Why did Catholic priest Michael Shirres get away with child molestation?
In mid-2018, a few months after the launching of the New Zealand government’s Royal Commission into Historical Abuse in Care, deceased Catholic priest Michael Shirres was revealed to have been a pedophile. Although it emerged that the Church had known about the abuse since at least the 1960s, Father Shirres had continued to operate for three decades, only removed from his position in 1993. Afterwards, he would sign up for the privately-run Safe Network, where organisers failed to report his admission of his many sex crimes during therapy, with Shirres dying a free man in 1997.
For a year after he left pastoral work, Shirres had continued to lecture at both the Catholic Institute of Technology and the University of Auckland, maintaining his longtime role as a leading proponent of Māori theology. Since 1973, he had worked extensively in the Northland region, attempting to promote the Catholic faith to the region’s indigenous population. As it happened, this was only a year after St Peter’s Māori College, a key vehicle of recognising Shirres’ vision, changed its name to Hato Petera College. Already, the school, which recruited heavily from Northland’s Hokianga area, had produced major names such as Ranginui Walker, who would later be appointed to head the University of Auckland’s Māori studies department in 1993.
As Hato Petera, it would continue to be highly influential on promoting Māori cultural nationalism, home to men such as Phillip “Piripi” John Munro, who was in charge of the school’s kapa haka group. Decades later, Munro was convicted of using his position to indecently assault his male students, sentenced to only a few hundred hours of community service. Afterwards, further examples of abuse would emerge in the public eye, with the former head of religious studies, Kaperiere Petera Leef, sentenced to three and a half years in prison, and ex-principal Elvis Dobson Shepherd receiving more than eight years.
At the same time as the government was launching its royal commission, Hato Petera was finally closed after declining enrollments left only one student at the school. The decision came after a period of turmoil in its administration, which forced leading trustee Rudy Taylor to front up to the media about matters at the troubled institution. An highly influential figure in Northland politics, Taylor was the nephew of a close friend of Shirres, Father Henare Tate, who advised him on the affairs of Hato Petera.
“I had a chat to Pa Tate in the last five months when I became the chairman of the whanau trust of Hato Petera. I used to contact him all the time about the strategy and what we could do to keep it open and he would give me strong advice.
“He was a person of guidance. He would say ‘I’m retiring, I’m retiring’ but people kept telling him ‘Pa, can you take our services’ or ‘Pa, can you take our marriage?’ and he was always obliging.”
Mr Taylor said Pa Tate had led many great services — including christenings, marriages, 21st birthdays and funerals. He moved to Auckland at Hato Petera College and played “a big role there”.
While Hato Petera was in its early years of being, Shirres would study anthropology at the University of Auckland, earning his PhD in 1986. Three years later, along with Father Tate, he launched a Māori theology course at the UoA, lecturing on the subject before his fall from grace and eventual death. Along with various other controversies involving the Royal Commission, he would be a source of contention in late 2019, after former Hato Petera house mother Rangi Davis allegedly justified his abuse to survivor Anne Hill.
Anne Hill of Northland was preyed on from the age of five by Michael Shirres, a Pākehā priest who lectured in Māori theology at the University of Auckland, wrote several books on Māori spirituality, and was celebrated for decades among tangata whenua in the Far North.
At the Royal Commission hearing in Auckland this month she had a conversation with Rangi Davis, who was newly-appointed to the Catholics’ Te Rōpū Tautoko group that liases with the Commission.
“We then had a conversation about the issues around abuse, and my abuser Michael Shirres from the Dominican Order,” she said. Ms Hill said she did not know Ms Davis was on Te Rōpū at the time.
“She offered me some comfort. And that comfort was to say that she believed that he was healing his sexuality with women.”
Soon after, Davis resigned from her position at Te Rōpū Tautoko, an organisation set up by the Catholic Church to liase with investigators. As of writing, the commission is yet to release its recommendations to the public. It remains to be seen whether the eventual reporting will truly expose how abusers such as Father Shirres remained undetected for so long, or whether it will simply take a shallow look at the problem, and quickly move on. What is clear however, is that Shirres benefitted from his exalted place in the worlds of academia and religion, and that there may well be many others like him continuing to operate.