A Catholic priest in Melbourne has reportedly been criticised for a speech in which he said Jill Meagher would have been at home instead of out on the night she was raped and killed if she was more “faith filled”.
Meagher was murdered by Adrian Bayley after a night out Melbourne in September 2012. He was sentenced to life in prison.
The priest delivered his homily at an end-of-term service for a Catholic primary school in Melbourne on Friday and radio station 3AW reported he held up a newspaper article with a picture of Bayley on it to make his point. The report says he told a crowd of about 100 that if Meagher had been more “faith filled” she would have been home and “not walking down Sydney Road at 3am”.
That. That’s something not to say about rape. So many reasons – one of them being the casual dismissal of women’s right to walk around in the world, and the implication that there’s something immoral about women doing so, and the implication that if they were more god-obsessed they would stay home, obsessing over god, and that that would be a good thing.