Former bishop of Broome Christopher Saunders, 76, showed no reaction as the District Court of Western Australia handed down the sentence on Wednesday.
In August, a court found Saunders guilty of one count of sexual penetration without consent and 12 counts of indecent assault. The offences took place between 2010 and 2019, while he was bishop of Broome, a remote diocese in northwestern Australia.
The court heard that Saunders groomed his victims, regularly inviting young Indigenous Aboriginal men and teenagers to a beach house or Catholic Church residence, where he provided them with alcohol, cigarettes, money and mobile phones. The assaults on the two men took place while they were heavily intoxicated.
Archbishop Timothy Costelloe, president of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, apologised for the pain and suffering Saunders inflicted on victims, saying their trust had been "profoundly betrayed by a leader of the Church".
Saunders was ordained a priest in 1976 and initially worked at mission stations in outback regions from the 1970s onwards. In the 1990s, he was appointed bishop of Broome by Pope John Paul II. He suspended his duties in 2020 following the allegations, and Pope Francis accepted his resignation in August 2021. Saunders has consistently denied the allegations.
The case follows Australia's Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse, established in 2013 after a series of scandals involving the Catholic Church. In 2017, the commission revealed that most abuse took place in churches, with seven percent of Catholic priests accused of abusing children in Australia between 1950 and 2010, and said allegations were almost never investigated.
The commission found that 4,444 alleged incidents of child sexual abuse had been reported to church authorities. In some dioceses, more than 15 percent of priests were perpetrators. It also heard testimony from Cardinal George Pell, the Vatican's former finance chief, who was found guilty in 2018 of sexually abusing choirboys in Melbourne in the 1990s. Pell was released from prison in 2020 after a court quashed his conviction, and died in Rome in January 2023.