Child abuse survivors have been granted the right to be present when Cardinal George Pell gives evidence in Rome as part of the ongoing Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Abuse.

In a statement today, the commission’s chair Justice Peter McClelland said the request was “reasonable”, while advising attendees that the commission will be sitting in Sydney during the hearing next week and that the evidence would be delivered via video link in Rome.

Justice McClellan advised technical testing was still being carried out at a hotel in central Rome where Cardinal Pell is set to deliver his evidence, with confirmation of an exact venue to follow after tomorrow morning.

A crowd funding campaign has raised more than $200,000 to send a group of clergy abuse survivors and support personnel to Rome to hear Cardinal Pell's testimony over three days from next Monday.

Now the Vatican's finance chief, former Melbourne and Sydney archbishop Cardinal Pell and a Ballarat priest are both slated to give evidence about abuse in the Ballarat diocese and Melbourne archdiocese.

Cardinal Pell presided over St Alipius primary school where four Christian Brothers abused children.

He and another priest lived in a presbytery with Australia's worst pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale in 1973.

Child abuse victim David Ridsdale claims that when he told Cardinal Pell in 1993 he had been abused by his uncle Gerald Ridsdale, Cardinal Pell said: "I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet”.

Cardinal Pell denies the allegation.

Victim Timothy Green, 53, said when he was 12 or 13 he told Cardinal Pell that Brother Edward Dowlan was abusing boys at Ballarat's St Patrick's College in 1974.

He claims Cardinal Pell said “don't be ridiculous” before leaving the room.

Cardinal Pell says he has no recollection of a conversation with Mr Green and denies it ever happened.