Fr Terry Pidoto. Photo: Ash Long

The rape conviction in 2007 of the late Fr Terry Pidoto, a former priest at Sacred Heart Church in Yea, is highlighted today (Wed., Sept. 18) by The Age newspaper.

“One Melbourne man will claim in a court filing this week being taken to Corpus Christi’s Glen Waverley campus around 1972 by Father Terrence Pidoto to be shown “where priests are made”,” says a report by Age journalists Farrah Tomazin, Chris Vedelago and Debbie Cuthbertson.

“The former St Bede’s altar boy says he was paraded by Pidoto in front of three young men sitting on a bed in their underwear, with the priest saying words to the effect: “Look boys, he’s the one I was telling you about. Isn’t he cute?”,” the newspaper reports.

“As two more seminarians joined the group, the 14-year-old boy sensed danger and asked to go home. Instead, Pidoto took him through the seminary to show him the chapel, and then the dining room.

“In claims accepted by a jury in 2007, the priest then raped him.

“’We got back in the car, and he never said a word to me on the way home,’ the survivor told The Age. ‘I stopped going to church after that.'”

Fr Pidoto, who had already been in jail for committing sexual crimes against boys in parishes around Melbourne, was scheduled to face the Melbourne County Court again on November 20, 2015, charged with additional child-sex offences, but he died earlier that month.

Terrence Melville Pidoto was jailed in Melbourne in 2007 for seven years after being found guilty of 11 charges including rape.