Two days before Christmas, former priest Guy Hartcher allegedly arrived at a suburban street in Sydney’s west to meet a 14-year-old boy he had been grooming for sex.
The 78-year-old faced court on Wednesday morning, charged with using a carriage service to send indecent material to a person under the age of 16 and procuring them for sex.
However, the boy was “a fictitious recipient”, as police had been posing as the teen.
Facebook had allegedly alerted the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the US to an account that was sharing child abuse material abroad.
According to Kelso Lawyers, which specialises in helping survivors of institutionalised child sex abuse, Hartcher was a long-time member of the Vincentian Fathers and Brothers, also known as the Congregation of the Mission.
In 1971, he secured a teaching job at St Stanislaus College in Bathurst at 24 years old, after training to become a Vincentian priest.
He then studied at the Catholic University in Washington DC and spent time in the 1970s and 1980s at the Holy Cross College in Dunedin, New Zealand.
In the 1994 Australian Catholic Directory, he was listed as the rector of the Catholic Church’s St Francis Xavier Seminary in Adelaide.
Hartcher has been retired for the past decade and living in Ashfield in Sydney’s inner west.
[Ed: Other reports record Mr Hartcher was previously the head priest of the Gresford-Dungog parish in the Maitland-Newcastle Diocese.]
Source: Guy Hartcher: Former priest allegedly wanted sex with 14-year-old boy