Church facing more damage
THE Catholic Church is facing fresh bombshells involving George Pell’s knowledge of the abuse by the country’s worst paedophile priests.
Federal Attorney-general Christian Porter has confirmed he is liaising with Victoria Police and considering releasing secret findings of the child sex abuse royal commission relating to Pell’s evidence following his convictions.
The commission’s findings were heavily redacted so they did not influence the police investigations at the time into Pell’s sexual assaults on the two choirboys in Melbourne Cathedral and other alleged acts against boys in a Ballarat swimming pool which have since been dropped.
Pell was warned during the commission’s hearings in 2015 and 2016 that he could “be seen as culpable” for the abuse of hundreds of children by former housemate, Gerald Ridsdale, if the commission found he knew and did nothing.
He infamously walked with Ridsdale into court in 1993 after Ridsdale was convicted of sexual abuse and indecent assault charges against 65 children as young as four. He was also accused of knowing about paedophile Father Peter Searson, who was moved around to three Melbourne Catholic Archdiocese parishes in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.
Pell was also quizzed about his knowledge of paedophile Brother Edward Dowlan from the Christian Brothers’ St Patrick’s School in Ballarat and Monsignor John Day in Mildura. The matters cannot yet be detailed but it is understood they relate to the hearings into Catholic Church authorities in Ballarat, where Pell was appointed assistant priest in 1973, and Melbourne, where he was appointed an auxiliary bishop in 1987. He shared a house with Ridsdale in 1973.
Ridsdale’s nephew, David Ridsdale, told the royal commission that in 1993, Pell was the first person he had told about his abuse by his uncle and accused Pell of trying to bribe him by saying: “I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet.”
A former altar boy told the commission he overheard Pell commenting to another priest before a funeral in September 1983: “I think Gerry’s been rooting boys again.”
Pell denied a suggestion he was aware in the 1970s and early ’80s that the then-bishop of Ballarat, Ronald Mulkearns, was sending Ridsdale for treatment for sexual offending. But documents showed in 1982 Pell was at a meeting when Bishop Mulkearns told them “it had become necessary for … Ridsdale to move” again.
The offending … was on any view breathtakingly arrogant
CHIEF JUDGE PETER KIDD