Australian Inquiry Puts a Top Aide to Pope on the Defensive

By Elisabetta Povoledo
New York Times
February 29, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/world/europe/australian-inquiry-puts-a-top-aide-to-pope-on-the-defensive.html?_r=0

When Pope Francis was chosen to lead the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics three years ago, he pledged to reform antiquated and troubled Vatican institutions.

He formed an inner circle of nine cardinals as his closest advisers, appointed a commission to deal with sexual abuse of children by the clergy, and another to reform the Vatican’s tangled finances. To pilot the financial reform and serve in his inner circle, Francis chose Cardinal George Pell.

So it was a matter of no small discomfort to the Vatican, and fascination to the world’s media, to see Cardinal Pell testify late Sunday — via video link from a hotel in Rome — before an Australian Royal Commission looking into institutional responses to child sexual abuse.

The questioning centered on how much the cardinal knew about a number of priests and brothers accused of pedophilia during the 40 years in which he rose through the ranks of Australia’s clerical hierarchy, and whether he failed to act on the abuses. Many of the accused offenders have been convicted.

Cardinal Pell has repeatedly acknowledged, and he did so again on Sunday, that the Roman Catholic Church made “enormous mistakes” and “let people down” when it did not protect the thousands of children who had been systematically abused by priests and religious brothers while their superiors looked the other way. “I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” he said.

But Cardinal Pell has also insisted, and he did so again on Sunday, that he had no memory of hearing about specific substantiated cases of sexual abuse during the 1970s and 1980s. He said he occasionally heard gossip.

At the time, he was a priest and consultant to the bishop in Ballarat — a city some 114 kilometers west of Melbourne — living in a presbytery next to a school where cases of abuse were found to be rampant, and later was auxiliary bishop of Melbourne.

His nearly four-hour testimony late Sunday, punctuated by numerous denials, quickly added fuel to criticism that the Vatican, despite the pope’s promises of reform, is still failing to grapple forcefully with the abuse issue.

On Monday, Pope Francis met with Cardinal Pell in a scheduled appointment. Arriving at the hotel Monday night to give fresh testimony, the cardinal told reporters that he had “the full backing of the pope.”

If the hearings, which are expected to last two or three more days, go very badly for Cardinal Pell, his position as Francis’s financial czar — pivotal to the pope’s reform agenda — could be at risk, a welcome twist for the cardinal’s rivals.

In Rome, Cardinal Pell is seen as the “mortal enemy” of the “well-entrenched clerical old guard in the Vatican,” which is flailing against the financial reforms that he is attempting to implement, wrote John L. Allen Jr., associate editor of Crux, a Catholic website that specializes in the Vatican.

“At the big-picture level, however, there’s no question that Pell is not on the side of the Vatican’s old guard — he’s the antidote to it,” Mr. Allen wrote.

The testimony itself comes just weeks after a high-profile Vatican commission on the prevention of child sexual abuse suspended one of its members, Peter Saunders, who accused the church of failing to deliver on its promises of reform and greater accountability.

Mr. Saunders and abuse victims say there has been no real progress on the issue since the pope approved the commission in March 2014. A tribunal created last June to determine whether bishops had covered up for miscreant priests has also been assailed as ineffective.

Critics also say that the pope ignored questions already swirling around Cardinal Pell’s record on sexual abuse, when he spirited him out of Melbourne to the Vatican in 2014, casting a cloud on Francis’s commitment to addressing the sexual abuse of minors.

At the time, Nicky Davis, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, called the cardinal’s promotion a “golden parachute,” handed to him so he could “leave the jurisdiction just when things are getting hot at the royal commission,” she told Australian Associated Press.

“It’s not a wonderful honor, it’s an escape clause,” she said.

Cardinal George Pell, right, arriving Monday at a hotel in Rome, from which he is providing testimony via video link.

To survivors, she said, the appointment was “a kick in the head, a slap in the face.”

For many critics, Cardinal Pell’s continual denials are part and parcel of an inadequate response to the abuse crisis as a whole.

“We need the hierarchy of the Vatican to take responsibility and stand up” said David Ridsdale, the nephew and for four years the victim of Gerald Ridsdale, a now-laicized Catholic priest whom he described as “Australia’s most notorious pedophile,” and who was eventually convicted on charges involving 54 children.

David Ridsdale was one of 11 sexual abuse victims who traveled to Rome with family and supporters for the public hearing thanks to a public funding campaign that raised more than $200,000 in less than a week so that they could attend for the proceedings.

Their presence in Rome drew the attention of the world’s media, which packed the back of the hotel room from which Cardinal Pell testified.

“We need to be the last of these survivors,” Mr. Ridsdale said.

Asked about Mr. Ridsdale’s case, Cardinal Pell conceded Sunday that “the way he was dealt with was a catastrophe, a catastrophe for the victims and a catastrophe for the church.”

“If effective action had been taken earlier, an enormous amount of suffering would have been avoided,” Cardinal Pell said, recalling that Father Ridsdale had been moved from parish to parish.

The Royal Commission was established three years ago to investigate the response of Australian institutions — including the church but also community groups, children’s homes, Scouts, Orthodox Jewish schools and the Salvation Army — to allegations and instances of child sexual abuse.

So far it has dealt with 36 cases, hearing public testimony from hundreds of victims, while thousands more have told their stories behind closed doors. New victims continue to come forward.

On paper, the commission’s findings are heart-rending: The average age of abuse victims was just over 10 for boys and just under 10 for girls.

On average, each victim was abused over a period of 2.8 years. The majority — around 60 percent — of the institutions where abuse occurred were faith-based organizations.

Cardinal Pell, who testified voluntarily, said at the hearing that until recent decades, the church had not understood the enormity of the child abuse problem, and so did not see it as an urgent and widespread problem that needed to be addressed.

“We weren’t alert in those ways anything like we are alert today,” he said, and the word of a priest trumped that of an accusing child.

“At that stage, the instinct was more to protect the institution, the community of the church, from shame.”