SPECIAL REPORT: the rise and fall of Cardinal George Pell

Television reporter Louise Milligan spent three years investigating George Pell and the Catholic Church and what she discovered has made her question her church and the justice system.

Iwas raised a devoted Catholic. Mass every Sunday, confession, giving up sweets for Lent. At school we recited Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy and at lunchtime didn’t step on lines on the pavement lest it be declared that we loved the devil. It’s perhaps that upbringing that, in 2015, drew me to cover the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse for ABC’s 7.30 program. That year, I met a woman, Julie Stewart, who was the same age as me. Julie had been raised in a parish across Melbourne from where I grew up. I’ll never forget seeing her First Communion photo – eyes cast to the heavens, her starchy white dress, veil and stiff crown of artificial flowers, her frilly socks and little patent leather shoes. Julie’s photo was just like mine from when I was eight. It reminded me of the innocent hope we all grew up with.

Julie had all of that hope and innocence dashed when she was abused in the confessional by a thoroughly horrible human called Father Peter Searson, a Brylcreemed paedophile priest who carried a gun around the parish school at Doveton, in Melbourne’s south-east, where he terrorised the children.

Many years later, when he was giving evidence to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into child abuse, Cardinal George Pell denied knowing about sexual abuse at Doveton, saying only “there might be victims”. But as we discovered for our program, in 1998 Pell, then Archbishop of Melbourne, had sent Julie a letter apologising for the abuse and paying her a confidential settlement through his Melbourne Response scheme. It made me think two things: First, I should investigate this man more because I had serious questions about whether he was a truth-teller.

Second, that I could so easily have been that little Catholic girl whose trust was betrayed.

I by no means thought Pell himself was an abuser until early 2016. From February that year, I began to meet men who made extremely concerning allegations about the Cardinal, going back decades.

I kept an open mind about Pell’s guilt. In fact, when a newspaper first ran an unsourced story that there was a police investigation into Pell, I found it very hard to believe that if it was true, it would not have come out by that point, given the Cardinal’s huge presence in the Australian cultural and political landscape.

But since then, I have spent countless hours researching Royal Commission archives. I have learned that it takes an average of 25.7 years for survivors of child sexual abuse to come forward. In the case of the young man who was the key witness in the trial that resulted in Pell being convicted on December 11 (and finally reportable last month), it had only been 19 years since he was, the jury found, sexually abused by Pell. The other young man who was with him, who tragically died of a drug overdose without making a complaint, was also well inside that time frame.

Survivors talk about the shame and embarrassment of coming forward. Imagine how much more difficult that would be when you are talking about a prince of the Catholic Church – the third most senior person in the Vatican. It’s a daunting ask of anyone, not least a victim of childhood trauma.

There was nothing in the men whom I began to meet (and whose stories I told in my book, Cardinal, The Rise and Fall of George Pell) that made me think that any of them were not telling the truth. Quite the reverse: it was abundantly clear they had nothing to gain from coming forward and everything to lose. I worried the strain of it would see them give up.

Being a complainant in a sexual crime trial is a terrible ordeal. In this case, it took nearly four years from the complaints being made to police to the news that Pell was guilty. In that time, they had to undergo brutal cross-examination from a QC who would later describe oral rape of a child as “vanilla sexual penetration”. All of that happened behind closed doors. I think you would have to have a florid mental illness to endure that if it hadn’t happened. And while these men have suffered from posttraumatic stress, they do not have florid mental illnesses.

Like everyone else in Australia, I did wonder about Pell’s decision not to fly to Australia in late 2015 because of a heart condition. One of the fascinating things I discovered when researching my book was that Pell’s sick note had been written by a Vatican doctor who is responsible for declaring medical miracles, which mean that a person gets the tick of approval for being a saint. I thought that was a telling choice of person to make the decision that Pell was too ill to fly. On the eve of my book launch, Pell was photographed at Heathrow in London after coming off a plane from Rome.

That photo and that evening is etched in my brain because releasing my book was a leap of faith into shark-infested waters. The Cardinal has always used and sought out power and powerful friendships. Even now, as a convicted paedophile, he enjoys support from friends in high places. Nonetheless, the response has been 99.9 per cent positive. I have had dozens and dozens of messages from people around the country and internationally, many of them ordinary lay Catholics or religious like nuns and priests, who are pleased that a light has been shone on this very dark place.

A loud and shouty minority has insisted Pell is innocent. The fact that the defenders of a now-convicted paedophile include two former Prime Ministers floors me. I understand that people have friendships and political alliances with Pell. They have gone in to battle with him in the culture wars. But their comments have shown, in my view, an extraordinary lack of empathy for victims and their

families who are hurting. A jury which was in possession of all the facts has convicted. The pundits sit in their armchairs with no such appreciation of all of those facts.

But a dawn of change is sweeping through parishes and schools. The institutional denial of previous years has, among ordinary Catholics who correspond with me at least, been replaced with disgust, embarrassment and anger. The fact that the man at the top of the tree was involved leaves them reeling.

I have heard from parents and student alumni, livid that schools in Sydney and Melbourne have circulated a newspaper article by Jesuit priest and commentator, Father Frank Brennan, which seeks to undermine the guilty verdict.

The most surprising example of this was St Kevin’s College in Melbourne. That’s where the two choirboys who were victims of Pell won scholarships.

The jury has found that Pell committed shocking crimes against those two boys in 1996. One became a heroin user, at just 14, the year after the abuse took place. He was addicted for the rest of his life until he had an overdose at age 30. Both boys lost their scholarships to the prestigious St Kevin’s because they lost their places in the choir after the abuse.

The parents who contacted me cannot believe that the school would be sending material like Brennan’s piece, given that heart-breaking history. They feel it was a profoundly insensitive thing for the school to do.

From what I have seen, there is a lot of disquiet about how the institutional Catholic educational hierarchy is dealing with this issue. And it is at odds with the feelings of many ordinary Catholics.

The courage of the young man at the centre of this crime is incredibly admirable. He is an intensely private person and I do not speak for him and this has been an absolute ordeal, but he has managed to convince a jury he is telling the truth under the most trying of circumstances. He has overcome an expensive and brutal legal team acting for George Pell. I cannot imagine the strain he has been under and also how difficult it would have been for him to have to relive his childhood trauma under those circumstances. He ought to be commended.

Then, of course, there is the family of the boy who died. They now know their son went through this and never felt that he could disclose it. That instead, he anaesthetised his pain with heroin from the age of 14.

Again, this is a depressingly familiar trajectory too often told to the Royal Commission. Holding onto a terrible secret hurts a young person. Drugs dull that. As Professor Carolyn Quadrio, a psychiatrist who is a specialist in childhood sexual abuse, particularly by clergy, told me, prisons are full of people who have been sexually abused as children.

I look at my own children and it saddens me to think of what those boys went through. I remember when we started shooting a reenactment of a game being played by George Pell and some eight-yearold boys at a swimming pool for our ABC story. We used my son and my neighbour’s boy for that scene. They enjoyed playing the game. It brought home to myself and my friend the horrible loss of trust that children who are victims of sexual abuse by clergy suffer. For if a person who is meant to represent all that is good in the world can’t be trusted, who can? We sat there in nauseated silence.

And what of when these traumatised little children, later broken adults, find the courage in themselves to report to police? They are met with a process that I found, first-hand, to be unnecessarily harsh. We had a five-year Royal Commission which made all sorts of recommendations about how the criminal justice process ought better be done. But from what I witnessed, there is still much to be achieved and I don’t think some of the players in the system have heeded that message at all.

I felt utterly brutalised in the Committal Proceedings courtroom in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. I felt like I had been hit by a truck. This was nothing compared to how those vulnerable men felt.

As a fellow witness, I wasn’t allowed to speak to them during that time and it was enormously difficult not to be able to reach out and say, ‘I hope you are okay, I’m thinking of you’. I am enormously grateful to these men for trusting me, for coming forward, for having the fortitude to keep going.

We have to do better, otherwise

I fear that the incentive for people to disclose to police will remain very low. That’s a bad thing for justice.

And what does that mean, in practical terms? It means the people who destroy little children’s lives will get away with it.