that time.
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