Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 28, 2025

11:00 Tue, 27 May 2025

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

One of Pope Francis' last activities before he passed away was a visit to the Coeli prison in Rome. It reminded me about one of our own prisons in Australia, the prison where I was baptised. After all the falsification of police rumors by rogue Debianists, and the case of the arrested Outreachies, the prison story is a curious twist of the truth.

Here is the main gate of Pentridge prison. The church is in the background at the end of the prison wall:

The Pope presides over St Peter's basilica in Rome. In Coburg, Australia, we have St Paul's church. Rome also has the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, just as St Paul's is outside the walls of Pentridge.

Pentridge Prison, Coburg, St Paul's Church

Back in 1967, Ronald Ryan gained notoriety as the last man to hang in Australia. His crime was the murder of a prison guard while escaping from Melbourne's Pentridge Prison. He maintained he was innocent and there was some controversy over who fired the fatal shot.

Ryan's wikipedia page has a detailed description of the prison escape, describing the fatal incident at the intersection of Sydney Road, O'Hea Street and Champ Street.

St Paul's church is mentioned, Ryan's accomplice used a wall for shelter.

Walker went south across Church Street toward the adjacent Roman Catholic church in Sydney Road. Prison officer Bennett had his rifle aimed at Walker and ordered Walker to halt or he would shoot. Walker took cover behind a small wall that bordered the church.

The report goes on to the murder itself in the middle of this well known street.

George Hodson fell to the ground. He had been struck by a single bullet that exited through Hodson's back, about an inch lower than the point of entry in his right chest. Hodson died in the middle of Sydney Road. Warder Robert Paterson, now with a rifle, ran back outside and onto Champ Street.

On 30 March 1966, Ryan and his accomplice Walker were convicted of murder and manslaughter respectively. Their appeals were rejected in June 1966.

On 23 July 1966, shortly after Ryan's trial and appeal had both failed, Fr Sean Patrick O'Connell was ordained a priest at St Patrick's Cathedral, oblivious to the fact he would eventually have a "life sentence", if you could call it that, to occupy the church beside the gates of the prison.

Fr John Brosnan, a Jesuit, was the prison chaplain for 30 years from the 1950s to the 1980s. His work put him in touch with the prisoners, the guards and their respective families. He ran a high profile campaign to spare Ryan from the death penalty. (obituary of Fr Brosnan).

My father had already been living in Coburg prior to the arrival of Fr O'Connell. They knew each other throughout the entire period of forty years that Fr O'Connell served the parish.

Fr Sean O'Connell served brief periods in the parishes of Flemington, Werribee and Clifton Hill. In 1975 he became Assistant Priest for the Coburg parish and in 1979 he was appointed as Parish Priest.

In other words, Fr O'Connell arrived shortly before Fr Brosnan would finish his three decades of chaplaincy service on the other side of the adjacent prison wall.

The long and distinguished service of these men is the thing that really amplifies the sense of shock people feel about the wrongdoing of some among their peers. The priests known for wrongdoing had been moved from parish to parish every two or three years while Fr O'Connell and Fr Brosnan both had decades of service in the same locations.

In 1980, Bob Hawke was elected as the representative for Wills, the federal district enclosing Coburg. On 8 February 1983, Hawke became leader of the Labor Party and in March 1983, he became Prime Minister, holding onto the top job until December 1991. Hawke was not religious, nonetheless, he is widely remembered for his 1987 election promise that within three years, no Australian child will live in poverty.

Nonetheless, Hawke himself didn't live in the working class district of Coburg, he had a large house on the other side of Melbourne in Sandringham. Australia's Prime Minister has an official residence in Canberra, The Lodge and in Sydney, Kirribilli House .

Hawke's father was a Congregational minister but Hawke himself was an atheist. News reports suggest Hawke contemplated becoming a Catholic before his death. Is it possible the influence of Fr O'Connell had a subconscious impact on the former Prime Minister's thinking over the years?

In addition to his role in this very busy parish, Fr O'Connell was a director of Australian Catholic Relief (now Caritas) and the Catholic Immigration Office (CIO) within the Archdiocese.

I was born in the region and baptised right beside the prison at St Paul's church in December 1978.

In Switzerland, Italian is the official language for one of the 26 cantons, the Canton of Ticino. Around eight percent of the Swiss population speak Italian. In Coburg, fifteen percent speak Italian, yet it is not an official language in any part of Australia. Fr O'Connell is well known for learning Italian and giving ministry to the Italian community.

In this photo from a festival, the procession is walking between the walls of the prison (left and rear of the photo) and the church (right hand side of the photo).

On 17 June 1980, Maria James was brutally murdered at a bookshop where she lived about fifty meters from St Mary's, the church in Thornbury, a district adjacent to Coburg. A witness claimed they saw Fr Anthony Bongiorno covered in blood. Fr O'Connell provided an alibi, which police verified through other means, proving that Fr Bongiorno was actually in Coburg on the day of the murder. The crime remains unsolved.

In November 1982, gangland figure Brian Kane asked Father John Brosnan to preside at his eventual funeral. A week later and Kane was shot in the Quarry Hotel, Brunswick. Fr Brosnan described the request from Kane in a news report:

For the prisoners, Fr Brosnan was like a stable family that some of them never had before.

Likewise, Fr O'Connell's 40 years in Coburg gave him the status of a family member for many of those who got to know him over the decades.

Here is a photo of Father O'Connell with students from year 3 and their teacher Miss Keogh in 1985:

I never attended the school in Coburg. I did year 3 at St Patrick's in Kilmore. St Patrick's primary school is on the opposite side of the road from Assumption College, where Fr Brosnan attended high school himself many years prior.

In 1989, the largest employer in the district, Kodak, contemplated closing their factory. Prime Minister Hawke wasn't going to allow that to happen under his nose and the Government made a deal to keep the factory open. Nonetheless, by 2004, the rise of digital cameras made the factory obsolete and it closed anyway.

In 1992, when Hawke resigned, there was a byelection for the district and the winner was prominent local football personality Phil Cleary running as an independent against the established Labor party. His victory was a major coup. The rise of Cleary hints at the special relationship between sport, politics and religion in Australian society.

In 1996, I moved back to Coburg and for a while we lived in O'Hea Street, one of the places described in the report about Ronald Ryan's prison break.

Ronald Ryan's wife and daughters lived in Hawthorn, adjacent to Kew. When I tell anybody in Melbourne that I used to cycle from Pentridge to Xavier College on a daily basis it sounds rather odd.

In 1997, the Virtual Moreland Community Network was established and opened an office at 512 Sydney Road, also adjacent to the churches and the notorious prison. Here is a map:

The prison itself was closed on 1 May 1997. Some of the original heritage listed walls and buildings have been preserved.

Looking through official filings from the Australian Labor Party, I found the Vice President of the Coburg branch, an active member of the Upgrade Upfield Coordinating Committee was at one point living in a house owned by Fr O'Connell on Mackay Street, Coburg. Was it community activism that saved the train or was it the power of faith? It could have been a bit of both.

Nonetheless, it is another hint at the relationships between religion, politics and sport that underpin Australian society.

Fr John Brosnan passed away in 2003. He was given a state funeral in St Patrick's Cathedral (Eulogy for John Brosnan). The St Patrick's Cathedral choir became very well known due to the prosecution of Cardinal George Pell.

The last time I communicated with Fr O'Connell was February 2011. We needed a copy of the baptism certificate before the wedding. The wedding itself was on Palm Sunday, the same day that Adrian von Bidder (Debian) died in Switzerland.

von Bidder's death was discussed like a suicide and given that it happened shortly after other confirmed suicides, it feels like it was part of a suicide cluster on the day of our wedding. So I received the sacrament of baptism meters away from the gates of a notorious prison known for the murder of a prison guard and then at the sacrament of marriage, we had this Debian death that was avoidable and could even be a criminal act of manslaughter under the British definition of the law.

The day of the baptism was the first Sunday of Advent and the wedding, when Adrian von Bidder died, was Palm Sunday.

In 2010 I went to Zurich to work on a contract for UBS. The Kanton told us that we had to pay mandatory church taxes or we could not attend mass or be buried in a Swiss cemetery if we died there. This felt totally inconsistent with everything I had previously learnt about Christianity.

The church tax situation was even more confusing because they demanded that we give money to the church but they were refusing to cover the cost of medical services for Carla after somebody fell on her in a yoga studio.

In September 2012, the Irish immigrant Jill Meagher was last seen in the same street, Sydney Road, on the night of her abduction. The tragic death gained worldwide notoriety. There was significant anger and sadness in the region, amplified by the intense media attention.

At the time, I felt there was significant inconsistency between the manner in which Australian women were marching to support the white, attractive Irish immigrant Jill Meagher while turning a blind eye to the manner in which the government rounds up women from Afghanistan and Iran and puts them into state-sponsored concentration camps.

In 2013, I publicly resigned my membership of the Australian Labor Party due to the abuse of immigrants, comparing it to the scandal in the church.

16 September 2015, researcher Val Noone gave a presentation about the Irish in Coburg. The details were subsequently published in a blog. Fr O'Connell and Michael Laporta are credited as sources.

Father X.____, who I covered previously, moved to an adjacent parish in 2009 and retired in 2016.

Throughout 2016, the Child Abuse Royal Commission conducted a series of public and private hearings about abuse in the Catholic Church. Fr O'Connell is not one of those accused of wrongdoing, quite the opposite, the wrongdoing undermines his legacy. Nonetheless, Fr O'Connell died shortly after the public scandal, just as my father died shortly after Cardinal Pell was sent to prison in 2019.

Fr O'Connell's church and presbytery were surrounded on two sides by very high prison walls. Ironically, after living there for forty years, he may have only discovered at the same time as everybody else the extent to which a small group of his colleagues belonged on the other side.

Fr O'Connell's Golden Jubilee as a priest was 23 July 2016. Four days later, the ABC program 7:30 Report broadcast a mixed bag of accusations that would subsequently be the basis for the prosecution of Cardinal Pell.

On 18 December 2016, Fr O'Connell died at the Austin Hospital. A few days later, on 23 December 2016, his funeral was held as a Pontifical Requiem mass, in other words, the funeral was conducted by the bishop.

Immediately after that, in 2017, I started discovering the evidence about similar scandals in the supply chain of open source software. Between September and October I raised concerns with the organizations responsible for funding, especially Mozilla.

Coincidentally, Australia's Child Abuse Royal Commission handed down their report in December 2017, right in the middle of the period where I had discovered the wrongdoing in open source software.

Rogue Debianists became upset when their blackmail racket was exposed. They began censoring blogs at the end of 2018 and the Debian Christmas lynchings quickly followed.

Paul Tagliamonte from the US Digital Service (White House) stomped on people using metaphors about summary executions:

Subject: Re: Censorship in Debian
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2018 10:39:19 -0500
From: Paul R. Tagliamonte <paultag@gmail.com>
To: Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>
CC: debian-project@lists.debian.org

This entire thread is so cringy, this is likely my last reply.

On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 9:31 PM Norbert Preining <norbert@preining.info> wrote:
>
> Paul,
>
> On Wed, 26 Dec 2018, Paul R. Tagliamonte wrote:
> > Please, all, get some perspective and stop with the comparisons to labor
> > camps, targeted killings, prisons and sentences of death. We sound like
>
> You did not understand the meaning of this comparison: The point was
> that the correct agreed upon and legal procedures have not been
> followed. And you deliberately removed this part from your email and
> consideration.

Gulags and military tribunals were both legal. They were not policy or
procedure fouls.
They were not foibles. It was intentional and targeted.

They were ways to murder dissidents. Say what you want about our ability to
self-govern the Debian community, and ways we've messed up, we've never
killed anyone as part of the expulsion process, and the comparisons need to
stop, even if I'm still "missing the point" and people consider what happened
with anti-harassment unfair. A-H is not killing DDs. Stop comparing them to it.

It's a very simple point.

> It is not about the planet, it is about expulsion that did not follow
> the rules. This *can* be consider a libel case due to influences on my
> professional life.
>
> Best
>
> Norbert

Paul

Tagliamonte's comment is wrong: people did die. Frans Pop and Adrian von Bidder both died shortly after the lynching of Sven Luther. Frans Pop wrote his suicide note / resignation email the night before Debian Day. See the full history of the Debian Harassment Culture. On the topic of Debian giving volunteers sentences, here are the gallows constructed to hang Ronald Ryan in D division at Pentridge:

Software in the Public Interest, Inc, a US non-profit, filed accounts for 2022 showing they spent $120,000 on legal fees to hide the fact Adrian von Bidder died, possibly as part of the suicide cluster, on our wedding day. Ironically, the psychology and the legal tactics used to evade liability for the suicides are remarkably similar to the tactics that the church was criticized for.

From baptism at the site of death to $120,000 in Debian kill money ...

The church reasoned that they had to hide certain crimes by priests to maintain the public perception of the church as infallible. Looking at the lifetime of good work done by men like Fr Brosnan and Fr O'Connell, their reputations have stood the test of time and their legacy would not have been diminished in any way if rogue priests had been managed more competently in the region throughout the same period.

Even if they spend $120 million dollars, the lawyers and judges can not bring back the volunteers who died. It is not easy to hide a death, especially when the Debian logo is on the tombstone, along with the date of our wedding:

Look at the email from Diana von Bidder-Senn, the widow. She was completely in the dark about debian-private and all the problems subsequent to the previous suicide. This is an example of how the public is fooled by the messages that Paul Tagliamonte and others were publishing to whitewash over the truth about Debian harassment culture. Would she have sent an email like this if she had read and understood all the emails about Frans Pop in 2010?

Subject: Re: condolences for Adrian
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2011 15:02:18 +0200
From: Diana von Bidder <diana@fortytwo.ch>
To: Stefano Zacchiroli <leader@debian.org>

Dear Stefano
Thank you for your wonderful mail! Yes Debian and people were very
important to Adrian. I was glad that he was not only sitting alone in
front of his computer but to know that there are people out there that
estimate him and are his friends even if most of you did not know each
other personally.
The way you describe him (empathy, calm, insight, ... - just the Adrian
I know) assures me on how good friends of Adrian are out there. And I
will always continue to think of this (in a good way!) when continuing
to use debian (which I became quite fond of because of Adrian). 
It's a pity that he couldn't go to Banja Luca anymore which he did so
much look forward to. Anyway, I wish you all the best and hope you
continue your good work.

- Diana

Shortly after Cardinal Pell died, I published a photo of our rowing crew. On 3 April 2023, the man sitting behind me won the National Emergency Medal. The following day, 4 April 2023, the Swiss financial regulator FINMA discretely shut down Parreaux, Thiebaud & Partners, leading to my investigation into the JuristGate scandal.

So I was baptised at the scene of a notorious death connected to the story of capital punishment in Australia and I went on to expose another facet of the corruption in the Swiss legal system. We don't know how many people have committed suicide due to invalid and corrupt judgments, liquidated lawyers, miscarriages of justice and other failings by racist Swiss hillbilly jurists. The suicide victims around Geneva are every bit as dead as George Hodson and Ronald Ryan.

I was granted Swiss citizenship on nothing less than the day of martyrs, an interesting coincidence when you consider the place of the baptism and the crimes I had exposed along the way. Could we say that Frans Pop and Adrian von Bidder were martyrs?.

Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg

From baptism at the site of death to $120,000 in Debian kill money ...

Rest in peace George Hodson, Ronald Ryan, Fr Sean O'Connell & Fr John Brosnan SJ

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