AUSTRALIAN CARDINAL WON’T QUIT OVER ABUSE
SYDNEY: Australian Cardinal George Pell said in an interview with Sky News he will not resign as the Vatican’s finance chief over the Catholic Church’s responses to child sex abuse in his homeland.
Cardinal Pell has denied any wrongdoing during his time in Australia’s Victoria state, where paedophile priests abused dozens of children in the 1970s and 1980s.
The 74-year-old cardinal has told the Royal Commission i nto Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that he was deceived by senior clergy about what was happening during a time of “crimes and cover-ups”.
“No, I wouldn’t resign. That would be taken as an admission of guilt,” he told Sky News in an interview in Rome broadcast in Australia on Friday.
“If the Holy Father [Pope Francis] asked me to do it I would point this out, but I would do whatever he wanted.”
Cardinal Pell last week spent four days giving evidence to the royal commission about his time in the town of Ballarat, where he grew up and worked, and Melbourne.
In his evidence via videolink from Rome, he admitted that having notorious priest Gerald Ridsdale and other paedophiles in Ballarat at the same time in the 1970s was a “disastrous coincidence”.
But he said he had no idea about the offences that were occurring, telling Sky that much of his work in Melbourne had been to help set things right for victims and their families. Cardinal Pell had drawn criticism for failing to attend the hearings in person in Australia, but said during the interview he was unable to due to a heart condition that had seen him collapse twice after long trips.
The Vatican defended the church’s actions on paedophile priests, saying while more needed to be done, popes Francis and Benedict XVI had taken courageous action. It also stood by Cardinal Pell.
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said “sensationalism” surrounding the Oscar-winning film Spotlight about sexual abuse by clergy in Boston and the Pell hearings had given the public the wrong impression.
Abuse survivors have questioned the credibility of Cardinal Pell’s claims that he had not been aware of widespread paedophilia among priests, but Mr Lombardi said the cardinal had given “a dignified and coherent personal testimony”.
The result was “an objective and lucid picture of the errors committed in many church environments in the previous decades”, Mr Lombardi said.
Australian victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests said on Friday they were disappointed they were not granted a meeting with Pope Francis and contested the Vatican’s assertion they failed to make their request through the proper channels.
The group of about 15 were in Rome for a week to watch Cardinal Pell give evidence.
“We would have wanted to know how the pope could have assisted us by vocalising his support and acknowledging the mistakes of the past,” said David Ridsdale, who as a boy was abused by his uncle, a priest at the time.
A Vatican spokesman said no request had been made though the proper channels. The group had made their approach through Cardinal Pell’s office.
“Considering what’s been happening, I don’t believe there was a lack of awareness of our efforts,” Mr Ridsdale said.
Australian Cardinal George Pell, the pope’s powerful finance minister, is under fire on two fronts.
For the outside world he is most notably accused of protecting paedophile priests. But closer to home he has made many Vatican enemies in his drive to shake up the secretive and archaic institution. What that means is that, while he swears he has Pope Francis’s full support over clerical abuse allegations, his controversial reformist zeal means that many would relish his downfall.
Cardinal Pell was picked in 2013 to be one of a key group of advisers to the pope set up to help the Argentine reform the unruly Vatican’s administrative body — the Curia — famed for infighting.
In 2014 he was appointed finance minister, the number three spot in the tiny city state, and charged with dragging it into the 21st century, increasing profitability and bringing its scandal-hit institutions into line with international standards.
The cardinal, 74 — a former archbishop of Melbourne and Sydney — did not hesitate to bring in top, and very costly, American firms to help him clean house.
The shock to the system was severe: the centuries-old Curia, enthralled to tradition and above all loathe to spill its secrets, wriggled under the scrutiny of outside auditors and blanched at its affairs going public.
In December 2014, Cardinal Pell revealed that hundreds of millions of euros had been found “tucked away” in accounts and desk drawers of various Holy See departments, which did not appear on the Vatican’s balance sheets.
He admitted that the city state had always tried to keep its problems “in-house”, but swore its workings would from then on be “transparent” — in a statement to the press which intensely irritated many in Saint Peter’s corridors of power.
Pope Francis wants “a poor Church for the poor” and that means cracking down on mismanagement, he said.
An in-house leaks scandal at the end of last year revealing misuse of Vatican funds gave his words further weight.
But the moral grandstanding did not sit well with those who accused the Holy See’s most senior English-speaking official of splashing out on business class flights, costly robes and home furnishings.
And he infuriated his boss as well: during a synod on the family in October, Cardinal Pell ignored Francis’s call for clemency towards those considered sinners by the Church, blocking attempts to open the door to remarried divorced people. He was also part of a conservative group of cardinals which wrote a leaked strongly worded letter to the pope warning him of attempts by the progressive wing to undermine him — forcing Francis to slam conspiracy theorists.
But the darkest shadow over Cardinal Pell’s head is the charge that he knew children were being abused by priests on his watch in Australia, and failed to act — an accusation he categorically refutes.
The cardinal’s testimony, given last week via video-link to Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse — under the watchful gaze of victims — has created much unwelcome publicity for the Vatican. Pope Francis said last month that those who move priests from one parish to another in an attempt to hide abuse, thus placing ever more children at risk, should resign.
Cardinal Pell has not made life any easier by saying he wasn’t interested in the abuse, in the 1970s and ’80s, and denying connections to serial paedophiles, despite once sharing a house with one. “If a driver sexually assaulted a passenger they picked up along the way, I don’t think it appropriate for the ... leadership of that company to be held responsible,” he said in 2014.
While slightly more contrite at the hearings, he still insisted he had not had any reason to investigate rumours of child molestation and blamed others for not stopping clerical abusers in Australia, including a gun-toting paedophile priest.
British survivor and former member of the Vatican’s commission on sex abuse Peter Saunders in June described Cardinal Pell as “almost sociopathic” and “a massive, massive thorn in the side of Pope Francis’s papacy if he’s allowed to remain”.
On Monday, the cardinal insisted he had “the full backing of the pope” — but with abuse survivors in town asking for an audience with Francis, the pontiff may be feeling under increased pressure to find Cardinal Pell another job.