Former Marist Brother Francis Cable has been sentenced to at least eight years’ prison for sex offences against 19 students at schools in Sydney and New South Wales’ Hunter region in the 1960s and 1970s.

The 83-year-old, also known as Brother Romuald, was given a maximum sentence of 16 years.

He had pleaded guilty to crimes against 17 boys in March, after a jury earlier found him guilty of 13 offences against two other boys.

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More than 30 abuse survivors and supporters clapped and cheered as Judge Peter Whitford handed down the sentence in Sydney’s District Court.

Judge Whitford said Cable’s “abhorrent” and “cruel” offences over 15 years were motivated by sexual gratification.

He said Cable showed little concern about being detected, but his victims were “incredibly resilient” for coming forward to report the abuse decades after it took place.

Judge Whitford said Cable failed to understand the damage he had caused to his victims and “persisted in a course of predatory conduct over a number of years” with no signs of remorse.

Some of his victims looked at the ground and shook their heads as they heard graphic details of Cable’s abuse on young boys attending Marist colleges at Maitland, in the Lower Hunter Valley, and Pagewood, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

Many of the victims were also sexually assaulted on beach and pool excursions or camps.

The court heard how Cable, a tech drawing teacher, repeatedly forced one of his teenage victims to have sex after class.

On one occasion when the boy was bleeding, he was bathed by his father who told him not to tell anyone for fear of being denied care for him and his siblings, who had no mother.

Cable told another victim: “You have the mark of the devil on you, and I have to get that out.”

He pushed his thumbs into the boy’s eye sockets when he resisted his advances, and told him: “You are evil. People will be ashamed of you.”

The court heard Cable also told a victim: “I can do what I like, you are not a Catholic and you have no say in anything”, and that he blessed a boy after assaulting him.

-ABC