A former NSW priest was shifted out of the state after complaints he was grabbing boys by the genitals and squeezing, a retired Bishop has told the child abuse royal commission.

Geoffrey Robinson, a key player in the church’s response to child sexual abuse by members of the clergy between 1994 and 2003, is giving evidence today before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney.

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Bishop Robinson said that shortly after he became a priest in the 1960s in Croydon, he was told of the actions of the fellow priest, referred to by the inquiry as TS.

“This priest was about three years senior to myself,” Bishop Robinson said.

“He was not the brightest student in the [seminary], but he was probably the strongest.

“At a certain point … he came across someone doing the wrong thing, and his solution was to revert to his physical strength.

“So he went up the person and grabbed him by the genitals and squeezed. And it worked.”

Bishop Robinson said after the priest was moved to a home for delinquent boys, his behaviour became “something of a pattern”.

The police became involved, and the decision was made to “get him out of the state and the priesthood”, Bishop Robinson said.

“At best it was outside to the law, at worst it was contrary to the law,” Bishop Robinson said of that decision.

“They simply decided they knew the facts … and they acted.”

Bishop realised police ‘not the total solution’ to abuse issue

Bishop Robinson also told the inquiry of his work in the early 1990s on a church tribunal set up to deal with complaints of sexual abuse by clergy.

He said that at the time he felt progress on the issue was too slow — that, while “the city was burning” – the church was setting up committees.

“When I sat down to start drafting a response to complaints, I quickly became aware that the majority of complaints did not want to go to the police,” Bishop Robinson said, adding that their were two reasons for that.

“One was the fear that if they went to the police, their particular case would become public. Some of them, even their husband or wife wasn’t aware of the abuse.

“The second fear was of being cross-examined by an opposing barrister.”

He said he realised the police were not “the total solution to the problem”.

Bishop Robinson, who was a bishop for 31 years in the Sydney Archdiocese and a priest for 54 years, has spoken out and written widely urging “profound and enduring change” and a more compassionate approach by the church to victims of abuse by religious leaders.

When the royal commission was announced, he said Cardinal George Pell did not represent the majority of Catholic bishops in Australia and was “not a team player, he never has been”.

Bishop Robinson, who has terminal cancer, has written two books: Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, and For Christ’s Sake.