Cardinal George Pell, pictured in 2014, will testify at an child sexual abuse royal commission via videolink on Monday. The commission allowed Pell to testify from Rome because he was too ill to travel home. The hearing is expected to last three or four days.
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He was asked by Gail Furness, SC advising the commission if he considered it appropriate for such a tribunal to consider the case of Bishop Mulkearns. “I’m not here to defend the indefensible”.
A Cardinal has described the Catholic Church’s handling of a paedophile priest in Australia as a “catastrophe”.
David Ridsdale, who was abused by his uncle, Gerald Ridsdale, said he was grateful that the horrors of Ballarat were finally getting global attention.
About 15 abuse victims and support staff travelled to Rome on the back of a crowd-funding campaign to see the Vatican’s treasurer give evidence after he said he was unable to travel to his native Australia because of heart problems.
“I would agree that it was known to all the people whom you’ve mentioned, and they do constitute a significant number”, Pell replied.
Ridsdale: “Fuck you, George, and everything you stand for”.
Pell’s office have denied the guards were working for him.
The 47-year-old said his survivor group was not on a witch hunt, but on quest for truth to ensure such abuse never happened again. Gerald Ridsdale is in prison after being convicted of multiple counts of abuse. I continue to regret the misunderstanding between us.
He said it was discussed and mentioned to him by parish friends but “no-one said we should do anything about it”.
“We want to hear the truth”.
(AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino). Peter Blenkiron, a survivor of priestly sex abuse, wears a T-shirt showing him at the age in which he was abused, in front of the Quirinale hotel in Rome, Sunday, Feb. 28, 2016.
He, along with numerous victims in attendance, wore red t-shirts with the words “No More Silence”.
Pell’s testimony will begin just hours before “Spotlight”, the drama of the Boston Globe’s investigation into how the church systematically shielded pedophiles for years, vies for as many as six Academy Awards.
Previous Australian inquiries have concluded that Pell created a victims’ compensation program mainly to limit the church’s liability, and that he aggressively tried to discourage victims from pursuing lawsuits. The alleged events took place in the 1970s and 1980s when he was a priest.
“I must say in those days, if a priest denied such activity, I was very strongly inclined to accept the denial”, he said.
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Cardinal Pell said he had no knowledge that Bishop Mulkearns had sent Gerald Risdale away for “treatment” after his paedophilia was discovered.
The group of survivors who traveled across the world to participate in the hearing sat in the first row.
Pell has long denied those allegations, which were apparently handled in 2002 by an internal investigation held behind closed doors by the Australian diocese, to which Pell belonged at the time.
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Now the Vatican’s third highest ranking official and in charge of the city-state’s finances, Pell was granted leave to appear via video link in Australia after the commission earlier this month accepted medical evidence a long-haul flight posed risks to the Cardinal’s health. “More and more Australian Catholics strenuously disagree with Pell’s response to child sex crimes by clergy, but their views, like the cries for help of victims, are ignored”.
