Cardinal George Pell responds to reports of investigation into sex abuse claims against him

By Patrick Carlyon
Herald Sun
February 21, 2016

http://tinyurl.com/jz6n6cy

 CARDINAL George Pell was in bed on the other side of the world when the Herald Sun rang his office on Friday afternoon. The newspaper was seeking comment. Victoria police was investigating historical claims that Pell had sexually abused five to 10 boys. The global time difference did not matter. Pell’s denial was swift and unequivocal. They always are.

Pell “strongly denied” the “utterly false” claims. This denial was different to all the others over the past decade. It had to be. The words were measured, as always, and bolstered with adverbs for fullest effect. The outrage bristled. Yet this statement was not about Pell’s knowledge of or response to pedophile priests. Cardinal George Pell had to address new allegations from the past -— his own history — of acts he himself has described as “profoundly evil and completely repugnant”.

The last time this happened, in 2002, Pell received support from the then Prime Minister down.

The details were hazy then, long ago claims by a middle-aged man about a boys’ beach camp at Phillip Island. One man’s word against another man’s.

Back then, public figures didn’t need the findings of an inquiry headed by a retired Supreme Court judge. They didn’t wait to test the evidence. Somehow, word leaked that the accuser had a criminal history. Public figures lined up to attest to Pell’s good name.

This time, for now at least, the untested allegations are even sketchier. Pell said he was unaware of them, had not been questioned, and described their exposure as “outrageous”.

They date to 1978, and a swimming pool, when Pell was a priest in Ballarat East, and the turn of the century, when Pell was the Archbishop of Melbourne, during the same period he fired passions for refusing communion for gay men and women.

Medically-grounded to a religious enclave 16,000km away, Pell seemed isolated yesterday.

There was no immediate clamour of character references from high-fliers. Pell had been accused last week of hiding at the Vatican: now, perhaps, despite the privileges of high office, he seemed stranded in a faraway tower.

Pell nevertheless projected the role so familiar to both his detractors and his defenders: imperious, impatient and infuriated. He sought to turn perceptions of flight into fight, with some success, too: much of yesterday’s media coverage cast Pell as the aggrieved aggressor demanding, in effect, an investigation into the investigation.

“The Cardinal calls on the Premier and the Police Minister to immediately investigate the leaking of these baseless allegations,” his statement read.

HERE was the latest denial in a career of conflict, an end to just another torrid week. In the days before, Pell was the subject of international debate raging about his inability to appear in person at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Everyone had an opinion about Pell’s heart diagnosis. Once, Pell got to pick his fights. Not anymore.

He had been labelled a “coward” in a song that topped iTunes. If he couldn’t come here, crowdfunding initiatives would send abuse victims to him at the Vatican.

He was cast as a wounded lion, an old man (at 74) whose old-world obstinacy would be confounded with modern guile.

“Cardinal Pell has always helped victims, listened to them and considered himself their ally,” his office replied.

“As an archbishop for almost 20 years, he has led from the front to put an end to cover- ups, to protect vulnerable people and to try to bring justice to victims.”

Victims, however, have long disagreed. Anthony and Chrissie Foster met Pell to discuss the abuse of their two daughters by Father Kevin O’Donnell. They described Pell’s response to a photo of their daughter Emma. She had cut herself in the photo; later, she committed suicide.

The Fosters have often talked about that meeting, and what they believe was Pell’s “sociopathic lack of empathy”.

Peter Saunders, sacked recently as a member of the papal anti-abuse panel, uses the same language. He said he believed Pell seemed callous and cruel.

The descriptors have become emblematic for critics of the church. Pell has come to embody an institution long accused of placing its preservation ahead of its victims’ needs.

For them, his face has become a symbol of resistance. His public tone is thought to be detached, his words are perceived as blunt. He often projects loftiness instead of warmth.

His careful style of speaking, likened to a barrister talking in abstractions, is considered painful by victims in search of understanding. Once, in likening the church’s culpability to that of a trucking company, he managed to offend not only victims but also truckers.

In 2013, he argued that the church did not grasp the horror of sex abuse in the 1970s, for only then “articles started to appear about the significance and importance and the terrible crimes of paedophilia”.

That evidence, to a Victorian parliament inquiry, followed a script of a corporate head or politician under siege. He offered a statement for his church’s “imperfect” response, then addressed four hours of questions with a patience he may have applied to chess as a child.

He was unmoved when protesters afterwards shrieked that he was doomed to Hell. Perhaps that was most striking: Pell always seems unmoved.

In his shrewd study The Prince, author David Marr makes much of Pell’s professional relationships during his rise in Australia.

Pell was disliked by fellow bishops in Australia for being too conservative. He wasn’t a team player; he bowed only to Rome.

He often reached out to a law firm, Corrs Chambers Westgarth. Peter Mahon, who ran Royce Communications, was a constant presence during times of crisis management.

Pell gained attention before the turn of the century for cataloguing society’s sins. He himself presented an unimpeachable front, and bloomed as a moral talisman for a succession of conservative politicians.

He sought no conventional constituency, and he was unfazed by the inevitable howls he elicited, such as his response in 1999 to teenage suicides linked to homophobia — “If they are connected with homosexuality, it is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction.”

He railed against same-sex marriage. And contraception. Even the ABC’s Brides of Christ mini-series was an early target. In 2002, before the full horrors of Ballarat were exposed, Pell offered a perspective on abortion. “Abortion is a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people,” he said.

He built a public name on deriding the sins of those outside of his faith. Yet the sins within his church have come to stamp his career, at least on this side of the world.

His personal account may take in Oxford scholarship, the influences of B.A. Santamaria and the third- highest position at the Vatican — Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, in charge of the Holy See’s finances. The younger man liked swimming and kicking a football; if contemporaries later recalled a stridency of thought, they also remembered a good rapport with young people.

HIS public robes in Australian life are now marked by institutional paedophilia by others — and a bullseye. Pell himself seemed slow to recognise this shift in perceptions — or unwilling to accept it.

He replaced Frank Little as Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996; only after death was Little’s shameful pattern of shielding criminal priests, and multiplying evils committed against children, exposed.

“One or two lonely voices have suggested that the Catholic Church here is in a state of crisis,” Pell said on assuming the position. “They are badly mistaken.”

Pell resisted calls for a royal commission for decades. The first groundswell followed an own goal — Pell’s decision to accompany Father Gerald Ridsdale, in sunglasses and white suit, to a Melbourne court for multiple sex crimes against children in 1993. Pell has never shaken off the implied symbolism in that choice, that for him and his church priestly welfare comes before victims’ needs.

Pell later admitted this decision was a “mistake”. Yet almost a decade later, after former Archbishop of Brisbane Peter Hollingworth fumbled questions of his handling of abuse in the Anglican Church, Pell still rejected the need for a royal commission.

A decade further on, after Victoria Police released suicide figures for Ballarat victims of Catholic clergy, and official rumblings grew in NSW, Pell remained adamant. Victims had received justice when the church had given them “due procedure and apologised”, he said.

Pell instituted his Melbourne Response in 1996, which he heralded with a “sincere, unreserved and public apology”. Victims could come to the church for care and compensation — then capped at $50,000, but later lifted. This was an alternative to litigation, but in successful claims the church would make no admission of liability. Victims were free to go to the police, but it later became clear that the church would not encourage them to do so.

Pell always trumpeted his mechanism. He described it as an international benchmark. Victims, however, said they believed the process was bullying.

They were compelled to sign away the possibility of later legal claims.

Many victims told the Victorian parliamentary inquiry that they felt traumatised by the process.

Even now, victim advocates reflexively groan at its mention. The Fosters had a compelling case, including documents showing that the church had known about Fr O’Donnell’s offending for 40 years. Pell had given them a written apology. The Fosters had rejected a $50,000 offer. Finally, they were awarded $750,000 plus costs — after a nine-year legal battle. Marr compared the average payout under the Melbourne Response — about $32,500 — to the more than $1 million paid per victim by the church in America.

OVER the past few years, claims that go to Pell’s intentions have been put again and again but none have ever been proven.

The optics are stark. In court-rooms, men sob for the futures they say were stolen from them as children. They recite times and dates and statements. To each claim, Pell is compelled to counter-claim.

Did Pell try and buy the silence of Ridsdale nephew David, as the prominent victim has alleged?

Did he knowingly move Gerald Ridsdale around the Ballarat archdiocese? Was he negligent in his handling of abuse claims while he was Archbishop of Melbourne?

Evidence was given recently that Pell was overheard speaking in 1983 about Ridsdale’s shocking behaviour. Pell responded by disputing his presence at the time of his alleged remarks. Pell has been issuing regular denials since 2002.

The David Ridsdale claim has haunted Pell since a 60 Minutes interview at that time. He has consistently argued that it makes little sense to offer a bribe when the offender had already been exposed for so many crimes.

Another claim, raised publicly at about the same time, traces back to the early 1970s and a then 12-year-old boy. A now middle-aged man, he told the media that he had informed Pell about the abuses of Brother Ted Dowlan, to which Pell had replied that he was being ridiculous. Pell would respond that he had no memory of such a conversation.

Pell has twice testified before the royal commission. He has been consistent throughout the years. He was unaware that Ridsdale was a paedophile in the early 1970s despite their close contact.

“I lived there with him and there was not even a whisper,” he said in the 1990s.

To claims of problems when he ran the Melbourne archdiocese, he has always argued that he could act only on evidence, not gossip.

Pell is the royal commission’s central figure, no matter whether he appears in person.

When Gerald Ridsdale gave video evidence last year, victims hoped for more than uncomfortable insights into depravity. They wanted to hear about the year Ridsdale and Pell lived together at the St Alipius presbytery in Ballarat in the early 1970s.

They itched to gather insights into a man who has always claimed an instinctive remove from evil.

The victims were disappointed.

IN 1961, he was known as Big George. Pell was one of the Werribee seminarians in charge of 40 kids, among them an 11-year-old. This boy decades later recalled Pell as a “gentle” and “kind” man who told the boys he had played in the ruck for Richmond. According to the boy, Big George changed. The boy would light a fire at the camp which would be doused by the CFA. He called it an act of revenge, committed with another boy. That second boy claimed he had told Big George to go away when he had tried to molest him.

It was decades before anyone heard such tales.

A retired Supreme Court judge, Alec Southwell, headed the inquiry. Pell, by then the Archbishop of Sydney, stood aside while the complaint was heard. Pell said the allegations were lies.

He denied them “utterly and totally”. “I believe completely George Pell’s denial,” said then prime minister John Howard.

Southwell’s findings were that the allegations could not be substantiated.

The complainant vowed to walk away from public scrutiny. He had what he needed, he said through his lawyer. Pell still talks about the case — Friday’s statement referred to his being “exonerated”.

At the time, he spoke about drawing on beliefs that may once again — 14 years later — become critical to his wellbeing.

“When a person is under extreme pressure, personal values may crumble,” he said.

“However my Catholic convictions sustained me during these dark weeks.”