I sort of knew him personally to a limited extent, he was actually one of the proactive priests that would actually dedicate time to go overseas and does a lot of actual charity work, and even decorates their church brilliantly for special occasions which many churches don't seem to do as well. I don't recall any other priest that I've met and remembered their faces that actually does this. While I did see him in positive light and I feel sad about this event, I prefer to take things to a more factual point of view even if it means to defame myself. I don't believe in peaceful and completely painless departures, and I also don't fully trust anyone, including those close to me, but I believe there are reasons for everything even if it could be something as little as possibly being a perfectionist; inability to tolerate that someone out there doesn't like them, to an explicable life long chain of complex conflicts tipping the scale, but we also don't know for sure if it was even a suicide until another police report comes through.

Rather than being seen as a significant person of religion (which he was as a result of his significant efforts), I saw Fr. Joe as a family friend, a very charitable man who has helped perhaps many more strangers around the world than the number of english words I can recognise, cherished by many parents and children and I'm sure many grieve for the loss of him. There were even people who flew across the world or drives hundreds of kilometres annually to see him because he was such a favourite. Anyway whatever the true cause of this conflict, I hope that both parties are satisfied, not regretting their actions and acquire forgiveness from the lord and from each other.

A bit of his background, he was rather new to the armadale church having only been there less than a year, people warned about it being a rather poor location to relocate to because of the shire/suburb community's bad reputation ^{I even knew someone whose house even had an over the top laser home security system there, like from the "over the hedge" movie}, however iirc he said he wanted to move to armadale anyway because he felt he had built up the whitfords parish community well enough as he had done in batemen 20-ish years ago. All three of these churches are connected to schools where every week or two, the church provides religious educational/emotional/faith/etc. support services for the connected school as well as regularly providing these services for the local community. Religions have always played a historically significant role in society as a form of emotional regulation and providing a means of supporting the unfortunate in many ways, even if they aren't perfect and cause conflicts themselves. Religion or not, Fr. Joe has always been the type that enjoys helping others to the point he used up his holidays to provide aid in foreign countries.

In regards to the accusation case, well to be honest, there are many people out there who just don't like others for some silly reasons. If I can get hated for having to strange attire due to dermatology problems, having a priest disliked for a few mistakes or misunderstandings that stick out because of his charismatic attitude wouldn't be a surprise, although hating someone enough to lie about them is unlikely. I can probably guess the abuse claims probably arose from him having a tendency to "pat" children on the head or shoulder and maybe "missing" by accident, and the child was probably sensitive and didn't like it, reporting it to the parent causing a misunderstanding with the priest deeply regretting his mistake. It's a church custom to touch a child on their head for their blessing when they go up with their arms crossed if they haven't had their first holy communion and maybe demonstrating the signing of the cross, but contact other than that is uneccessary. and I've known children that disliked being patted on the head or being touched at all, (I am one of them, and I'm still hypersensitive to touches) and you can't expect someone who knows thousands of people to remember every single person's preferences after they complain. I've seen a manager at my old workplace who's actually lost his job in a similar situation after being accused of sexual misconduct who had a habit of patting people on their backs. That being said, I've never gone to a school he was a priest of, but from what I know he's a charismatic priest that just about everybody liked. In the unlikely event that the accusers actually had ill intent, it is possible to easily corner a priest of their status. You can also take it this way too, if everybody claimed child abuse if they have experienced the current definition of it, prisons would be filled with parents, teachers, health care workers and so on because it is a highly subjective matter. I noticed that there are also major gaps in the australian law that an ill intent citizen could very easily exploit without evidence, but then again some circumstances would present impossible probability of gathering evidence to support claims.

That aside, I'm also interested in hearing a detailed reasoning of the accuser and the detailed police report, but with the media being media, they always dramatise events such as these with very little effort for verification of information and then aggregator websites often just copy and paste articles, often editing them slightly leading to a whole mess of potentially inaccurate information as they are a business for efficiency at the cost of the information accuracy the reader is receiving. For all we know from various articles on the internet one family accused the priest of sexual misconduct, and that the priest was found dead shortly after and was presumed an intentional suicide probably before the priest even realised that an investigation had started. However it was presumed, there is still a minuscule chance he could've had a stroke, choked on coffee or in a very terrible case scenario, could've been killed by a third party because the articles don't even state the actual cause of death other than a likely suicide and there were no internal body investigations stated, although it is rather disrespectful to perform an autopsy on an important religious figure without strong indications and reasons to otherwise perform it, but if it isn't performed and the police don't know for sure how he died, we also can't know for sure why he died.