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In March 2015, heritage-listed St James Catholic Church in Brighton was mostly destroyed by fire and St Mary's Catholic Church in St Kilda was found with a small amount fire damage to a door. Paedophile priest Ronald Pickering served as minister at these locations. At least five people killed themselves after being sexually abused by priest Pickering between 1960 and 1980, according to research carried out in 2012.

One victim, Raymond D'Brass, told a 2013 Victorian government inquiry that Pickering groomed him with cigarettes, money and alcohol. He was abused between the age of 9 and 13 while acting as a choir and altar boy at the church.

Then a few days later, Emergency services were called to a fire at St Mary's Catholic Church in Dandenong, at 2am on Wednesday. It took firefighters 90 minutes to extinguish blazes at the altar and storage room, and police are treating the blaze as suspicious.  The church was the site of child sex abuses perpetrated by now-deceased paedophile Father Kevin O'Donnell.

Father O'Donnell - who was reportedly as the 'two-a-day man', was believed to have committed hundreds of sexual assaults against young girls and boys over the 50 years that he worked in Victorian Catholic churches, before he retired in 1992. He died in 1997.

At the Dandenong church in 1958 Father O'Donnell molested a 15-year-old boy in the presbytery and went on to sexually abuse his brother, sister and friends, The Age reported. He presided over the church from 1958 to 1986, before moving onto Oakleigh.

Bishop Peter Elliott refused to admit that the fires were lit by sex abuse victims.

Australian actress Rachel Griffiths said she was 'quite elated' when she heard the 124-year-old James Catholic church had been destroyed by fire. She revealed that like many of the church's former parishioners she found it hard to even 'drive past' St James church in Brighton, in Melbourne's south-east.

Ms Griffiths said the church was plagued by 'tragedy and complicated feelings' and described it as being known locally as 'the haunted house on the hill'.

"We've all attended many funerals of boys that we now know were abused by [Father Ronald] Pickering ... and other perpetrators in the parish - at the actual church that it occurred in," she said.

"It's been hard for priests to really cleanse this parish, it's been very difficult to rebuild a community and we pretty much all scattered after the revelations came out and found other parishes."

Ms Griffiths revealed she and other local Catholics had avoided being married in the church because of the sick crimes that historically took place inside it.