#Australia #WA – A Western Australian court released covert police video of former Catholic Bishop Christopher Saunders with a young Aboriginal man as the 76-year-old waited to be sentenced for sex crimes.
Saunders, the longtime Bishop of Broome, was convicted in August 2026 of one count of sexual penetration without consent and 12 counts of unlawful and indecent assault. A District Court jury in Perth acquitted him of six other charges. The offenses involved two young Aboriginal men and were alleged to have occurred between about 2008 and 2019, while he held one of the senior Catholic posts in northern Australia.
On September 21, 2026, he returned to court for a sentencing hearing after more than five weeks in a maximum-security prison. Judge Martin Flynn heard submissions that day but deferred the sentence until October 7. Prosecutors cited the age gap with the victims, Saunders’s position of authority, the breach of trust, and the use of church funds and church-owned properties for alcohol-fueled gatherings. Defense lawyers asked the court to weigh his prior good character; the judge indicated that factor would carry limited weight where it had helped enable the offending. Saunders’s lawyer told the court that an appropriate sentence was likely to mean immediate imprisonment.
The same day, the court released surveillance recordings made inside Saunders’s Broome home in early 2024. Police had installed hidden cameras after questioning him and while he was already under investigation. The footage, which had been played to the jury, showed a shirtless Saunders drinking with a young Aboriginal man and touching the man’s feet and between his legs. Prosecutors described the recordings as evidence of grooming, not as depictions of the offenses of conviction. Reporting indicated the men in the tapes were not the complainants in the trial. The judge rejected a suggestion that supplying alcohol and then engaging in sexual activity with a young man who had a drinking problem could be treated as ordinary pastoral care.
Saunders was ordained a priest in the Kimberley in 1976 and became Bishop of Broome in 1996, overseeing parishes and schools across a vast diocese. He stepped aside in 2020 after abuse allegations became public, and Pope Francis accepted his resignation the following year. Police charged him in 2024 after a lengthy investigation. Unless the convictions were overturned on appeal, he stood to be the highest-ranking Catholic cleric in Australia convicted of sexual abuse committed while a member of the clergy.
