Former Priest Peter Chalk's Victims In Japan and Australia

 

Chalk's Mugshot in Melbourne June 15

It has been a 29 year struggle to extradite Australian Peter Chalk from Japan to Australia to face charges that as a priest he molested 10 children in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra. Chalk was a priest in the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (or MSC). This order, which is sometimes known as the "Sacred Heart Fathers", operates some parishes and schools in Australia. The order provides opportunities for its Australian priests to travel overseas. At any one time, a significant proportion of the order's Australian priests are serving in Asia. Since 1952, the MSC order's Australian province has conducted missionary activities in Japan.

According to the annual editions of the Australian Catholic Directory, in the 1970s Father Peter Chalk was listed as residing (with about seven other MSC priests) in the "Sacred Heart Monastery", at Croydon in Melbourne's east. This monastery was involved in the training of priests for the MSC order.

During the late 1970s, Chalk also ministered at a nearby parish (St Anne's), conducted by the MSC order, serving the suburbs of Park Orchards and Warrandyte. As part of his role in that parish, Father Peter Chalk conducted a youth group, which included young teenagers as young as 12 or 13.

About 1980, Father Peter Chalk was listed as an assistant priest at another MSC parish — St John the Apostle, Kippax, in . While in Canberra, he undertook a course of Japanese studies.

During this time, some persons who had encountered Father Peter Chalk in Australia in the 1970s (either as a member of a parish youth group or as a young trainee for the priesthood) spoke to Chalk's superiors and colleagues about being raped and molested.

For example, one former youth-club member (Peter) says that in the 1970s, when he was aged 12 onwards, he encountered Father Peter Chalk in youth activities. He says that in 1977, Chalk had raped him on three separate occasions to the new parish priest in charge of Melbourne's Park Orchards parish, Father Frederick Van Gestel.

Fred Van Gestel, who has since left the priesthood, passed Peter's report on to MSC superiors, including Father James Fallon. Fallon was then one of the most senior priests in the MSC order's Australian province; and he is believed to have been a friend of Chalk. In 1979, the MSC office in Melbourne received 3 more complaints that Chalk had molested 2 boys aged 9 and 13, and a girl aged 10.

In 1981, Chalk was listed in the Australian Catholic Directory as being on the staff of the Yarra Theological Union (an ecclesiastical college) in Box Hill, Melbourne.

In the early 1982, the Australian MSC office arranged for Peter Chalk to work in its overseas operations in Japan. His name was deleted from the 1983 Australian Catholic Directory this directory noted Chalk as “being assigned overseas”.

In 1994, a young boy and his parents contacted the police in Tokyo and made a sworn, signed statement about sexual abuse at the hands of Chalk. The Tokyo police then interviewed and obtained written statements from another boy who had been in Chalk's parish.

The complainants were investigated and then suddenly the police and prosecutors received notice from Archdiocese of Tokyo lawyers that a settlement had been reached and Chalk was to return to Australia to face the allegations but this would have created difficulties for Chalk and the MSC order. Tokyo prosecutors dropped charges and a judge sealed all records.

In 1995, with the Australian police interested in him, Chalk and the MSC order went into damage control. The order allowed Chalk to "resign" from the order. He then stayed on in Japan as a lay person, establishing a new career for himself teaching English to Japanese high-school students at an MSC run school.

He changed his surname to a Japanese name ("Peter Shiraishi") after getting married, and 3 years later gained Japanese citizenship being married to a daughter of a Japanese lawmaker.

A consequence of this was that, if Chalk re-entered Australia using his Japanese identity, Australian police would not notice.

Since 1998, if anyone asked the MSC order about Peter Chalk, the order has claimed that it "does not know where Chalk is now or what he is doing".

Chalk's new identity was convenient for the MSC order because, if more reports surfaced about Chalk's Melbourne activities in the 1970s or Tokyo in the '80s or '90s, the order could claim to be no longer responsible for him.

Because Chalk was now apparently hard to find, the Melbourne police investigation stayed "on hold". However, the Melbourne police still possess a file concerning their investigation of Peter Chalk.

In the late 1990s, in the absence of police action, the only option available for Chalk's Melbourne victims was to have their complaints investigated (and subsequently upheld) by the Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese's commissioner on sexual abuse, Mr Peter O'Callaghan, QC. The written apology, which each victim received from the archbishop of Melbourne, said that the archdiocese was apologising for the harm done to each one by Father Peter Chalk.

It is interesting to note that the MSC order has a connection with the Catholic Church's Australia-wide management of the church's sex-abuse problems. In 2007 the head of the MSC order in Australia was appointed as the co-chair of the church's National Committee for Professional Standards — the body which superintends the handling of church sex-abuse complaints in Australia through the church's controversial "Towards Healing" scheme. 

WJ Bryant