By a Broken Rites researcher

• Article updated 29 January 2013

A New South Wales priest who retired more than 15 years ago has become the second Catholic clergyman in Australia charged with concealing someone else's child-sex crimes.

Father Lewis Fenton, 81, is accused of concealing two alleged offences committed by another Hunter Valley man against a nine-year-old boy. The other man's offences are alleged to have occurred between 1982 and 1984 at Nelson Bay and Stockton.

Father Fenton was charged at Charlestown police station (in Newcastle, NSW) on 4 January 2013. Detectives from Charlestown charged Father Fenton with misprision of a felony — that is, failing to disclose a serious crime. He was also charged with one count of accessory before the fact. He was bailed to appear for proceedings at Newcastle Local Court.

On 29 January 2013, Father Fenton appeared in Newcastle Local Court, where he was officially charged. He was accompanied to court by a group of supporters. The magistrate scheduled the case for a further mention on a later date.

The detectives had been investigating allegations about two men convicted of child-sex crimes in the 1980s. One of the men worked in the publishing industry and the other was former Catholic primary school teacher Anthony Bambach, who was on the staff of a school in Nelson Bay (north of Newcastle) in the 1980s when Father Fenton was the local parish priest. Bambach was placed on a five-year good behaviour bond in 1989 after he was convicted of sexually assaulting a Nelson Bay school boy, aged 10.

Persons have made police statements, alleging that they reported Bambach's child-sex crimes to the church.

Father Lew Fenton worked in the Maitland-Newcastle diocese (the Catholic Church in New South Wales is divided into eleven dioceses). Broken Rites has checked some of the annual editions of the Australian Catholic Directory and has found that Father Fenton was listed at Cardiff parish in the late 1970s, Nelson Bay in the 1980s, and Gateshead until the mid-1990s, when he retired to live at a Catholic aged-care facility in the Hunter Valley.

The charge of misprision of a felony was replaced in the NSW Crimes Act in 1990 by a package of concealing serious crimes offences under section 316.

Father Fenton was charged with the older offence because the allegations relate to the 1980s.

The detectives who charged Father Fenton belong to a unit called Strike Force Georgiana, which is investigating church-related crimes in the Hunter Valley. People with information are asked to contact the office of Detective Sergeant Kristi Faber at Charlestown police station, telephone 02-49429999.

The Brennan case

On 30 August 2012, police charged Father Brennan with misprision of a felony (relating to the alleged offences of another clergyman in the 1970s who was allegedly under Brennan's supervision). Brennan was issued with an order to appear in court on a future date but he died (of cancer) on 30 September 2012) before the court proceedings were scheduled to begin. Because of his death, the Brennan case could not proceed.

• See more from Broken Rites about the Brennan case here.