CARDINAL’S MURKY PAST RAISES EYEBROWS AT THE VATICAN
Church’s ‘sociopathic’ No 3 at the centre of allegations as inquiry intensifies By Kristen Gelineau and Nicole Winfield
Cardinal George Pell has been dogged for years by allegations that he mishandled the Catholic Church sex abuse crisis in his native Australia, and now the scrutiny is more intense than ever. Australia’s latest inquiry is as high-level as it gets, and since Cardinal Pell is now the Vatican’s third most powerful official, the same can nearly be said for him.
Cardinal Pell, whom Pope Francis placed in charge of the Vatican’s finances last year, is accused of creating a victims’ compensation programme mainly to protect the church’s assets and of using aggressive tactics to discourage victims’ lawsuits, all while he was a bishop in Australia.
Cardinal Pell is also facing accusations from earlier in his career when he was a priest and auxiliary bishop and not in the ultimate position of authority: that he ignored warnings about an abusive teacher, bribed the victim of a paedophile priest to stay silent and was part of a committee that moved that priest from parish to parish.
Cardinal Pell has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and defended his record on confronting the abuse scandal as archbishop of Melbourne, and later of Sydney. But the investigation by Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is raising eyebrows in the Vatican, where the pope promised to hold bishops accountable for failing to protect children and care for victims.
The Vatican’s position was further complicated this week when Peter Saunders, a member of Pope Francis’ sexual abuse advisory commission, spoke out against Cardinal Pell. The issue has now become so fraught that three Vatican offices have issued statements trying to limit the damage by distancing themselves from Mr Saunders’ comments and, to some degree, what is happening in Australia.
Cardinal Pell testified twice last year before the long-running Royal Commission — the highest form of investigation in Australia — and with pressure mounting, he offered to appear again. On Monday, the commission took him up on that, asking him to testify at a later date.
The commission is looking at how the Catholic Church and other institutions dealt with decades of abuse across Australia. Given the scale of abuse in Catholic institutions, much of the attention has focused on how the church — and Cardinal Pell — responded.
“The buck has to stop somewhere,” abuse survivor Paul Tatchell recently told the commission. “And in Australia, it’s George Pell.”
The commission has just wrapped up two weeks of hearings in the city of Ballarat, where scores of children were abused by Catholic clergy from the 1960s to the 1980s. Many victims in Ballarat and elsewhere in Victoria state killed themselves, in one of the worst clusters of clerical abuse trauma in the world.
Anthony Foster’s daughter was one of them. Repeatedly raped as a child by priest Kevin O’Donnell, she committed suicide when she was 26. Her sister was raped by the same priest and began binge drinking to dull the pain, Mr Foster says. One day while intoxicated, she was struck by a car when crossing the road and is now severely disabled.
Mr Foster and his wife met with Cardinal Pell in 1997 to discuss the abuse. Mr Foster said Cardinal Pell, then the archbishop of Melbourne, was cold and confrontational, dismissing his concerns that the archdiocese’s compensation programme was unfair.
Years later, Mr Foster would testify before a Victoria inquiry into institutional child abuse — a lower, state-level investigation separate from the Royal Commission — that Cardinal Pell showed a “sociopathic lack of empathy”.
“He was bombastic, certainly overpowering, verge of anger. He was telling us if we didn’t like it, go to court,” Mr Foster says today. “It was adversarial at that point and from that point on.”
Cardinal Pell has acknowledged having an “unfortunate encounter” with the Fosters, but testified at the Victoria inquiry in 2013 that he believed compassion is best expressed through actions. He noted that the church compensated the family and paid for their counselling, and called the case a great tragedy.
After Cardinal Pell’s meeting with the Fosters, the church sent the family a letter offering compensation, dubbing it a “realistic alternative to litigation that will otherwise be strenuously defended”. That phrasing was used in all church offer letters sent to Melbourne victims in the 1990s, and was perceived by many to be a way of discouraging legal action.
Under questioning at a Royal Commission hearing, Cardinal Pell rejected a suggestion the wording was meant to be menacing, and said it wasn’t intended to deter victims from going to court. Still, he described the phrase as inappropriate because it could upset victims.
The Royal Commission, which the government launched in 2012, has no power to criminally charge a person. But commissioners can note in their final report whether they believe someone has broken the law — such as concealing a crime — and can refer the matter to police and prosecutors.
Cardinal Pell declined to comment to The Associated Press. In his testimony to the Victoria inquiry and a statement to the Royal Commission, he rejected each allegation against him as false and called child abuse “profoundly evil”.
Cardinal Pell denies allegations that he was involved in moving Gerald Ridsdale — Australia’s most notorious paedophile priest — between parishes, and said he never tried to buy the silence of one of Ridsdale’s victims. Cardinal Pell said he has no memory of ignoring warnings in the 1970s that a teacher was abusing students. The bribery allegation has been the most explosive one to emerge from the Royal Commission. Ridsdale’s nephew, David Ridsdale, told the commission that in 1993 he spoke by phone with Cardinal Pell — then an auxiliary bishop of Melbourne and family friend — about the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his uncle.
David Ridsdale testified that Cardinal Pell began talking about the needs of Ridsdale’s growing family, pointing out that he may soon need to buy a car or house. David Ridsdale testified that Cardinal Pell then said: “I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet.”
“Some days I don’t know who I am angrier at,” David Ridsdale told the commission. “Gerald for being a sick monster, or George for the way he reacted and dealt with the issue.”
Cardinal Pell issued a statement denying that he offered the nephew a financial incentive to stay quiet and said he had spoken to him after his uncle was already under investigation — meaning there was no reason to keep the case quiet since authorities already knew about it.
The allegations are unlikely to threaten Cardinal Pell’s position, since they were already known when the pope made him prefect. But they have been closely watched by members of the pope’s sexual abuse advisory commission, which is expected to discuss Cardinal Pell’s case at a working group meeting this week in London, said commission member Peter Saunders.
Mr Saunders criticised Cardinal Pell’s response to the abuse crisis in an interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes this week, prompting Cardinal Pell to threaten legal action and the Vatican to issue a statement emphasising that Saunders had spoken from a personal standpoint and not on behalf of the pope’s commission.
“Cardinal George Pell has always responded carefully and thoroughly to the accusations and questions posed by the competent Australian authorities,” the Vatican statement said. “And his position has been made known again in recent days by a public declaration on his part, which must be considered reliable and worthy of respect and attention.”
Cardinal Pell has said the Melbourne compensation programme he launched in 1996 was groundbreaking within the church, given that Australian law at the time made it difficult for victims to sue the church.
It initially paid abuse survivors up to A$50,000 (1.3 million baht) in exchange for them giving up their right to further litigation. But some victims have dubbed it an inadequate, intimidating tactic to prevent them from suing.
In its final report, the Victoria inquiry found that the programme was hardly an independent body as Cardinal Pell asserted, that the amounts it paid out were not commensurate with the suffering endured, and that the waiver victims were forced to sign to make it clear they were to keep quiet, creating the perception that it was “hush money”.
The inquiry concluded that, while 97% of the claims were approved and some victims were satisfied with the programme, it ultimately benefited the Melbourne archdiocese by limiting exposure and protecting its reputation.
The buck has to stop somewhere. And in Australia, it’s George Pell PAUL TATCHELL ABUSE SURVIVOR