The group of survivors who traveled across the world to participate in the hearing sat in the first row.
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Victims and relatives of children who claim they were sexually abused by the Catholic Church hold placards as they stand outside the venue for Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney, Australia.
Cardinal George Pell has said he has the Pope’s “full backing”, as he testifies for a second day at a hearing into child sex abuse.
Another priest resident at the St. Alipius presbytery during the period in question was Father Gerald Ridsdale, who has been in prison since 1994 for these crimes and has been liaicized. The deeply Catholic city has been devastated by disclosures about the huge number of abuse victims there, scores of whom killed themselves.
Pell himself is not accused of sexual abuse. “He might have feared that, if he told us the truth, that people like myself would have said: ‘Well, look, is that correct?”
“This is the core of the problem… that they say “we are clergy, it is not our responsibility to report. And it all stems from that abuse”.
And it seemed parents, children, teachers, parishioners and other priests were confiding to everyone else about offending clergy but never to him.
“Words are one thing, actions are another”.
“Too many were dismissed and sometimes they were dismissed in absolutely scandalous circumstances”, Cardinal Pell said.
The bishop’s former adviser, priest John McKinnon, told the Royal Commission in December that Mulkearns was “profoundly sorry” for relocating suspected pedophile priests, but could no longer remember details.
The cardinal’s testimony came just hours before Spotlight, the film that depicts the Boston Globe’s investigation into child sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church, won the Academy Award for best picture.
Australian Cardinal George Pell at a press conference at the Vatican on 31 March 2014. “It’s a sad story and it wasn’t of much interest to me”, Pell said, bringing audible gasps from the public gallery.
Pell’s office have denied the guards were working for him. Under questioning from Furness, Pell said he had heard “one or two fleeting references” to “misbehavior” by Dowlan in the 1970s “which I concluded might have been pedophilia activity”.
Pell: “I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet”.
“We would have to acknowledge that there were some statements said that were certainly more constructive than previously”, he told reporters in Rome.
Tornelli said the Commission had not yet presented any specific allegation that would cause trouble for Cardinal Pell.
“Gentle and euphemistic language… was regularly used by Bishop Mulkearns on these occasions, so that some of us were kept in the dark”, he said. “Too many people have committed suicide for these abuses, and that’s why we are here today”. Pell was appointed auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese of Melbourne in 1987, and was named archbishop in 1996.
The inquiry has gathered considerable attention in Australia, with supporters of abuse victims gathering outside and holding signs saying “Pope Sack Pell Now” and “Pell Go To Hell”.
Anthony Foster testified at an earlier inquiry that when he and his wife sought compensation over the abuse their daughters suffered, Pell showed a “sociopathic lack of empathy”. A second struggled with alcohol addiction, and while intoxicated was struck by a auto, leaving her severely disabled.
When Gail Furness SC, the barrister assisting the royal commission, pressed him on that point, and asked whether “wrongdoing” was on his mind, he said: “Not particularly”.
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“I nodded, got no recognition, nothing”, Ridsdale said.
