Australia’s Cardinal George Pell has denied knowing anything about the abusive activities of a fellow cleric when he was a priest in the Victoria suburb of Ballarat in the 1970s.
The cardinal has also claimed that he was victim to “a gross deception” by his then bishop, Dr Robert Mulkearns, and Msgr Leo Fiscalini, with whom he was in a 1982 meeting that discussed moving the then Fr Gerald Ridsdale between parishes.
Tried on several occasions between 1993 and 2013, Mr Ridsdale has been convicted of 138 offences against more than 50 victims.
Videolink
Speaking from Rome by videolink with Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse, the Vatican’s financial chief said neither cleric told him that allegations of abuse had been made against Fr Ridsdale. He sincerely believed, he said, that “we were being informed implicitly or explicitly by the bishop that this man was open and available for an appropriate transfer or promotion”.
He had followed the bishop’s lead in the matter, he said, maintaining “I had no reason to think that behind these presenting reasons there was a different world of reality”.
Had criminal activity been the reason for Fr Ridsdale being moved, he said, it would have been “a commonsense expectation” that this should have been raised.
“We do not propose to shift priests, promote them when… it has been shown they have engaged in criminal activity,” he said, continuing, “That is not the basis on which the Church has ever acted”. Overall responsibility for the mishandling of Fr Ridsdale “lies overwhelmingly with the bishop”, he said.
The cardinal’s sessions with the commission are taking place remotely because of medical advice that it would be unsafe for him to fly as he has a serious heart condition. Abuse survivors in Australia have protested against this, leading the Australian comedian Tim Minchin to release a derisive song – in which he accuses Cardinal Pell of hypocrisy and cowardice for not returning to Australia to give evidence in person – to help fund their flights to Rome so they could witness the cardinal give evidence.
Indefensible
Cardinal Pell also told the commission he was not participating in the inquiry “to defend the indefensible”. While the Church is working to remedy its mistakes, he said, he recognised that “the Church in many places, certainly in Australia, has mucked things up, has let people down”.
Pell has already answered questions about these matters at 2013’s Victoria Parliamentary enquiry and again in August 2014 during Royal Commission hearings into the archdiocese of Melbourne.