Miranda Devine: Pell Punished for Trying to Aid Victims
By Miranda Devinet
TOMORROW at 8am our time, Cardinal George Pell will give evidence via videolink from the Hotel Quirinale in Rome to the child sexual abuse royal commission. It will be the third time he has testified to the commission. He has hardly been hiding. And yet the point of much of the unrestrained vitriol spewed at him is that he is a coward who has refused to “come home” to testify. But Pell, 74, has a heart complaint and has been told by doctors not to fly, a fact accepted by royal commissioner Peter McClellan after some delay, which served to add to pressure on the star witness of the $500 million exercise.
Watching Pell tomorrow will be a self-invited group of about 120, including 50 journalists and assorted victims, supporters and Pell-haters who have travelled to Rome, on the proceeds of an abusive ditty by anti-Catholic crooner Tim Minchin, calling Pell “scum” and “coward”. The royal commission has sent “support staff” and media people, at unknown cost, to assist this unofficial lynch mob. It doesn’t matter that he is in frail health and will have delivered 21 hours of testimony after tomorrow’s stint, which starts at 10pm, Rome time, and goes till 2am. The worst accusations are that he helped move paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale between parishes in the 1980s, when he was a junior priest in Ballarat under Bishop Mulkearns. However, as Father Eric Bryant has testified at a meeting he attended with Pell in 1982, Mulkearns simply said Ridsdale was being moved because he had a “problem with homosexuality”. Bryant said he didn’t link homosexuality with paedophilia and was offended by the suggestion put to him: “I know a number of clergy who are homosexual and who are the most decent people in the world.” Pell’s accusers must expect that he make that link, which is ironic, because his central problem is that he is a conservative priest who raised the eternal ire of homosexual activists by refusing to give them communion. So he is fair game. But the indifference of much of the media to any semblance of fairness is astonishing. LIVE BLOG WITH MIRANDA The ABC has illustrated stories about Pell with images of a toy truck with his face glued onto it, and festooned with rocks and spiders, a reference to “rock spiders”, slang for paedophiles. On Channel 10’s the Project, Minchin debuted his song, along with an illustration of a hollow cross with Pell inside with two altar boys. There is no justification for this abuse in anything before the royal commission. Pell denies the accusation that he tried to “buy” the silence of Ridsdale’s nephew and victim David Ridsdale, and at the time police were already investigating the paedophile. Anthony and Chrissie Foster, who have received $750,000 compensation from the church, accuse Pell of a “sociopathic lack of empathy” when he met them as the new Archbishop of Melbourne, to discuss the abuse of their two daughters by a priest a decade earlier. But Pell was the most senior churchman to meet them and the first to respond with a plan to help victims, his Melbourne Response. This is the unfairness of the attacks on Pell. He alone of any church leader in Australia responded to the crisis of child sexual abuse and set up a system. He became Archbishop of Melbourne on 16 June 1996. Sick of inaction by his fellow bishops, within a month he had instructed Corrs lawyers to come up with a plan. By mid-October Peter O’Callaghan QC was appointed the first Independent Commissioner investigating 351 complaints of abuse, of which 97 per cent were upheld. Pell acted with decisiveness and efficiency. Yet he has become the whipping boy, and even on the eve of his testimony, was betrayed by Victoria police who leaked vague allegations that Pell himself had sexually abused boys. This was an appalling intervention by police who are in the firing line for failing to investigate complaints of child sexual abuse and for telling untruths about the church to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry. Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton claimed 43 suicides related to child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but there was only one. Ashton also claimed police had not “had a single referral of a child sexual abuse allegation by the Catholic Church’’. Wrong. As O’Callaghan, has testified, of 304 complaints, 97 were reported to police, and 76 victims were encouraged to go to police. So pleased were Victoria police that they issued a press release praising the Melbourne response in 1996, and NSW police royal commissioner Justice James Wood also lauded it as a “model”. Victoria police seemed to drop the ball. Last week, former priest and psychiatrist Dr Peter Evans told the commission he was contacted by police in 1975 about the paedophile Ridsdale. “The police were certainly investigating it and knew about it. The police informed me that they would not be pressing charges. However, the policeman added that they … thought, he was guilty.” So you have one potential scapegoat accusing the other of covering up paedophilia, and leaking allegations. If all the abuse heaped on him would ensure that children never again suffered sexual abuse, perhaps even Pell would say it is a cross worth bearing. But it does the opposite. By targeting the one man who tried to do the right thing it ensures that no church leader in their right mind would take decisive action again. To save his own skin, Pell would have been better to leave it to the cowards and bumblers who had presided over the evil for so long.
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