Pell and the unforgiving glare [Opinion]

By John Ferguson
Australian
April 27, 2020

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/george-pell-and-the-unforgiving-glare/news-story/7add1be5b389bc6b0d6d71b12beab924

George Pell and his supporters won’t have been surprised that news of another police investigation into the cardinal broke just days after his High Court acquittal of child sex abuse.

For months, rumours about another possible complainant had been swirling among Catholic circles, and through the streets of Ballarat and the broader survivor community.

But, as is the case with so much that revolves around the 78-year-old, who knows what to believe and how much, if any, weight to give the latest claim?

Given the emphatic High Court ruling on the St Patrick’s Cathedral abuse convictions and the failure of any of the original charges to go the full distance, the report on a fresh complainant was greeted by Camp Pell with a depressing sense of weariness rather than profound alarm.

The Pell rumour mill can be exhausting as it grinds away with speculation about what might or might not have happened decades ago in and around the gold town where the cardinal grew up and beyond.

As the reports of another decades-old abuse allegation were published in the media, Sky News was preparing to air what was an instructive and slightly melancholy interview between commentator Andrew Bolt and the cardinal, who presented like a man who had discovered a deep sense of humility late in life.

Bolt asked Pell: “How would you react if the Victorian police were to keep trawling for victims, keep trawling for attempts to prosecute you?”

Pell: “Well, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised. But who knows? That’s their business.”

Cardinal George Pell has revealed he is ashamed of the Catholic Church for the way it dealt with the “cancer” of child sex abuse in the past. In an exclusive world-first televised interview with Sky News Australia presenter Andrew Bolt, Cardinal Pell talks candidly about the scourge of child abuse within his own church and how the many failures to act still haunt him today. “It was like a cancer … we had to cut it out,” he said. “I totally condemn these sorts of activities, and the damage that it’s done to people. “One of the things that aggrieves me is the suggestion that I’m anti-victim, or not sufficiently sympathetic. I devoted a lot of time and energy to try to save them, to get justice, to get help and to get compensation.” Cardinal Pell also shone light on the 405 days he spent locked up for seven child sex offences which were eventually quashed by the High Court of Australia. He befriended several inmates, including a convicted murderer, and witnessed the devastation ice addiction had on those around him. Cardinal Pell explained he felt flat following his release but he felt no “anger or hostility” towards his accuser. He hopes to transition into a quiet life of gardening where he could focus on growing roses and cabbage.

There will be only one concern for Pell.

Having been wronged by the Victorian justice system and police over the cathedral allegations, he will be desperate not to spend any more time in prison.

The Pell scandal has had a catastrophic impact on the church and rebounded negatively on the survivor community.

Adjunct professor Chris Goddard, of the University of South Australia, is an expert on abuse cases who says the fallout from the Pell decision is still resonating.

There is no other offending that he knows of where the more the perpetrator damages the victim the harder it is to prosecute and the less likely that the abuser will be caught.

Pell became the focus of hundreds of Catholic abuse victims who had no direct connection to his case.

“I think overall the finding has had a very depressing effect on the victims I have spoken to,’’ Goddard tells Inquirer.

“I think they have felt very let down.’’

So much about child sex abuse inevitably becomes personal, with Pell facing the cyclonic headwinds of deep community anger aimed at the Catholic Church.

None of which excuses the grave legal injustice that he suffered at the hands of the Victorian justice system.

For weeks there have been subtle forces at play as the most strident Pell critics have quietly tried to position the debate around the cardinal away from the botched cathedral convictions and on to the next chapter of the scandal.

No one expects the Pell story to end any time soon.

After the convictions were quashed came the relentless urging for the release of the unredacted version of the child sex abuse royal commission, which features quite a few blacked-out passages that relate to Pell.

At the same time, civil actions are being foreshadowed and now there is the report of alleged 1970s-era impropriety, although the details are scant. There is no evidence to suggest the 1970s-era complaint is true and police are refusing to discuss the issue.

In the Sky interview, Pell intimated that he wasn’t expecting a whole lot of trouble from the royal commission, but he is probably being overly optimistic.

Ironically, the timing of the release of the Pell redactions will possibly give an indication of how seriously police are treating the latest reported claims against the cardinal.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has asked Prime Minister Scott Morrison for the redactions to be published but this was before reports of another complaint were made.

Letters are being sent on the issue between Canberra and Spring Street, with federal Attorney-General Christian Porter awaiting the approval of the Victorian government before releasing any redactions.

Three-and-a-half years ago, counsel assisting the child sex abuse royal commission submitted that Pell was involved in knowingly helping shuffle serial sex offender Gerald Ridsdale between parishes while Pell was serving as a consultor to disgraced bishop Ronald Mulkearns.

Mulkearns, who died in 2016, was the mendacious driving force behind shifting Ridsdale around Diocese of Ballarat parishes with gay abandon, helping destroy the lives of hundreds of victims and their families.

The then Father Pell was at a consultors’ meeting in 1982 when it was decided to move Ridsdale from the Western District town of Mortlake, where Ridsdale committed some of his worst offending.

“It is submitted it was the common understanding of the meeting that complaints that Ridsdale had sexually abused children was the reason it had become necessary to move him,’’ counsel assisting said.

“It follows that the conduct of any consultor who agreed to move Ridsdale, or indeed any priest, with knowledge of allegations of child sexual abuse made against them, is unacceptable.’’

Pell told the commission that Mulkearns had lied to him about why Ridsdale was being moved and that despite widespread rumours about Ridsdale and others he knew nothing about the abuse.

The Ridsdale family was well known to Pell but he claimed to the royal commission he wasn’t aware of Ridsdale’s abusive behaviour.

The pair lived together for a time in Ballarat, although this proves nothing.

“It wasn’t known to me,’’ Pell said of the Ridsdale abuse.

Pell had been warned that he would be culpable if the commission found he knew of Ridsdale’s offending.

Pell’s reputation never recovered among his critics after he attended a court hearing to support Ridsdale in 1993.

The photograph of the pair side by side outside court became a defining moment for those in the Ballarat diocese who questioned the cardinal’s motives.

Royal commissioners are not bound by the recommendations of counsel assisting but often follow the guidance.

The commission also heard that when an auxiliary bishop in Melbourne, Pell failed to act on allegations of violent and sexual misconduct by a now dead, gun-toting, weirdo priest named Peter Searson.

Pell said that, like Ridsdale, Searson’s activities had been kept from him, but counsel assisting argued that there was no attempt by others in the church to deceive him.

“The matters known to Cardinal Pell on his own evidence … were sufficient that he ought reasonably to have concluded that more serious action needed to be taken in relation to Searson,” counsel assisting said.

While we will only ever know for certain what the royal commission found when the redacted chapters are actually released, Pell will be lucky if he escapes criticism, with the potential for some of it to be scathing.

Having survived 405 days in jail, there is probably not much the cardinal can’t deal with and failing charges of perjury being filed, it does not seem likely his liberty will be threatened by the commission.

Asked by Bolt about the reach of corruption within the Vatican, Pell replied: “It’s a little bit like Victoria. You’re not quite sure where the vein runs, how thick and broad it is and how high it goes.’’

Pell is rightly deeply suspicious about how he was treated and why police sought to prosecute such a weak case, the centre of which were the now-discredited “cathedral allegations”.

Defenders of the Victorian justice system are right to point to its strengths. But its critics would argue they are wrong to paper over the stark deficiencies in this case and the manner in which the County Court jury and the Victorian Court of Appeal failed to adequately consider the over­whelm­ing evidence that countered the complainant’s narrative.

There are questions that run from the way the investigation was conducted, to the decision to prosecute and then the Court of Appeal’s failure to deal with a clearly faulty jury decision.

Yet, with all these concerns, Dan Andrews refuses to acknowledge the injustice.

And the legal community has gone into damage control to protect a system that is also reeling from the impact of the Lawyer X royal commission.

Victorian bar president Wendy Harris QC wrote to her community in the wake of the High Court decision, attacking a newspaper article by former premier Jeff Kennett in which he slammed the two members of the Court of Appeal who failed to bring to an end the Pell incarceration.

“Whatever one’s personal view of the correctness of the decisions of the Court of Appeal and the High Court respectively, the different outcomes in the two courts reflect the proper functioning of the checks and balances which exist in our justice system,’’ she said.

Harris is only partly right — overlooking, perhaps, the gravity of the injustice against Pell.

Some critics within the Victorian bar argue privately that Harris has overstepped the mark — that the Victorian justice system doesn’t need leaders arguing for the status quo, but instead powerful advocates to reform a framework that failed Pell and, therefore, the community.

We are not talking about root-and-branch changes.

There is some disquiet that Victoria has only just started delivering on the option of judge-only criminal trials, which could have prevented the incarceration of Pell.

Momentum is gathering behind the scenes for an independent review of how the case got to court and why the prosecution pursued it in the way it did.

The state opposition is calling for a “please explain” from police, prosecutors and the courts. Had Pell not been released, demands would have been made by the cardinal’s closest supporters for a royal commission.

Liberal leader Michael O’Brien said: “The High Court has stepped in to say Victoria’s legal system’s got a fundamental problem.’’

“They’re getting it too wrong for too long and the public has got to ask questions about how we can continue to have confidence in Victoria’s legal system.’’

One of the chief Liberal criticisms is that Victoria’s courts have been stacked with Labor appointments. Since 1999, Labor has been in power in Victoria for all but four years and the Victorian ALP is expert at looking after its own.

Andrews and Labor would never cop an inquiry into the judicial system.

Andrews is too strategic (and probably preoccupied) to allow another inquiry, given the possibility that the Lawyer X royal commission will excoriate the police force and raise questions about many prosecutions.

Andrews will also bank on the view that the community has little or no sympathy for the Catholic Church and the cardinal.

You can only guess how much Pell-related information has been relayed from police to the government. The Premier, people close to him say, is disgusted with the way the church has handled the issue of child abuse, sometimes (decades ago) with the help of police.

Andrews’s assessment is that the church deserves to be smashed for what happened.

This school of thought is shared by many and extends to the view that even if the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, action must be taken.

In Pell’s case, guilty or not.