Pell gave evidence via video link for a fourth and final day to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse from a Rome hotel conference room a short distance from the Vatican.
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Pell testified from Rome because he said he could not travel home for health reasons. About 20 survivors and their supporters flew to Rome to witness Pell’s testimony.
Cardinal Pell was a family friend of David Ridsdale and David’s father was a carpenter who did work for the diocese.
‘If they’d asked my opinion I would have given it, ‘ he said.
He was confronted with evidence brought by the commission earlier in the hearing that as a priest in 1974, he had received information from a student at St. Patrick’s College in the Diocese of Ballarat that Br. In that instance, he said, in retrospect to could not “excuse my comparative lack of activity”.
Asked by commission chairman Peter McClellan what he did about it, Pell replied: “I didn’t do anything about it”. Dowlan was later removed from the school but went on to abuse schoolchildren elsewhere until 1985.
“We all want to try to make things better actually and on the ground especially for the survivors and their families and I undertake to continue to help the group work effectively with the committees and agencies that we have here in the Church in Rome and especially the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors”, Cardinal Pell said.
Nagle was abused by a priest at a school in Ballarat in the 1970s. “And that’s why we’ve been fighting for so long”, he said. “Even the language that I was alleged to have used is ridiculous”.
“The suggestion that I would speak like that to a young person in distress is absolutely false”, Pell said.
Ballarat clergy sexual abuse survivor David Ridsdale said victims were exhausted and overwhelmed with emotion following the meeting where they all shared their personal stories with the Cardinal.
He admitted knowing of some concerns, including those held by parents about Doveton parish priest Peter Searson who was entering the boys’ toilets at the parish school, watching boys in the shower and taking children into the presbytery without permission.
“A Catholic priest was raping them when this photo was taken, at this age”.
Pell said it was a “disastrous coincidence” that five known pedophile Catholic clerics had been operating in Pell’s hometown of Ballarat while he served there as a priest.
‘We are still waiting to hear, things are still in motion for a potential Papal visit we will hear later today if that’s going to happen, ‘ he said.
Before the hearing began, Cardinal Pell expressed his willingness to meet with the abuse survivors who traveled from Australia to be present at the hearing.
“It was hard: an honest and occasionally emotional meeting”, the cardinal said after the encounter. I know many of their families and I know the goodness of so many people in Catholic Ballarat: a goodness which is not extinguished by the evil that was done. But Cardinal Pell’s lawyer reminded the commission of evidence given by the former director of education in the Archdiocese of Melbourne that he did not at any time approach Cardinal Pell or any auxiliary bishop about the matter, dealing only with then-Archbishop Frank Little and the vicar general.
Cardinal Pell said he was “not cut from the same cloth”, and that as a bishop who was known for being outspoken, he would have gone against the expectation to cover up at the time.
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Cardinal Pell also said that after that initial phone call, David never called back.
