A Top Pope Aide Calls Church Conduct in Australia Sex Abuse a ‘Catastrophe’

By Rob Taylor And Francis X. Rocca
Wall Street Journal
February 29, 2016

http://tinyurl.com/hhyywqn

Cardinal George Pell was shown on a screen Monday in Canberra, Australia, as he testified to a royal commission. Photo by LUKAS COCH

A top adviser to Pope Francis on Monday told an Australian inquiry that the failure to halt child abuse by clergy decades ago in the country was “a catastrophe” for both victims and the church. But he denied knowledge of any crimes while he was a priest there at that time.

Cardinal George Pell, who is the Vatican’s financial chief, made the church’s most conciliatory and detailed comments yet regarding accusations of sexual abuse of hundreds of Australian children in the 1970s and 1980s in testimony to a government-appointed Royal Commission.

“It certainly was much, much more difficult for the child to be believed then. The predisposition was not to believe,” Cardinal Pell, 74 years old, told the Australia-based inquiry by video-link from Rome. “The instinct was more to protect the institution, the community of the church, from shame.”

The Australian panel was formed in 2012 to investigate accusations of serious child abuse over decades within institutions including churches, schools, orphanages and sporting clubs. It will eventually report back to government.

Cardinal Pell has testified to the long-running inquiry previously, and to a separate investigation by lawmakers in Victoria state, where he was Archbishop of Melbourne from 1996 to 2001 and devised a system to deal with abuse complaints.

Some of the offenses allegedly took place when Cardinal Pell was a junior priest in the Australian town of Ballarat decades ago. The panel isn’t investigating Cardinal Pell or any individual priest over alleged abuse. From priest, he rose to become the top church official in Australia and now one of the most influential officials at the Vatican.

Many of the priests at the center of the Australian abuse allegations have been convicted and sentenced to prison.

In the past, some of the most incendiary accusations have been against Catholic clergy, with victims accusing senior church leaders of attempting to paper over abuse claims, shifting priests between congregations rather than reporting their alleged behavior to police and even destroying records. Cardinal Pell on Monday called any such acts “unacceptable.”

At the opening of a scheduled multi-day appearance, Cardinal Pell said that after reviewing one of the worst cases of clerical abuse involving former Ballarat priest and convicted pedophile Gerald Ridsdale he had concluded that the handling of the case by a senior bishop was “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 while he had heard rumors of sexual abuses during his time in Ballarat, and later in Melbourne, he couldn’t recall substantive accusations, though he told the inquiry “my memory is sometimes fallible.”

Rumors of a member of the Christian Brother religious order kissing students at a Ballarat school, or swimming nude with boys, were dismissed as “eccentricities” of an elderly cleric, Cardinal Pell said, adding that naked swimming was relatively common in Australia decades ago. “No improprieties were ever alleged to me,” Cardinal Pell said.

The predisposition of the church during the worst alleged abuses in the 1970s and 80s had been not to trust children or even adults making “very, very, very plausible” allegations of misbehavior by pedophile priests, he said.

Cardinal Pell said he had also made errors of judgment after hearing rumors of abuse, choosing to accept the denials of priests rather than investigate the allegations of children involved.

“In those days, if a priest denied such activity, I was very strongly inclined to accept the denial,” he said.

“I’m not here to defend the indefensible,” Cardinal Pell said. “The church has made enormous mistakes and is working to remedy those. But the church in many places, certainly in Australia, has mucked things up, has let people down.”

The prelate is the equivalent of the Vatican’s treasurer. He also sits on the 9-member Council of Cardinals, known as the G9, which Pope Francis established in 2013 to advise him on Vatican reform and church governance.

The Catholic Church is Australia’s largest, representing almost a quarter of the population with 5.4 million followers.

Cardinal Pell testified from Rome because he was too ill to travel to Australia. In attendance during his testimony were about 20 survivors of abuse or their family members who had traveled to Italy after raising more than $100,000 in a crowdfunding campaign.

Some of those people from Australia who watched Cardinal Pell give evidence in a Rome hotel wore red T-shirts that included the words: “Some don’t remember, some never forget.”